“These services help identify who killed Nemtsov and to investigate war crimes by the Russian military in Ukraine” is what an administrator of the anti-corruption project Skaner (or “Scanner”) told me a few weeks ago, when I asked about their thoughts on FindClone, a 5-dollar-per-month Russian face recognition site (described by BellingCat’s Aric Toler as “the most powerful open source tool I’ve used”). In July 2019, Skaner posted the social media accounts of police officers, who’d been snapped brutally beating up Muscovites demonstrating for democratic elections. “It was the peak [of using face recognition to expose violent police],” says another activist to whom I spoke earlier this week. But afterwards, police started hiding their faces behind tinted helmets and masks. And officers began using face recognition to ID protesters: “This way they now manage to avoid the ugly image of beatings in public squares and simply come to activists' private homes to detain them a few hours after the event.”
Meanwhile, journalists in Russia have used FindClone to help identify an online casino owner, local athletes paid to intimidate election observers in St. Petersburg and, um, the developers of FindClone themselves. Men filmed torturing and killing a man in Syria were identified as mercenaries of the Russian private military company “Wagner Group”. The Novaya Gazeta journalist who broke that story once had a sheep head and funeral wreath sent to his office. Another journalist told me he uses FindClone to help him identify “just people, or their friends, or their mothers and fathers”, for his investigative work.
“Gentleman, anons, I have 40 FindClone searches left, and the term will expire soon, it’s a pity if they disappear. Therefore, I offer my search services.” In the past years, again and again, posts like this appear on the Russian anonymous forum 2ch.hk (otherwise known as “Dvach”). Replies stream in: Users post pictures of teens, stills from porn videos or homemade sex tapes, a lady who “refused to hire me”, “him please”, “her please.” FindClone matches profiles of strangers to profiles on VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook equivalent (“Dvach'' is hosted by the state-affiliated company VK, which also operates VKontakte). On Dvach, users have used FindClone to look for the VKontakte pages of women in porn videos or escort dating services. They share tips on how to “expose” them: who to message (the women’s friends, family, their children’s school friends) and what to say (introduce yourself as a journalist, “blackmail and harassment”).
“I don’t sit on Dvach or any other anonymous image boards,” one woman, who has criticized the forum’s attacks on sex workers, tells me. “But I’ve heard that it’s a very toxic environment and face recognition tools are actively used to deanonymize.” Since 2010, “Dvach” is run by a user called Abu, who said he bought the site for 10,000 dollars. In 2011, Abu’s real life identity was revealed as Nariman Namazov, a 27-year-old Azerbaijani SEO specialist from Moscow. In 2020, Dvach users doxxed the Russian actresses who starred in a porn horror film by Rammstein singer Till Lindemann. “If someone needs to poison women, they would have recognized and poisoned them 10 years ago without these tools,” one Russian feminist, who received death threats after defending the women in the Lindemann video, told me, arguing that face recognition tools, “can also service for good, for example to recognize criminals and crooks”.
We will publish a story about FindClone on the AlgorithmWatch website later this month – if you’re interested, stay tuned.
