The women’s bathroom at the Shokoladnitsa cafe in Moscow near the Oktyabrskaya metro station. Photo: TV Rain. Used with permission. Yesterday, on June 27, the Russian independent news channel TV Rain (“Dozhd”) published an investigative report on a network of hidden cameras operating in women's restrooms throughout Moscow. The footage circulates worldwide on the Internet, unbeknownst to most of the women who appear in these videos. One small group of women, led by Polina Anisimova and aided by an anonymous informant and his hacker companion, are now fighting back, trying to involve Russia's law enforcement. With the channel's permission, RuNet Echo presents a full translation of TV Rain's report below. By Sonya Groysman and Ivan Pivsaev Late in the evening on June 12, an unknown Vkontakte user with a blank profile and an avatar featuring the Russian rapper Pasha Tekhnik sent Polina Anisimova a photograph with her face and asked if it was her in the picture. She didn’t get around to reading the message until the middle of the night. When she finally looked, there she was in the image. There was her sweatshirt, her birthmark, and the mole on her face. But she couldn’t remember when or how the photo had been taken. She’s certainly never uploaded any such picture to the Internet. Now quite alarmed, Polina showed the message to her boyfriend. At first, they decided it was some kind of bad joke or a new kind of online blackmail, and they started googling ways Vkontakte can be used to extort people. After Polina confirmed that it really was her in the picture, the anonymous account sent her several more photos with a message telling her that he had “bad news” for her, explaining that she “had become a victim, just like his loved ones.” In the pictures, a young woman was urinating in a bathroom with white and brown tiles. Anisimova became even more confused, refusing to believe that this was her. The anonymous account didn’t blackmail Polina or threaten her. He only warned that she, like many other young women, were the victims of a hidden-camera operation. Photo: Facebook / Polina Anisimova. Used with permission. The strange photographs bore a watermark reading “Hidden Zone.” Searching for this phrase online, Polina and her boyfriend had no trouble finding on a torrent-tracking website hundreds of videos filmed using hidden cameras in women’s bathrooms. Before long, Anisimova recognized herself in one video’s preview image. Now there was no longer any doubt: it was her purse in the video, her blue jeans, and her bare buttocks. The only distinction was her long hair, which she’d cut short a full two years ago. That’s how Polina learned that a pornographic video has existed on the Internet since at least 2014 featuring her, filmed without her knowledge. The next day, Polina revealed the whole story on her Facebook page. “If I remained silent about this, this story could become grounds to blackmail me down the road, even though I didn’t do anything, like thousands of other victims,” she wrote. The news media soon picked up her story. The thing that seemed to shock most people was that Polina, as best she can guess, was filmed in the bathroom at a local Shokoladnitsa, one of Russia’s most popular cafe chains. This, at any rate, is what Polina’s “informant” told her. He’s contacted other women filmed in these videos, as well, and some of them say they’ve been able to work out when and how they were recorded by the hidden cameras. The anonymous informant says he began investigating the videos after one of his relatives became a victim. Now he says he’s trying to figure out who’s behind the videos, and he’s notifying victims using FindFace (a controversial tool that links photographs of people to their Vkontakte accounts). So far, he says he’s managed to contact less than a dozen victims. (In many of the videos, the faces are barely visible, or FindFace fails to match the people to the correct Vkontakte accounts.) He says he hopes police reports filed by these victims will be enough to prompt a full investigation. Polina Anisimova and another four women filmed in the bathroom by hidden cameras are now consulting with a lawyer who will bring their case to court. “What happened is a violation of our rights. And now we’re trying to understand what to do about this, and how to restore our rights,” Anisimova says. The informant says he’s encouraged his relative to take the matter to court, but she is apparently a low-ranking city official, and she’s evidently afraid of losing her job.