Similarly, Putin’s two-day visit—his 10th trip to India but his first since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—is less about a bilateral relationship than it is a message to the world. Russia retains support, Putin is saying, even as it is being accused of stalling and derailing any meaningful peace negotiations. Just before Putin arrived in Delhi, the Times of India published an op-ed by the ambassadors to India of France, Germany and the U.K. that accused Putin of having a “total disregard for human life.” It embarrassed India’s Ministry of External Affairs which said the article was “unacceptable and unusual” and accused the ambassadors of trying to interfere in India’s sovereign right to conduct foreign policy as it sees fit.

For Modi too, Putin’s visit is an opportunity to send a message to the U.S. that India will not be bullied by tariffs, even as the value of its trade with Washington dwarfs that of its trade with Moscow. Keeping Russia close is also vital to India to balance out Russia’s growing reliance on China. India shares a long, volatile border with China, and the growing power disparity between the two countries means Delhi needs all the support (from Moscow and Washington) that it can get.

Despite their need for mutual support, India and Russia’s relationship is not without its tensions. At a demonstration in Delhi, ahead of Putin’s visit, the families of Indians stranded in Russia held up placards that read "Our Sons Are Not Soldiers of Russia." At least 12 Indians have died while fighting in the war and 127 have joined the Russian army. And India remains, despite Modi’s authoritarian tendencies, a democracy, with an influential civil society and a public that believes in its right to change governments at the ballot box.

It might explain both why Modi increasingly borrows from Putin’s playbook as he seeks to build India into a surveillance state and why he remains vulnerable to being stymied by committed opposition. A recent controversy over a cybersecurity app that the Modi government tried to mandate be pre-installed on every new smartphone sold in India – a country with a billion smartphone users – exemplified this tension.

Modi and Putin’s parallel surveillance states

“Today, your phone is like your house in your pocket,” says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder of the Delhi-based advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation. He was responding to news this week that the Indian government had directed companies such as Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi to pre-install Sanchar Saathi (literally, Communication Partner), a state-owned cybersecurity app on all new smartphones. Effectively, Gupta said, the “government is putting its own lock on your house.” And it gets to keep the key. The Indian government’s directive is very similar to one from the Kremlin in August to pre-install its Max messenger app on all smartphones. Max, the Kremlin said, was a necessary anti-fraud measure to protect vulnerable Russian citizens. On September 1, it became mandatory for the Kremlin's Max messenger app to be pre-installed on all smartphones. Now officials warn they might ban WhatsApp altogether for failing to prevent "crime and fraud." 

Just as Max gives Russia the tools to effectively spy on all of the people all of the time, opposition politician Priyanka Gandhi described the Modi government’s Sanchar Saathi as a “snooping” app. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “Citizens have a right to privacy.” Criticism has focused on the mandatory nature of the app and a secretive process in which no prior public discussion was had before companies were ordered to install the app. The government has rejected the idea that Sanchar Saathi can be used for surveillance purposes. In 2024, it pointed out, Indians lost over $2.5 billion to cyber scams that take advantage of the widespread adoption of digital services in India and the abundance of data available online. Internet freedom advocate Nikhil Pahwa says that the Indian government has been notoriously lax about protecting citizens’ data and is responsible in large part for creating the problems it claims to be fixing with the mandatory state-owned cybersecurity app. 

Even as it gave itself carte blanche to access citizens’ data, the Indian authorities this month also implemented stricter rules governing data privacy. The rules demand more accountability from Big Tech, for companies to minimize the collection of personal data and to give users a clearly-marked option to not share data. Its language about consent and individual privacy borrows heavily from Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR is the basis for much of the regulation around the world, from Brazil to South Korea and Canada. Currently, some 144 countries have national data privacy and protection guidelines in place. 

Among the few holdouts is the U.S., where individual states have been setting up rules that sometimes clash with federal priorities. One of those priorities is to weaken GDPR. Last week, in Brussels, Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said that if the EU “take their foot off this regulatory framework” it might lead to increased investment. “Let’s settle the outstanding cases against Google, and against Microsoft, and against Amazon. Let’s put them behind us,” Lutnick said as he also dangled the carrot of reduced tariffs. The EU has already proposed a ‘Digital Omnibus’ package that waters down the GDPR’s rules on individual data privacy and freezes AI regulation. 

An argument the Indian government’s supporters, including many in the media, used to defend the mandatory pre-installation of a state cybersecurity app was Big Tech’s vast, revenue-generating data crawls. It is an argument that strikes at the heart of digital sovereignty, an increasingly popular phrase in the Global South, where countries are now insisting that tech giants store local data locally and share some of the profits. In May, Meta said it might have to cut Nigerian users off from their Facebook and Instagram accounts after the government fined parent company Meta nearly $300 million for violating data protection laws. It’s the kind of action that is now leading the U.S. government to negotiate trade deals with countries—most recently with Malaysia and Indonesia—that require them to refrain from taxing Silicon Valley profits or requiring them to invest in the local digital ecosystem. 

