Georgia’s surveillance cameras under scrutiny amid anti-government protests

Over the past years, Georgia has installed more than 4,300 “smart” cameras on its streets. The surveillance networks – built with technology from NEC, Hikvision, Dahua and Papillon Systems – are now attracting attention in the Central Asian country which is currently going through its third month of anti-government protests.

The Georgian government has not been transparent about its use of CCTV, opening questions on whether it is using surveillance systems to monitor dissidents and protestors, according to Radio Free Europe (RFE).

Since the protests began in October last year, police and ruling party-affiliated violent groups have engaged in widespread violence against protesters and journalists. At the beginning of February, the Georgian parliament, led by the Georgian Dream party, passed a number of restrictive amendments to crack down on the right to protest.

Sanctioned firms lead in supplying Georgia with CCTV

Another troubling aspect of the surveillance systems is the number of companies under U.S. sanctions involved in creating them.

Officially, only the airport and state border checkpoints in Georgia are equipped with cameras with facial recognition systems. The system was introduced in 2023 through an EU-funded program with the state procuring the technology from Japanese company NEC.

However, Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has also reportedly used a facial recognition tool named Polyface, licensed from Papillon Systems. The Russian company was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Commerce for providing support to Russia’s operations in the occupied areas of Ukraine, including using biometric technology to suppress Ukrainian resistance.

Papillon Systems is currently in the process of purchasing another facial recognition firm 3DiVi, the company’s co-founder Dmitry Morozov confirmed for Biometric Update. 3DiVi was added to the U.S. Entity List for the same reasons as Papillon.

Most of the cameras are supplied by Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua, also sanctioned by the U.S. over alleged involvement in the repression against Uyghurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang.

The official distributor of Hikvinson products for Georgia is Neotech which has installed surveillance systems in major cities. The capital of Tbilisi alone has more than 2,000 cameras installed for state agencies, according to the firm.

Currently, little is known about who controls the cameras, the surveillance systems’ capabilities, how the government processes and stores data, or whether facial recognition is being used outside of officially designated border areas. The exact number of surveillance cameras under state control also remains unknown.

According to former Georgian State Inspector Londa Toloraia, the disorganization among state agencies over surveillance cameras has been deliberate. The Georgian police have allegedly accessed surveillance footage from private businesses unlawfully.

“The Ministry of Internal Affairs was very disorganized among state agencies,” says Toloria. “Why does the Ministry of Internal Affairs benefit from this system’s disorganization? Because when it suits them, there are records, and when they don’t need the records, they usually don’t exist… when the responsibility of a police officer could be questioned or police misconduct is revealed, in such cases the records don’t exist.”

Article Topics

3DiVi  |  biometrics  |  cctv  |  Dahua Technology  |  facial recognition  |  Georgia (country)  |  HIKVISION  |  NEC  |  Papillon  |  video surveillance