Authoritarian states build global digital surveillance market through tech exchange

A fifteen-year-old girl in Stavropol Krai, Russia, wrote a single surname on a bus stop in February 2026. "Navalny." By June, she had been sentenced to seventy hours of compulsory labor. The bus stop happened to sit in a district monitored by the Center for Combating Extremism. Across the country in Astrakhan, a pensioner named Yuri was identified from surveillance footage after writing "No to War" in red marker on buildings. He received three years of restricted freedom. These were not isolated incidents of state repression. They were the visible edge of a vast, interconnected system of digital control that authoritarian regimes have spent years assembling—and exporting.

Digital authoritarianism, it turns out, is not a domestic project. It is a global marketplace. China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, and companies connected to them are actively selling and exchanging the infrastructure of surveillance: facial recognition systems, video analytics platforms, biometric databases, deep packet inspection tools, and artificial intelligence designed to identify, track, and preempt dissent. Western technologies flow into these systems too. The result is a patchwork of control that spans continents and operates according to a shared logic: the merger of cameras, algorithms, databases, and state power into a single apparatus that can observe citizens in real time, reconstruct their past movements and communications, and identify them retroactively—long after they thought they were safe.

Russia has been building this infrastructure at home while selling pieces of it abroad. In Moscow alone, more than 220,000 video devices were connected to a unified data storage and processing center by 2023, according to journalist Andrei Zakharov's research. The system works. After the 2021 protests, activists were arrested using facial recognition. Yevgeny Yesenov was arrested the day after a rally; police came to his apartment after analyzing surveillance footage. He became the first person in Russia arrested as a direct result of video surveillance analysis. He was sentenced to four years in a penal colony, though released on parole after eighteen months. Since then, the same system has been used to arrest people for anti-war graffiti and for setting fire to military enlistment offices. The technology makes repression faster and less visible. Citizens know they can be identified retroactively, which means the state no longer needs to constantly demonstrate force.

China has moved faster and further. It has built one of the most sophisticated domestic systems of digital control on earth—a ratio approaching one camera for every two people—and has turned the export of this infrastructure into foreign policy. Through the Digital Silk Road, launched in 2017, China promotes digital infrastructure, technological cooperation, and surveillance solutions to countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Formally, these projects are described as support for digital transformation. In practice, they deepen partners' dependence on Chinese technologies and create channels for the spread of mass-surveillance systems. In Western Asia, where sixteen of twenty territories are classified as authoritarian regimes according to the 2023 EIU Democracy Index, Chinese "smart city" projects are concentrated in the Gulf states: eleven in the UAE, seven in Saudi Arabia. The latest Chinese concept of the smart city, from 2022, involves real-time information monitoring across virtually all aspects of urban life.

Russia, meanwhile, has been trying to develop its own large language models—GigaChat and YandexGPT—since 2019, with Sberbank offering access to countries in the Global South. The models are supposed to reflect "local values," which in practice means embedding state ideology into the code from the start. Yet Russian AI lags behind American and Chinese models. China, by contrast, distributes its language models as open source, which means anyone can take the code and modify it. More than fifty percent of Chinese model users come from developers in the Global South. This openness masks a deeper control: all Chinese language models are regulated by the state, and party censorship is written into the code. You cannot get an answer about the Tiananmen Square protests.

The two authoritarian powers are cooperating as well as competing. In January 2025, Vladimir Putin instructed the Russian government and Sberbank to deepen cooperation with China on AI research and development. Joint laboratories were announced in November 2025 for nano-structured optoelectronic materials and for AI algorithms. The immediate stimulus was sanctions—Russia's access to advanced chips was restricted after its invasion of Ukraine—but the dependence runs deeper. Up to eighty percent of all cameras used in Russia are made in China and sold under Russian brands. Russia and North Korea are also cooperating, with North Korea supplying weapons tested in Ukraine and data flowing back to improve North Korean AI-guided systems.

The reach of these systems extends to Iran, where Chinese facial recognition technologies, internet filtering equipment, and surveillance tools from companies like Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision have been integrated into the architecture of state control. Russia's FindFace facial recognition system was acquired by Iran through intermediary companies and resold to entities linked to the Iranian state, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As early as 2019, Iranian women began receiving fines by mail for not wearing the hijab while in a car—evidence of the government's use of digital surveillance. In December 2025, Iran and Russia signed a cooperation agreement in AI, cybersecurity, and the digital economy. Taraneh M., an artist detained during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests, prepared for arrest by securing her devices and deleting confidential information. Investigators nevertheless presented her with a thick dossier of her social media posts dating back five years. She has been released but is now afraid to speak on the phone.

In Venezuela, authoritarian digital control is being built through international supply chains. The interior ministry held talks with the Belarusian company Synesis, which is under U.S. sanctions for technologies used to identify and arrest protesters. The Kipod software offered to Venezuela included facial recognition, license plate recognition, detection of weapons and crowds, and monitoring of traffic violations. Across Africa, Chinese AI-surveillance systems have spread to at least eleven countries, including Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zimbabwe. In Central Asia, governments have actively purchased Chinese digital public-security systems. In 2013, Tajikistan cooperated with Huawei to create a surveillance system in Dushanbe worth approximately twenty-two million dollars, largely financed by a Chinese loan. The pattern repeats: surveillance systems are marketed as crime prevention and smart city development, but their repressive use is connected with control over citizens.

Experts from the Carnegie Endowment, the European Parliament, and Freedom House agree on the main danger: AI systems can suppress protest before it has even properly materialized. They can detect early signals—unusual online activity, movement patterns, links between activists. The system works because it is distributed, because it is profitable, and because it is being sold as progress. One of the most functional proposals to slow its spread is to make Western technologies open source and move digital strategies away from national sovereignty toward inclusion of the Global South—not as territories of extraction for data centers serving Western AI models, but as actual participants in digital governance. Such an approach would prioritize human-centered concerns: agriculture, healthcare, education, transport, urban planning, adaptation to climate change. Whether democratic states will choose this path remains unclear.