The men behind the hidden cameras in public bathrooms of Moscow and the woman who combats them · global voices in Spanish

On June 27, the Independent Russian news channel TV Rain (“Dozhd") published a research report on a network of hidden cameras in women's bathrooms in Moscow.Filming circulates along the world, while women who appear in the videos do not know.A small group of women, led by Anisimova Poly.With the permission of the television channel, Runet Echo then presents a complete translation of the Rain TV report.

"Yesterday, I discovered that there is" porn "starring me"

By Sonya Groysman and Ivan Pivsaev

On June 12 in the afternoon, an unknown user of Vkontakte with a blank profile and a photo of the Russian rapper Pasha Tekhnik sent a photograph of his face to Polina Anisimova and asked if it was she who appeared in the photo.She doesn't connect too much and did not read the message until later at night.When she finally looked, she appeared in the image.His sweater, his birth mark and his sin appeared on his face.However, I could not remember when or how that photograph had been made.I was sure of not having uploaded a photo like that on the Internet;Now, alarmed, he taught the message to her boyfriend.

At first, they took it as some kind of macabre joke or a new type of blackmail online, so they searched Google forms in which Vkontakte can be used to extort people.

Once Poina confirmed that it was she who appeared in the photo, the anonymous account sent him many more photos with a message that said he had "bad news" for her and explained that "he had become a victim, such andas their loved ones ».In the images, a young woman urinated in a bathroom with white and brown tiles.Anisimova was even even more confusing, I didn't want to believe it was.

The anonymous account did not blackmail her or threatened her;He simply warned her that she, like many other young people, were being victims of a hidden camera operation.

The strange photographs were accompanied by a watermark that prayed "hidden zone".Looking for this phrase on the Internet, Polina and her boyfriend had no problem find.Not too late, Anisimova recognized herself in the miniature image of one of the videos.He no longer had any doubt: his bag appeared in the video, his blue jeans and his naked buttocks.The only different thing was his long hair, which he had cut two years ago.

This is how Polina learned that there was a pornographic video on the Internet since, at least 2014, with her as the protagonist and recorded without her knowledge.

The next day, Polina published her entire story on her Facebook page."If I remain silent, this story could become the basis to blackmail me later, even if I haven't done anything, like thousands of other victims," he wrote.

The media soon echoed their history.What seemed more impressing to most was that Polina, as she had guessed, was recorded in a bath in ShokoLadnitssa, one of the most popular coffee shop chains in Russia.This was, in any case, what Poina's "informant" had told him.This informant has contacted other recorded women and some of them say they were able to find out when and how they were recorded by the hidden cameras.

The anonymous informant comments that he began investigating the videos when one of his relatives became a victim;Now, he says, he is trying to find out who is behind the videos and that he is notifying the victims using Findface (a controversial tool that relates photographs of people with his Vkontakte accounts).

Until now, he has been able to contact at least a dozen victims.(In many of the videos, the faces are barely visible, or Findface fails to relate them to any Vkontakte account).He also says that he hopes that the police reports presented by the victims are sufficient to give rise to a complete investigation.

Anisimova Polina and four other women recorded in the bathroom with hidden cameras are consulting with a lawyer who will take his case to court.«This is a violation of our rights;And now, we are trying to understand what to do about it and how to restore our rights, "says Anisimova.

The informant comments that he is encouraging his relative to take the case to the courts, but, apparently, he is a low -ranking officer in the city, and, obviously, he is afraid of losing his job."His tacit policy," says the informant, "is that they will help you resign if you are mixed in any type of scandal, even if you are the victim".

The informant refuses to share his identity, claiming that he does not want to reveal himself, "considering the sources" to the disposition of the people to whom he is directed.

***

A rapid Internet search is enough to demonstrate the amount of pornography available from hidden cameras or women's recordings using public bathrooms in coffee shops or shopping centers, women in testers and other similar videos.The market for this content - Voyeurs - are people who get sexual excitement by spying on others;A subgenre of voyeur porn are the videos with a hidden camera of women urinating.Some of these people are excited by anything related to urinating.

One of the companions of the anonymous informant, who is helping Polina and other women to track those who recorded them, is a computer hacker who managed to enter a closed forum of voyeurs on the Internet.He says that most voyeurs are between 35 and 60 years old and operate under the rules of a secret company.In the websites in which videos are communicated and exchanged, there are several levels of access to the content;In addition, registering to join the community is quite difficult.Clearly, the community has been built to ensure maximum clandestinity.The group also has its own legends and heroes for "better content" and "better [camera]" angles ".