Defending the need for digital sovereignty, the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor wrote recently that “self-respecting and self-reliant” countries must insist on “unhindered rights to regulate the national digital space” or risk “cementing digital vassalage.” In October, the California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that requires companies to make it easy for Californians to opt out of data sharing, a right that Californians retain even when traveling thus forcing tech companies to consider making it a national option in order to comply with the law. But, as digital rights campaigner Nikhil Pahwa says, while India’s Data Protection Law “will make private companies more accountable, it makes the Indian government less accountable.” 

India is the first country to attempt to follow the Russian lead in having a state-run app pre-installed on all smartphones. The next steps, the Russian example suggests, are significantly more alarming. In Russia, schoolchildren will now have their faces scanned as they enter school buildings. Their data will be added to the national 'Unified Biometric System,' which already holds the details of over 50 million Russians. The project, which authorities have said is "voluntary," is expected to cost over $600 million. And by 2030, the Ministry of Digital Development estimates that there will be five million government-run surveillance cameras across the country, all hooked up to an AI system with facial recognition capabilities. By 2021, some reports already ranked Delhi as the most surveilled city in the world. And the Indian government has a history of using spyware to keep tabs on opposition politicians, civil society organizations and journalists.

So even as the Indian government backpedals on Sanchar Saathi, its very existence was a warning that digital privacy and sovereignty doesn’t necessarily mean more rights for people. It could just mean a power grab by a national government, particularly one that takes its cues from Putin’s Russia.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Russia is in the process of constructing the most comprehensive digital surveillance state outside of China, deploying a three-layered approach that enforces the use of state-approved communication platforms, implements AI-powered censorship tools, and creates targeted tracking systems for vulnerable populations. The system is no longer about just restricting information, it's about creating a digital ecosystem where every click, conversation, and movement can be monitored, analyzed, and controlled by the state. 

From September 1, 2025, Russia crossed a critical threshold in digital authoritarianism by mandating that its state-backed messenger app Max be pre-installed on all smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs sold in the country. 

Max functions as Russia's answer to China's WeChat, offering government services, electronic signatures, and payment options on a single platform. But unlike Western messaging apps with end-to-end encryption, Max lacks such protections and has been accused of gaining unauthorized camera access, with users reporting that the app turns on their device cameras "every 5-10 minutes" without permission. The integration with Gosuslugi, Russia's public services portal, means Max is effectively the only gateway for basic civil services: paying utility bills, signing documents, and accessing government services.

As Max was rolled out, WhatsApp and Telegram users found themselves unable to make voice calls, with connections failing or dropping within seconds. Officials justified blocking these features by citing their use by "scammers and terrorists," while a State Duma deputy warned that WhatsApp should "prepare to leave the Russian market".

The Amina Experiment

The most chilling aspect of Russia's digital control system may be its targeted surveillance of migrants through another app called the Amina app. Starting September 1, foreign workers from nine countries, including Ukraine, Georgia, India, Pakistan and Egypt, must install an app that transmits their location to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

This creates a two-tiered digital citizenship system. While Russian citizens navigate Max's surveillance, migrants face constant geolocation tracking. If the Amina app doesn't receive location data for more than three days, individuals are removed from official registries and added to a "controlled persons registry". This designation bars them from banking, marriage, property ownership, and enrolling children in schools, effectively creating digital exile within Russia's borders.

Russia's censorship apparatus has evolved beyond human moderators to embrace artificial intelligence for content control. Roskomnadzor, the executive body which supervises communications, has developed automated systems that scan "large volumes of text files" to detect references to illegal drugs in books and publications. Publishers can now submit manuscripts to AI censors before publication, receiving either flagged content or an all-clear message.

This represents a fundamental shift in how authoritarian states approach information control. As one publishing industry source told Meduza: "We've always assumed that the censors and the people who report books don't actually read them. But neural networks do. So now it's a war against the A.I.s: how to craft a book so the algorithm can't flag it, but readers still get the message".

The scope of Russia's digital surveillance ambitions became clear when the FSB, the country’s intelligence service, demanded round-the-clock access to Yandex's Alisa smart home system. While Yandex was only fined 10,000 rubles (about $120) for refusing – a symbolic amount that suggests the real pressure comes through other channels – the precedent is significant. The demand for access to Alisa represented what digital rights lawyer Evgeny Smirnov called an unprecedented expansion of the Yarovaya Law, which previously targeted mainly messaging services. Now, virtually any IT infrastructure that processes user data could fall under FSB surveillance demands.

