Surveillance

Schools in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana, are using facial recognition to take morning attendance. Telangana is also using facial recognition to pay pensions, renew driving licences, evoting, and deter crime. Adoption was partly fueled by fear of spreading covid-19 through

Like around 1,500 other school districts, Columbus City Schools, the largest school district in the US state of Ohio, has begun partnering with the Texas-based safety technology company Gaggle. Gaggle monitors students’ devices for signs of potential concerns such as self-harm, depression, or

The Newport-Mesa [California] Unified School District Board of Education approved a new AI-enhanced surveillance system from Everon LLC (formerly ADT Commercial) that includes automated cameras, software that can spot after-hours intruders, read car licence plates, and monitor for signs of

A coalition of 33 civil rights, disabilities, privacy, and education advocacy groups are pushing the state of Florida to stop developing the Florida Schools Safety Portal, a database of detailed information about students for the claimed purpose of preventing school shootings, calling it a "massive

In a 2010 case, the Lower Merion school district in suburban Philadelphia school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by students who had discovered that the webcams attached to their school-issued laptops had secretly taken hundreds of photographs of them in their homes

After the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security expanded its monitoring of online activity and set up a new intelligence branch to counter domestic terrorism, including tracking platforms that have been linked to threats and “narratives known to provoke

In December 2020 Myanmar authorities began rolling out its $1.2 million "Safe City" system of 335 Huawei AI-equipped surveillance cameras in eight townships in the capital, Naypyidaw. The system, whose purpose was originally presented by the Myanmar government as fighting crime, automatically scans

Hundreds of pages of Myanmar government budgets for the last two fiscal years obtained by the New York Times show that the Myanmar military who staged a coup in February 2021 had new and sophisticated tools at their disposal: Israeli-made, military-grade surveillance drones, European iPhone cracking

The internet, mobile, and social media shutdown in Myanmar left protesters vulnerable to rumours and at a disadvantage in organising opposition to the 2021 military coup. Coordination was done via phone, word of mouth, and the Bluetooth-based messaging app Bridgefy, which was downloaded more than 1

The Belarusian government is using the "Kipod" facial recognition software developed by the local software company LLCC Synesis to track and identify dissidents. Synesis was previously sanctioned by the EU for providing authorities with an AI surveillance platform capable of tracking individuals

In August 2020, controversial Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko cut off most of the nation's access to the internet in hopes of disrupting the protests against the vote-rigging that saw him installed as president. Online news sites were left largely offline from election day onward, and

Despite its indications of support for the pro-democracy protesters, in October 2020 the EU bought the Belarusian authorities 15 surveillance drones, raising concerns that the video equipment they carry would be used to identify and arrest individual pro-democracy protesters. The EU foreign service

The 2020 Belarus protests were the largest in the country's history and brought an unprecedented crackdown, in which protesters nationwide were tortured and criminally prosecuted as a means of repressing peaceful assembly. A report finds that these cases became political as the government violated

In 2019, interviews with Hong Kong protesters destroying smart lampposts revealed that many distrusted the government's claim that they would only take air quality measurements and help with traffic control, largely because of the comprehensive surveillance net the Chinese government was using to

In 2019 Hong Kong protesters cut down 20 of the city's smart lampposts, which are streetlights equipped with sensors and cameras, in order to counter the threat that they were vectors for surveillance technologies such as facial and licence plate recognition. TickTack Technology, which provided the

During 2019, Hong Kong law enforcement authorities had access to AI facial recognition software provided by Sydney-based iOmniscient that can match faces and licence plates from video footage to police databases, but chief executive Carrie Lam's administration and police did not confirm whether they