Before Shokoladnitsa scandal, the Russian voyeur were a relatively invisible community.Every year, hundreds of women in Russia become the target of those who install cameras hide and sell their content;However, there have never been, as a result, cases of criminals with high profile or convictions.

The Moscow Police Department maintains that it does not even remember a archived report by these women who are the target of the videos discovered in recent months.Police do not consider it a mass phenomenon, but several isolated cases.

Videos such as Anisimova are sold on closed voyeurs web pages with complicated registration systems.Some of them are also available on normal porn pages.The record of these pages is not free and can cost up to hundreds of dollars.

Voyeurs forums can be divided into "open" and "closed" groups, depending on the complexity of the registration process.In these groups, members exchange stories about their experiences recording and spying, share their own videos and other materials found online and advise each other about the best team to spy on bathrooms.

Judging for what is written in these forums, many of those who record these videos use minicamas disguised as objects.The most common camouflage is hiding the camera under what looks keys.In Russia, the purchase, production or sale of special technology whose purpose is to obtain private information (without those who are being recorded) is prohibited under the article of the Criminal Code 138.1, which stipulates a maximum penalty of four years in prison.The greatest case in recent history related to this type of crime was initiated against the figure of the opposition Natalia Pelevina, a member of the Parna political party, which was surprised with a pen with hidden chamber.

Most voyeurs tend to think that they are not doing anything wrong;However, many fear for their own security, so they spend a lot of time dealing with the issue of protection of their faces.

A former deputy director in the defense body, for example, did not stop spying on women, even after the matter came to light;He spent 15 years spying on his companions before being surprised, however, now he declares "I can't stop doing it" and that he still "comes back to look".In another thread of comments, the same man enthusiastically describes the state in which he enters when he sees women urinating: «When I go to the bathroom and start looking, sometimes I reach a state of such exaltation that my heart hurts, emotionsThey are so strong and intense!The views in the bathroom ... They completely take over me ».

Voyeurs can be excited even without seeing any nude;The fact that a person's privacy has been raped and the feeling of power over the ignorant individual is usually enough, says the clinical psychologist and addiction specialist Veronika Kashirina.In many degrees, many people enjoy spying on others, adds Kashirina, but in more rare cases, there are individuals who feel forced to spy, even when people's safety is compromised.(The International Classification of Diseases places voyerism in the "disorder of sexual preference") category).

Kashirina comments that voyeryism is related to the violation of psychological limits between people: «In our country, there are frequently five people living in a study-apartment, changing clothes in front of others, washing without closing the door or parents they havesex while your children sleep close.This strongly confuses psychological limits, distorting people's attitude regarding their own privacy and that of others, which may be the basis of desire to spy on others or, on the contrary, avoid keeping themselves, doingwho want to expose themselves publicly ».

People like these, Kashirina continue, normally have low self -esteem, and the feeling of superiority before their victims and the support of others in closed internet forums artificially helps to create that sense of self -assessment, simultaneously suppressing the feelings of guilt, thatThey are doing something wrong and the fear of being exposed.

However, most of these voyeur are not afraid of criminal prosecution.The chances of being discovered are scarce - says a participant in a forum, optimistically remarking that it is difficult to find their victims and, that the content itself, from the legal point of view, does not differ much from normal pornography.In general terms, community members seem to believe that voyeurs only need to be careful and avoid "attracting attention" to the existence of the group or, if not "those fucking journalists will put together a great scandal".

***

The hacker who broke into the Voyeurs forum and used stolen accounts in order to study the closed sections of the web, says that the first of these communities (a call "Petrovka, 38") appeared in the 90s, in the era of the era of the eraVHS.The largest community that exists today, called by the voyeur «The Pen» [El Redile] (abbreviation of its original name «The Piggy Pen» [the fold of pigs], was created 12 years ago by a person known as «Keks ».

The affiliation to "The Pen" is closed, and the participants have different sections with different access levels on the website.The state and access level of a member can change according to the payment or upload of new videos to the site.

“Many veteran voyeurs left the business a long time ago and now they enjoy the abundance of new videos that the new ones leave in the forum in order to upload steps in the hierarchy of the community and get a higher status, which will guarantee them theAccess to the restricted sections of extreme content »explains the hacker.

Open forums also have closed sections in which participants distribute their own "jobs".The majority, judging by the content published in the forum, do not have a commercial purpose but are "operators" that record videos to sell them to pages specialized in this content.Sometimes, they also promote their productions in the commercial sections of the forums.While communication is very active in these forums, these "operators" say almost nothing about themselves, while in other forums, members share personal stories of their private life.

One of the informant's companions comments that he spoke with a former "The Pen" member, who said he had become one of the web sponsors and that in 2008 he received access to the closed sections.According to what he says, there are a lot of Voyeur video producers for sale.