The Broader Pattern 

Russia's digital control system follows the Chinese model but adapts it for different circumstances. While China built its internet infrastructure "with total state control in mind," Russia is retrofitting an existing system that was initially developed by private actors. This creates both opportunities and vulnerabilities.

The government's $660 million investment in upgrading its TSPU censorship system over the next five years signals long-term commitment to digital control. The goal is to achieve "96% efficiency" in restricting access to VPN circumvention tools. Meanwhile, new laws make VPN usage an aggravating factor in criminal cases and criminalizes "knowingly searching for extremist materials" online.

The infrastructure Russia is building today, from mandatory state messengers to AI censors to migrant tracking apps represents the cutting edge of digital authoritarianism. At least 18 countries have already imported Chinese surveillance technology, but Russia's approach offers a lower-cost alternative that's more easily transferable.. The combination of mandatory state apps, AI-powered censorship, and precision targeting of vulnerable populations creates a blueprint that other authoritarian regimes are likely to study and adapt.

To understand the impetus behind Russia’s digital Panopticon, look at Nepal: Russian analysts could barely contain their glee as they watched Nepal's deadly social media protests unfold. "Classic Western handiwork!" they declared, dismissing the uprising as just another "internet revolution" orchestrated by foreign powers. But their commentary revealed Moscow's deeper anxiety: what happens when you lose control of the narrative?

Russia isn't building its surveillance state to prevent what happened in Nepal, they're building it because they already lived through their own version. The 2021 Navalny protests proved that Russia's digitally native generation could organize faster than the state could respond. The difference is that Moscow's solution wasn't to back down like Nepal's now fallen government did. It was to eliminate the human networks first, then build the digital cage.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Mangnale is an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global non-profit media outlet. In August, he and his co-authors Ravi Nair and NBR Arcadio published a detailed inquiry into labyrinthine offshore investment structures through which the Adani Group — an India-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in everything from ports, infrastructure and cement to green energy, cooking oil and apples — might have been manipulating its stock price. The documents were shared with both Financial Times and The Guardian, which also published lengthy stories alleging that the Adani Group appeared to be using funds from shell companies in Mauritius to break Indian stock market rules.

Mangnale’s phone was attacked with spyware just hours after reporters had submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for their investigation, according to an OCCRP press release. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

OCCRP stated in a press release that Mangnale's phone was attacked with spyware just hours after it submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for its report. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

Gautam Adani, the Adani Group’s chairman and the second richest person in India, has been close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for decades. When Modi was campaigning in the 2014 general elections, which brought him to power with a sweeping majority, he used a jet and two helicopters owned by the Adani Group to crisscross the country. Modi’s perceived bond with Adani as well as with Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man — all three come from the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat — has for years given rise to accusations of crony capitalism and suggestions that India now has its own set of Russian-style oligarchs.

The Adani Group’s supposed influence on Modi is a major campaign issue for opposition parties, many of which are coming together in a coalition to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 general election. According to Rahul Gandhi — leader of the opposition Congress party and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has provided three Indian prime ministers — the Adani Group is so close to power it is practically synonymous with the government. He said Apple’s threat notifications showed that the government was hacking the phones of politicians who sought to expose Adani and his hold over Modi. 

Mahua Moitra, a prominent opposition politician and outspoken critic of Adani, reported that she had also received the warning from Apple to her phone. She posted on X: “Adani and PMO bullies — your fear makes me pity you.” PMO stands for the prime minister’s office.   

Mangnale, referring to the opposition’s allegations, told me that there was only circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Apple notification could be tied to the Indian government. As for his own phone, a forensic analysis commissioned by OCCRP did not indicate which government or government agency was behind the attack, nor did it surface any evidence that the Adani Group was involved. But the timing raised eyebrows, as the Modi government has been accused in the past of using spyware on political opponents, critical journalists, scholars and lawyers. 

In 2019, the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Meta, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court against the Israel-based NSO Group, developers of a spyware called Pegasus, in which it was revealed that the software had been used to target Indian journalists and activists. A year later, The Pegasus Project, an international journalistic investigation, reported that the phone numbers of at least 300 Indian individuals — Rahul Gandhi among them — had been slated for targeting with the eponymous weapons-grade spyware. And last year, The New York Times reported that Pegasus spyware was included in a $2 billion defense deal that Modi signed in 2017, on the first ever visit made by an Indian prime minister to Israel. In November 2021, Apple sued NSO too, arguing that in a “free society, it is unacceptable to weaponize powerful state-sponsored spyware against those who seek to make the world a better place.” 

What is happening to Mangnale is the most recent iteration of a script that has been playing out for the last nine years. India’s democratic regression is evident in its declining scores in a variety of international indices. In the latest World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranks 161 out of 180 countries, and its score has been declining sharply since 2017. According to RSF, “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis.”  

