Free The New Nobility of the KGB by Andrei Soldatov

database of information that could be used in an investigation but has not been included in a formal criminal charge. 13 According to the authors’ information, on March 31, 2009, the Sistematica company in Moscow won the state contract to build a “system to automate the line of the fight against extremism.” 14 The client is the Interior Ministry, and the sum of the contract is more than $380,000. The system should be completed by November 2010. As stated in the contract, the “automated system is to improve the quality of information support to combat extremist activities.” The development of the system, the document states, will allow for the creation of a database on countering extremist activity, as well as automate the processes of the exchange of information between the Interior Ministry, the FSB, and Federal Protective Service. 15
     
    The system will have branches in every regional situation center fighting against extremism and will allow fifty users to work simultaneously. The Interior Ministry has said that it is “currently not possible” to estimate the size of the database: In other words, the ministry cannot say even approximately how many people might be entered into the database and will be subject to monitoring.
     
    Russia’s expanded surveillance efforts seem to be directly at odds with the spirit of the 1993 Russian Constitution, which states in Article 23: “1. Everyone shall have the right to the inviolability of private life, personal and family secrets, the protection of honor and good name. 2. Everyone shall have the right to privacy in correspondence, telephone conversations, and postal, telegraph, and other messages. Limitations of this right shall be allowed only by court decision.” 16
     
     
    UNDER RUSSIA’S WATCHFUL eye, individuals as well as organizations have increasingly come under a sophisticated system of surveillance. Those with the earmarks of extremism are put on a watch list, and the details of their personal lives may be scoured by FSB personnel. According to Russian law, public utterances inciting racial, social, or other forms of hate are considered forms of extremism. In 2006-2007, yet under Putin, “extremism” was expanded to include media criticism of state officials—a distinction that in turn required the media to label as extremist any organization the government deemed to be so. 17 Another amendment to the law made under Putin extended the definition of extremism to include “public justification of terrorism or other terrorist activity,” but without defining “justification.” Additional amendments regulate the production and distribution of “extremist” material without specifying what constitutes such material and introduce new penalties for journalists, media outlets, and printers found guilty of the offense. Penalties range from fines and confiscation of production equipment to the outright suspension of media outlets for up to ninety days. 18
     
    Lyudmila Alekseeva, the head of the Moscow-based Helsinki Group, compares the current situation in Russia to that of the struggle against the dissident movement in the Soviet Union. “There is a sense of déjà vu: the practice of surveillance of dissidents is back, taking people off trains, preventing conversations. The practice not only returned, but is enriched with new means of pressure on the people.”
     
    At a press conference on June 16, 2009, human rights activists from the Movement for Human Rights and the Moscow Helsinki Group demanded that Russia disband the Interior Ministry Department for Countering Extremism. In their statement, the groups noted that in creating the new department, Medvedev had established “a system of political surveillance consisting of people who, accustomed to dealing with dangerous criminals . . . were given very broad and vague criteria to include people on the lists of targets to counteract.” 19
     
    These measures of surveillance are not precisely