"Videos abroad (beach nudists, sex between shrubs, women urinating in the forest, etc.) are mainly recorded by" Vadukha "and in a smaller amount by" Jerki ".The hidden cameras of women (generally the bride) urinating at wedding parties are the specialty of "Zooom"."Veg", however, records minors urinating in bathrooms.For many years, "Fall" has sat down to record up directly from inside septic tanks, carrying a gas mask and covered by some type of blanket or layer.One of the most dangerous voyeur is ‘Surakspit,’ voluntary and moderator author of ‘The Pen."Its base has been Moscow during the last nine years, secretly recording under the skirt of women on mechanical stairs," says the source of the informant.

These Internet nicknames are frequently mentioned in the voyeur forums and torrents websites host thousands of videos allegedly from these characters.

In fact, an account with the name "Surakspit" truly exists and has climbed on porn pages "skirt videos" recorded on mechanical stairs of the Moscow Metro.The same account sells videos of hidden cameras in bags or umbrella to a foreign website specialized in this content.

An "operator" known by the name of "Uchebnik" ("Textbook") has spent many years recording with hidden cameras in public bathrooms.Until approximately 2009, it belonged to a web page with payment videos recorded in coffee shops and schools.In the voyeur community, "Uchebnik" is a legend."I'm not Uchebnik, I'm just learning," wrote a user of these forums in his profile.The members of these forums can see their "style" in numerous videos anonymously uploaded, which have continued to appear on voyeur porn pages since 2009.

Another way to create "content" for voyeur is infecting the computers of its victims with a virus that guarantees a hacker remote access to the webcam.

It is the same voyeurs who develop this type of virus, in order to focus on a small group of people, so that antivirus are quite slow recognizing this threat.According to one of the RV Rain sources, there are also legal programs that provide remote access to the computer (software that antivirus programs do not block) that some programmers install in the machines of unconscious customers.Videos of intimate acts recorded with this hijacked camera procedure are also put up for sale in the commercial sections of “The Pen."

"Webcam surveillance has become a type of large -scale cyberfraude," says Internet expert Anton Merkurov."All you have to do is download a suspicious program that infects the computer".He says that the best way to protect from these attacks is to paste a piece of adhesive tape on the webcam, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg does.

***

Before the video starring Poina arrived at the Porn Torrent website, it was sold at the "Hidden Zone" payment site [hidden zone], as evidenced by the recording water mark.

Hidden Zone is one of the largest online sources specialized in content for voyeurs.According to the approximate data of similarweb (a platform that measures and analyzes the user-compromise statistics for web pages), more than 90.000 people visited Hidden Zone between April and May 2016.

Many followers of voyeur pornography dream of getting access to Hidden Zone, but it is a complicated process, thanks to the record in several steps of the web and the frequency with which the web blocks accounts that use stolen passwords.In the voyeurs forums, there are many whole threads dedicated to how to access Hidden Zone.If you try from a Russian IP, you will find a message saying that the web has been blocked by the Russian censor, Roskomnadzor, although the web is not in the blacklist of the agency.

The web is updated daily.As of June 27, the last video supposedly recorded in a Russian public bath was uploaded on June 26.

From Hidden Zone and other payment websites, the videos arrive at the Torrent and other services for files;These will be distributed by users who at the time paid for access and who want to share their discoveries while raising their hierarchy in voyeur forums.

And that's how the Anisimova Poly.This is just an episode of the series that is being recorded for years in public bathrooms (and perhaps there is still a hidden camera there).

In one of these Torrent pages, Poina discovered that there are five "seasons" of videos, starting in 2011 and ending in 2015.The "national production" is from Russia.Each "season" is starring about 200 women of different ages relieving before the hidden camera.The last episode, apparently last year, was uploaded in January 2016.Each video has a serial number and, judging by the last one, the full series would contain more than 2.000 videos.

"Only one of those hidden cameras in public bathroom.

The 2011 videos folder contains a great variety of filming.Some of the videos were recorded from inside the septic tanks of portable baths, while others show bathrooms with bright tiles.These locations do not appear in the last "seasons".In the 2011 folder, you will find videos recorded in bathrooms that are identical to that of the Anisimova Poly.The second woman says that this is the bathroom bathroom Shokoladnitsa near the Oktyabrskaya Metro station in Moscow.

This sink appears in hundreds of videos of other "seasons".One of the cameras seems to have been installed on the paper near the toilet and, in some videos, a black garbage bag partially covers the camera.The anonymous informant believes that the videos recorded in other sinks used a camera disguised as metallic hanger for paper towels attached to the door, instead of the bag for bag."I have no idea how they manage to drill holes for the screws during the hours in which the business is open and replace one thing with the other," says the informant.

