Cameras with facial recognition, biometric databases and internet traffic controls are gradually being integrated into a single control infrastructure that several regimes sell to and copy from one another. That is the argument of an analysis by Global Voices, published as part of its series "Big Tech and Authoritarianism."
Russia: punishments based on camera footage
The text begins with two cases. Sonya, a 15-year-old girl from Russia's Stavropol region, received a sentence of 70 hours of community service in June 2026: in February she had written "Navalny" at a bus stop. Yuri, a retiree from Astrakhan who was likewise identified through cameras, was sentenced to three years of restricted freedom for painting "No to war" on several buildings.
Journalist Andrei Zakharov, cited by Global Voices, says that in 2023 Moscow was already linking more than 220,000 video surveillance devices to a unified data center. According to Comparitech, Moscow and Saint Petersburg are among the ten cities outside China with the most cameras per inhabitant. The analysis adds that in 2024 up to 80% of the cameras used in Russia were made in China and sold under Russian brands.
China: technology as a foreign policy tool
Global Voices argues that Beijing incorporated the sale of digital infrastructure into its foreign policy with the Digital Silk Road, announced in 2017. Officially, the text says, the projects are presented as support for digital transformation, although they also increase dependence on Chinese technology.
Among the Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates has 11 Chinese "smart city" projects and Saudi Arabia has seven. A 2026 report by the Institute of Development Studies identified Chinese AI surveillance systems in 11 African countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal and Zimbabwe. In Central Asia, the Caspian Policy Center recalls that in 2013 Tajikistan worked with Huawei on a "safe city" project for Dushanbe, worth about 22 million dollars.
Iran and Venezuela: buyers from multiple suppliers
In February 2026, the organization Article 19 concluded that internet control in Iran relies to a large extent on Chinese equipment from firms such as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision and Tiandy. For their part, Le Monde and Forbidden Stories revealed that Iran obtained, through intermediaries, the Russian system FindFace, from NtechLab, which ended up in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard and the Ministry of Intelligence. Tehran and Moscow signed a cooperation pact in December 2025 on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, among other areas.
In Venezuela, China's Dahua kept its presence in the market even though the United States added it to its entity list in 2019. Between 2021 and 2023, Venezuela's Interior Ministry held talks with Belarusian company Synesis, which is sanctioned by Washington, about its Kipod program, which incorporates facial and license plate recognition.
What the analysis proposes
Global Voices notes that even democratic states have used surveillance against their own citizens. Among the measures it mentions are adopting open source in Western technologies and bringing in, as active participants in AI governance, the nations that make up the majority of the world's population.
Sources
- Global Voices en Español (CC BY 3.0)