By May next year, India will hold general elections, in which Modi is expected to win a third consecutive five-year term as prime minister and further entrench a Hindu nationalist agenda. Since 2014, as India has become a strategic potential counterweight to runaway Chinese power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region, Modi has reveled in being increasingly visible on the global stage. Abroad, he has brandished India’s credentials as a pluralist democracy. The mounting criticism in the Western media of his authoritarian tendencies and Hindu chauvinism has seemingly had little effect on India’s diplomatic standing. Meanwhile at home, Modi has arguably been using — perhaps misusing — the full authority of the prime minister’s office to stifle opposition critics. 

The morning after Apple sent out its warning, there was an outpouring of anger on social media, with leading opposition figures accusing the government of spying. Apple, as a matter of course, says it is “unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications.” The logic is that such information “may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future.” But the lack of information leaves a gap that is then filled by speculation and conspiracies. Apple’s circumspect message, containing within it the possibility that the threat notification might be false altogether, also gives governments plausible deniability.

Right on cue, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of information and technology, managed in a single statement to claim that the government was concerned about Apple’s notification and would “get to the bottom of it” while also dismissing surveillance concerns as just bellyaching. “There are many compulsive critics in our country,” Vaishnaw said about the allegations from opposition politicians. “Their only job is to criticize the government.” Lawyer Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, described Vaishnaw's statements as an attempt to “trivialize or misdirect public attention.”

Finding that his phone had been attacked by spyware was not the only example of Mangnale being targeted after OCCRP published its investigation into the Adani Group's possibly illegal stock manipulation. In October, the Gujarat police summoned Mangnale and his co-author Ravi Nair to the state capital Ahmedabad to question them about the OCCRP report. Neither journalist lives in the state, which made the police summons, based on a single complaint by an investor in Adani stocks, seem like intimidation. It took the intervention of India's Supreme Court to grant both journalists temporary protection from arrest.

Before the Supreme Court, the well-known lawyer Indira Jaising had argued that the Gujarat police had no jurisdiction to arbitrarily summon Mangnale and Nair to the state without informing them in what capacity they were being questioned. It seemed, she told the court, like a “prelude to arrest” and thus a violation of their constitutional right to personal liberty. A week later, the Supreme Court made a similar ruling to protect two Financial Times correspondents based in India from arrest. The journalists, in Mumbai and Delhi, had not even written the article based on documents shared by the OCCRP, but were still summoned by police to Gujarat. On December 1, the police are expected to explain to the Supreme Court why they are seemingly so eager to question the reporters.

While the mainstream television news networks in India frequently and loudly debate news topics on air, there is little coverage of the pressure that the Indian government puts on individuals who try to hold the government to account. Ravish Kumar, an esteemed Hindi-language journalist, told me that few people in India were aware of the threat to journalists and opposition voices in Modi's India. “When people hear allegations made by political figures such as Rahul Gandhi, they can be dismissed as politics rather than fact. There is no serious discussion of surveillance in the press,” he said. 

Kumar once had a substantial platform on NDTV, a respected news network that had built its reputation over decades. In March this year, the Adani Group completed a hostile takeover of NDTV, leading to a series of resignations by the network's most recognizable anchors and editors, including Kumar. NDTV is now yet another of India's television news networks owned by corporations that are either openly friendly to the Modi government or unwilling to jeopardize their other businesses by being duly critical. 

Nowadays, Kumar reports for his personal YouTube channel, albeit one with about 7.8 million subscribers. A documentary about his lonely fight to keep reporting from India both accurately and skeptically was screened in cinemas across the U.K. and U.S. in July. 

According to Kumar, journalists and critics are naturally fearful about the Indian government's punitive measures because some have ended up in prison on the basis of dubious evidence found on their phones and laptops. Most notoriously, a group of reputed academics, writers and human rights activists were accused of inciting riots in 2018 and plotting to assassinate the prime minister. Independent analysts hired by The Washington Post reported that the electronic evidence in the case was likely planted. 

Some of this possibly planted evidence was found on the computer of Stan Swamy, an octogenarian Jesuit priest who was charged with crimes under India’s anti-terror law and died in 2021 as he awaited trial. Swamy suffered from Parkinson's disease, which can make everyday actions like eating and drinking difficult. While in custody, he was treated so poorly by the authorities that he had to appeal for a month before he was given a straw to make it easier for him to drink.

The threat of arrest hangs like a Damoclean sword above the heads of journalists like Mangnale who dare to ask questions of power and investigate institutional corruption. Despite the interim stay on his arrest, Mangnale still faces further court proceedings and the possibility of interrogation by the Gujarat police. In the words of Drew Sullivan, OCCRP’s publisher: “The police hauling in reporters for vague reasons seems to represent state-sanctioned harassment of journalists and is a direct assault on freedom of expression in the world's largest democracy.”