After Poly.Some of the comments mention the ShokoLadnitsa chain.

"I can tell you something with total certainty: let's not wait. “Pero no han encontrado el otro Shokoladnitsa," contestaba otro de los usuarios.

Another internet user was wondering about coffee performance: «… The vague illusion that coffee employees have nothing to do with all this will disappear before or later, but now, in addition to these girls, safety guards [of coffee]They will look for the toilets worried about another scandal, ”he wrote.

Apart from the ShokoLadnitsa near the Oktyabrskaya Metro station, the victims contacted by the anonymous informant have tracked hidden camera videos to three other bathrooms in Shokoladnitsa located on Tverskaya street, Lomonosov Prospekt and near the Paveletskaya Metro station.Looking for geolocalized photos on Instagram, it is possible.The bathroom was remodeled then.

ShokoLadnitsa has refused to comment on this information.

In 2014, a Woman web user.Ru wrote about the hidden cameras allegedly found in the Shokoladnitsa toilet in Lomonosov Prospekt and said "the cafeteria staff were incredibly rude and did not even apologize".One of the two ShokoLadnitsa coffee shops in Lomonosov Prospekt commented on Rain TV that he had no idea of hidden cameras.The other ShokoLadnitsa said there had been an incident but in another coffee (the staff did not specify).

The collection of videos in question was recorded in at least seven different places;However, they all present the same beige and brown tiles, making it impossible to determine the exact location of the bathroom.

ShokoLadnitsa has been quite reluctant to comment on the incidents.Just after the revelations of Anisimova, the director of the coffee chain, Tamara Shesterina, promised in an interview that the security guards would verify the reports on hidden cameras.He also said that the company's security cameras work only in the receivers and in the work areas and said they have no information about cameras installed in the bathrooms.

Speaking on the radio echo of Moscow, a member of the Shokoladnitsa security team doubted the presence of this type of cameras in the bathrooms, since the installation would have been noticed.

Tamara Shesterina promised that ShokoLadnitsa press service would be up to date with Rain TV questions, however, two days later he commented that the company's representatives would only make comments "when it was strictly necessary".Finally, Márketing Director Elena Rusanova told TV Rain that Shokoladnitsa rejected any comments about it.The company has not contacted Poina Anisimova.

***

Polina says that your potential lawyer believes that your case can be of interest to the police, given the scale of this.Mari Davtyan, another lawyer, says that the actions of recording and distributing this type of videos signed up by article 137 of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the invasions of the privacy of an individual.«Privacy includes any intimate act of people's lives, not only sexual content, but also any act that is considered private by society.Since he goes to the bathroom alone, this is a private moment in the lives of people who do not concern others, ”explains Davtyan.

Davtyan declares that he has never worked with cases like this, but he knows sentences in which a court has recognized the distribution of a sexual video as an invasion of privacy."With this logic, it is quite possible to assume that the distribution of this type of [in bathrooms] is classified according to article 137," he mentions, adding that the use of personal image (including videos) without the express permission of thatperson is also a violation of article 152.1 of the Administrative Code.

According to Davtyan, it is not possible.«Pornography presupposes sexual relations or some kind of sexual behavior.But it is clear that this recording was made for sexual excitement purposes, since the videos have been distributed on web pages for this purpose, ”he adds.

At the same time, some of the women contacted by the anonymous informant have refused to go to the police."They are in a phase of denial in which they think‘ if I don't say anything, it means that nothing has happened, "he tries to explain their anisimova logic.

"For most, knowing that they are being used as a sexual object is quite traumatic," says psychologist Veronika Kashirina.“This is because the violation of personal privacy is linked to a violation of our sense of personal security, in the same way that our intimate field is linked to our biological, social, spiritual and values areas.This is a space that one normally keeps from others.So the normal reaction to a violation of the psychological limits of this type is the anger and the desire to stop it, as well as to protect oneself from repeating again in the future ».Kashirina adds that in some cases, these invasions of privacy can cause damage to victims similar to those of physical violation, for example, the development of a post -traumatic stress disorder.In these cases, he declares, a specialist should be consulted.

On the other hand, Poina expresses that showing the public his problem was his "natural defense mechanism".«I was angry, I was furious, and the natural result of my emotions became a publication [on Facebook].In this case, I feel as if it were domestic violence.I remembered how Anya Zhavnerovich [a Russian journalist who publicly revealed that he had been a victim of domestic violence] spoke with courage about everything that happened to him.I am not the first one that this anonymous man contacted;The others simply blocked [from Vkontakte] or sent him to shut up after knowing the truth »says Anisimova.