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While Israeli companies are perhaps the most high-profile purveyors of spyware, several companies headquartered in the United States and in Europe also sell surveillance technology. And persistent regulatory inconsistencies and blindspots suggest that there is still considerable reluctance, globally, to legislate to prevent the misuse of such technology. In Europe, this week, countries including France, Germany and the Netherlands have been arguing for the need to install spyware to surveil journalists if security agencies deem it necessary. 

As governments vacillate over regulation, human rights abuses continue. Last month, Israel was reported to be using facial recognition technology software called Red Wolf to deliberately and exclusively track Palestinians. Journalist Antony Loewenstein was based for several years in East Jerusalem. In his new book, “The Palestine Laboratory,” he explores how Israel has turned Palestine into a testing ground for surveillance tools that Israeli companies then export to governments around the world. I spoke with Loewenstein, who lives in Australia, over the phone.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did the privatization of the Israeli defense industry begin and why was that an important moment?

For the first decade of Israel's existence after 1948, it was all state run. The Six-Day War [in 1967], when Israel, in six days, took control of the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem, really accelerated the defense industry. By the 1970s, there was a fairly healthy private Israeli arms industry. Some of the companies that had been public before were now private. But it's important to remember that both in the past, and also now, with organizations like NSO Group, most of these companies are private in name only. They are arms of the state. 

They are used by the state to forward and pursue their diplomatic aims. In the last 10 or so years, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, have gone around the world to countries that are not friends with Israel and have held out Israeli spyware as a carrot. Basically, Israel is saying, ‘If you are friends with us, if you help us, if you join with us in the U.N. in certain ways, if you don't criticize us so much, we will sell you this unbelievably effective spyware.’ And since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there have been huge numbers of European countries and others desperately coming to Israel, wanting defense equipment to protect themselves from any potential Russian attack.

How has Israel’s tech industry changed borders across the world?

Maybe the most prominent example, although not particularly well known, is the Israeli surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexico border. They were installed a number of years ago, and it doesn't make much of a difference whether it's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. In fact, Biden is accelerating this technological border, so to speak, and the company that America has used is Elbit, which is Israel's biggest defense company. They have done a lot of work in the West Bank and across the Israel-Gaza border. And the reason the U.S. used Elbit as a contractor was because they liked what Elbit was doing in Palestine. I mean, the company promotes itself as being ‘successful’ in Palestine.

Does this border technology change the willingness of states to commit violent acts?

I don't think necessarily violence becomes less likely. But I think in some contexts, Israeli surveillance tech, what you see being tested on Palestinians, makes it far easier for regimes to not go down the path of killing people en masse. Instead, they just massively surveil their populations, which allows them to get all the information they potentially need without the need for the bad images, so to speak, of mass violence. However, I also think that with an almost inevitable surge in climate refugees and with global migration at its largest since World War II, a lot of nations will actually revert to extreme violence on their borders.

You can see what the EU has been doing in the last few years with the assistance of Israeli drones, unarmed drones. The EU has made the decision with Frontex, their border — so-called — security, to allow the vast majority of brown or black bodies on boats to drown. That's a conscious political decision. They don't feel that way about Ukrainian refugees. And just for the record, I think all people should be welcomed. But the European Union does not see it that way. And the idea that you could possibly in years to come have armed drones hovering over the Mediterranean, firing on boats, shooting boats out of the water, I think is very conceivable.

Does Israel’s defense industry pose a threat to its allies?

It does. To me, the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is like an abusive relationship. On the face of it, very close. I think they love each other. They're expressing admiration for each other all the time. Without the financial, diplomatic and military support from the U.S., Israel would arguably not exist. And yet, according to the most accurate figure that I could find, every single day the NSA, America's leading intelligence agency and the biggest intelligence agency in the world, has roughly 400 Hebrew speakers spying on Israel. Spying on their best friend. And rest assured, that works in reverse as well.

They don't really trust each other. More importantly, in the last few years, the Biden administration has talked about trying to curtail the power of Israeli spyware. A year and a half ago, they sanctioned NSO Group, the company behind Pegasus. A lot of the media was saying, ‘Oh, this is fantastic, the White House is now taking spyware seriously.’ But I think that’s misunderstanding the issue. America doesn’t want competition. They don’t want a real challenge to their dominance in spyware. They're pissed off that Israeli spyware, which has been sold to dozens and dozens of countries around the world, threatens their hegemony.

You wrote in the book about how the Covid pandemic has been a wake up call for Israelis to how they, too, are vulnerable to surveillance.

For many Israeli Jews, for many years, all the surveillance was happening over there. It was happening to Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli Jews didn't really feel it themselves. They were being surveilled, but they were either unaware of it or didn't seem to care. During the pandemic, Israel had lockdowns like a lot of other countries. A lot of Israel’s biggest defense companies — Elbit and NSO Group — pivoted to developing various tools to supposedly fight the pandemic. But it was still mass surveillance, mass monitoring, which they now used within Israel itself. 

For the first time, a lot of Israeli Jews discovered that they themselves were being monitored, that their phones had been hacked. Eventually, the occupation always comes home. Slowly, Israeli Jews are waking up to the reality that what's happening literally down the road in Palestine will inevitably bleed back into their own world.

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I. Hery Flores kept calm when officers approached him as he departed a Tegucigalpa gas station in the early summer of 2021. Only one was in a blue police uniform. The others wore jeans and button down shirts — typical attire for police investigators in Honduras’ capital city. But then they slapped on handcuffs without giving him time to react. Later he realized they never showed him an arrest warrant.

They shoved Flores into a car without license plates and drove him around on Tegucigalpa’s winding roads. The officers interrogated him for more than two hours about his political activity as a student at the National Autonomous University of Honduras and as a member of a political party called Libre. Other Hondurans who had been murdered or disappeared in recent years — Berta Cáceres, Sneider Centeno, Vicky Hernández — flashed through Flores’ mind. “Their primary objective wasn’t to arrest me,” he later told me.

He persuaded one of them to let him call his mother. “The police have detained me and I’m at the Kennedy police station,” he told her. Within the hour, people were calling for his release on social media. One was the Libre party presidential candidate Xiomara Castro. Another was her husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, the former Honduran president who was deposed through a coup d’etat in June 2009 and later became head of the Libre party.

Before the day was through, Flores had been charged with “aggravated arson.” Authorities alleged he set a pharmacy on fire during a 2019 protest, which he denies. Flores spent a week and a half in pre-trial detention in a maximum-security prison until a judge decided he was not a flight risk and granted his provisional release while his trial was ongoing.

This was Flores’ first sustained encounter with police, and yet they seemed to know him well. He later learned that over two years’ time, they had compiled a 300-page file on him. He had spotted police stationed outside his home from time to time. Some photos in his file came from social media. But other images he didn’t recognize seemed to have been taken from a distance, perhaps by someone who was following him. While on the phone, he had sometimes heard noises, similar to the sound of fingers typing on a keyboard.

Flores wasn’t alone. He was one of an untold number of Hondurans caught up in a complex web of surveillance tools and tactics deployed by a state determined to protect its own power and preserve its status as Central America’s largest drug corridor. Presiding over this regime from 2014 until 2022 was Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. After he left office in January 2022 , Hernández — or “JOH” as he was commonly known in Honduras — was extradited to the U.S. on drug trafficking and weapons charges. He is currently awaiting trial in the Southern District of New York.

Dozens of interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, technical experts, activists and lawyers, and an extensive review of documents and court filings obtained through Honduras' public information access law offer a detailed (if still incomplete) picture of the digital surveillance apparatus that dominated Honduras during the Hernández administration. What follows is the story of what happens when surveillance companies sell their products to a government known to be carrying out widescale human rights abuses against its people and of the potential reform to this abusive digital surveillance apparatus as it heads into year two of Xiomara Castro’s administration.

The roots of these problems run deep for Honduras. The Central American nation has long faced endemic poverty and violence and today has one of the highest murder rates in the world. An estimated 120 tons of cocaine passed through the country in 2019. All this has driven hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to migrate to the U.S. in recent years.

The Honduran government also has a long history of monitoring its own citizens. A former army general told Honduran media that the country has been able to illegally intercept phone calls for at least 40 years.

But under Hernández, who was in office from 2014 until 2022, decades of intrusive but old-fashioned government monitoring began to look genteel. Hernández supercharged the state surveillance apparatus, first by passing laws to enable overreaching surveillance and then by bulking up police snooping powers with cutting-edge software. During his administration, Honduras acquired some of the most advanced AI and digital forensics tools from the biggest brands in the business, like Israel’s Cellebrite and the U.S.-based military contractor Palantir. There is also evidence of Honduran officials using other major surveillance tech products including Circles, i2, Galileo and Pegasus.

Why would a country of 9.5 million people need so many hardcore surveillance tools? To monitor anyone threatening to expose its wrongdoings or challenge its power. And to ensure its hold on a thriving drug trade.

The case brought against Hernández by the U.S. Justice Department accuses him of leveraging “the Government of Honduras’ law enforcement, military, and financial resources to further his drug trafficking scheme” by sharing sensitive information from law enforcement and the military with drug traffickers to facilitate shipments. A drug trafficker famously quoted Hernández saying he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” For his part, Hernández denies all these allegations. He says they are the result of drug traffickers trying to get back at him for cracking down on the drug trade during his time as president. 

But whether they were working for the state or trying to hold the state to account, people who were on the ground during Hernández’s time in office tell a different story. Opposition politicians, journalists and activists were under constant watch, both in real life and online. Phones were regularly confiscated and illegally compromised. Hernández built up a system that allowed him to access personal information on anyone in the country, on a whim. A former police officer, who wished to remain anonymous because he feared reprisals from the state, explained that Hernández positioned military officers within law enforcement departments as “consultants.” They would report back to him any information of interest, whether it was related to drug trafficking, political targets or other sensitive matters. But in the eyes of this officer, one thing was clear: “Nothing moved in Honduras without JOH finding out.”

Revelations about the reach of the Honduran digital surveillance apparatus also raise serious questions about the companies that build and sell these technologies. Tamir Israel, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, explained that these companies are required under international human rights laws to act responsibly and conduct due diligence in their sales. But many experts I spoke with agreed that from Azerbaijan to Mexico to Saudi Arabia, enough abuse has been exposed over the years to know this is not happening across the industry. Angela Alarcón, a Latin America campaigner at the digital rights organization Access Now, said that companies often try to shirk responsibility for human rights abuses by claiming their clients — mainly governments — hold sole liability for what happens to their targets. But companies are also responsible, she said: “Why? Because their technology can be used as a weapon that can destroy lives.”

II. HOW TO BUILD A SURVEILLANCE STATE

In 2009, a coup by the right-wing Honduran military, tacitly supported by the U.S., removed the president — Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, now head of the Libre party — from office and plunged the country’s already weak institutions into chaos. Thousands took to the streets in protest. Police and the military responded by violently repressing demonstrations, arresting protesters and enforcing a curfew. A subsequent commission found security forces were responsible for at least 20 deaths. In December of that same year, the head of the country’s drug trafficking unit in the public prosecutor’s office, Julián Arístides González, was murdered. Documents later showed that the police planned his killing at their headquarters.

The already-growing drug trade only further prospered in Honduras over the next decade, lending it the unenviable moniker of a “narco state.” Some police became directly involved in the drug trade. Others, under extreme pressure to protect drug traffickers from the law, were corrupt by default.

“The police have been at the service of drug traffickers and organized crime,” said Maria Luisa Borjas, a former police officer. “Honest officers who have wanted to remain part of the police have had to become deaf, blind and mute because their lives and the lives of their families are in danger.”

Borjas knows these dynamics well. She was once the head of internal affairs in the national police, where she was charged with holding officers accountable to the law. After she investigated extrajudicial killings carried out by a group of high-ranking police officers in 2002, she was fired from her job. One of the high-ranking officers she identified, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, later became the police director. Events surrounding Borjas’ firing and Bonilla’s tenure created further scandal that is now being laid out before a federal court in the U.S. where Bonilla, just like his former boss, is being tried on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

In 2012, when Juan Orlando Hernández was the president of the Honduran Congress, legislators passed a law colloquially known as the “Wiretapping Law,” which allows authorities to listen to phone calls and intervene in other forms of communications. 

“It’s something they were already doing, but in 2012, they legalized the practice,” said Hedme Sierra Castro, who has tracked digital surveillance of activists as part of the NGO ACI-Participa.

In 2013, a new attorney general — with close ties to Hernández — was elected to lead the public prosecutor’s office. He still presides over the institution and has been implicated in a U.S. court for aiding drug traffickers.

Hernández came to power in 2014 and used a special security council to build out a sweeping surveillance regime. Yet at the same time, crime soared and the drug trade continued to thrive. It was all for the purpose of “protecting the drug trafficking business,” said Honduran journalist and criminologist Wendy Funez. “They created an apparatus using the power of the state.”

The inner workings of the security forces in the Hernández government were complex, with more than a dozen different special forces between the police and the military. The military was the “brains” behind his security apparatus, explained Wendy Funez. “But the police carried out the orders,” she said. 

The situation attracted some international attention in March 2016, after Goldman Prize-winning environmentalist Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home. Her death underscored how dangerous post-coup Honduras had become for anyone who opposed the status quo, no matter how much prominence they had reached internationally. The killing shook the country. A U.S.-trained former military officer, who had also been the president of the hydroelectric energy company Desarrollos Energéticos, was later convicted of ordering her murder.

A month later police officials ostensibly admitted they had a corruption problem and ordered a clean-up of the 12,000-person force in a process known as the police “depuración,” or purification. But “it was a farce,” Borjas said. Hundreds of officers who were kicked out of the police force have since sued the government, alleging that they were expelled for speaking out against sexual assault or opposing Hernández’s government. Or because, like Borjas, they themselves had exposed instances of corruption.

Although Honduras maintained the quiet support of the U.S. throughout the Hernández administration — the country is home to a U.S. military base, along with Chiquita (formerly United Fruit) and the palm oil giant Dinant — JOH’s immediate extradition at the end of his last term signaled a change of tune. While he was still in office, his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was famously tried and convicted of running a major cocaine trafficking operation in the U.S. in 2021. In judicial proceedings, it came out that he had accepted a roughly $1 million donation to his brother’s presidential campaign from the notorious leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The former president’s brother (and Guzmán) have since been tried and convicted of major drug trafficking crimes. Both are serving life sentences in the U.S.

III. THE PALANTIR UNIT

Within the byzantine internal structure of the Honduran National Police, the Police Directorate of Investigations is charged with investigating serious crimes, such as homicides. In the working class Kennedy neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, a multi-building complex houses the Directorate, with more than a dozen forensic and ballistic labs, investigators’ offices and a floor dedicated to Interpol offices. It is also home to a room with about 10 computers in it, known as the Palantir Unit. 

One Saturday afternoon, when I visited the Palantir Unit, I met a lone staffer. Her job was to respond to requests by investigators for information from the Palantir platform, she explained. The U.S.-made software creates information-rich reports that profile people of interest, and it can diagram their social and family connections, drawing on information from the national census, public healthcare systems, customs and immigration, the names of relatives of people under investigation, vehicle registration information and other sources. Public records show that the Honduran police have run more than 12,700 searches through the platform since 2015, when the Palantir Unit started. Honduras’ secretary of defense and the public prosecutor’s office, through a special criminal investigation unit known as the ATIC, can also carry out Palantir requests. The secretary of defense has run 380 searches since 2014 and ATIC has run 14,157 since 2015. 

“Palantir is a database that opens a big window,” said Cristian Nolasco, the Police Directorate of Investigations spokesperson, who has been part of the police since 1998. 

Known mainly for its large contracts with U.S. law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military, Palantir in recent years has expanded its operations, selling to governments around the world and to the private sector. Now headquartered in Colorado, Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and it received early seed investment of $2 million from In-Q-Tel, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm. The publicly-traded company had a market cap of $13.3 billion at the start of 2023. 

Palantir was recently profiled in the Washington Post for the technological edge its algorithm gives to Ukraine’s armed forces. It also has contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that Amnesty International says have “[enabled] ICE to identify, share information about, investigate, and track migrants and asylum-seekers” who have been arrested in workplace raids.

Luís, who was in the police force during Hernández’s first term in office, said that he often filed requests for Palantir reports while investigating local organized crime groups. The software analyzed information to make it easier for intelligence officers like Luís — who says he received training from Americans and Colombians — to track down their targets and understand their movements. Luís asked that we not use his real name, as he is legally prohibited from speaking publicly about his work.

Luís would hand all intelligence reports to his supervisor, and he knew that reports eventually made their way to President Hernández himself. Based on his knowledge of the software’s capacity, Luís said that above all else, it helped Hernández “to control the opposition” and “to neutralize his opponents within organized crime.” Cristian Nolasco, the police spokesperson, said that even though the Palantir Unit is housed within the national police, it was the military that really had control of the technology under Hernández, through the National Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence, an opaque institution comparable to the U.S. Secret Service.

Palantir’s software is just one among many powerful surveillance tools that the Police Directorate of Investigations has at its disposal. Since at least 2012, the police have used data analytics software from IBM’s i2, now owned by the Canadian software company Harris, to profile suspects and their close connections.

A report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that Honduras was also likely using Circles, a surveillance technology made in Israel that listens in on calls and monitors texts and location by “exploiting weaknesses in the global mobile phone system.” Researchers made this assessment following the discovery of two servers in Honduras using the technology, including one belonging to the country’s defense department. Citizen Lab also identified an operator in Honduras for the NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus, which has been used to spy on journalists and activists in Mexico, El Salvador and Saudi Arabia. Previous reporting also revealed that Hernández’s government purchased software called Galileo, to hack emails and listen to phone calls, from the now-defunct Italian company Hacking Team.

Since 2017, the Directorate also has used phone extraction and analysis software from the Israeli company Cellebrite, which boasts having contracts with police, military and secret service agencies in more than 150 countries. Its main product, Universal Forensic Extraction Device, can bypass passwords and encryption to remotely access mobile phones and computers. It then extracts, analyzes and presents the data in a tidy report. 

The Directorate used Cellebrite for 939 extractions from 2017 to 2022. The police provided me with a long list of crimes they have investigated using Cellebrite technology, including homicide, drug trafficking, human trafficking, rape, fraud, vandalism and arson. Court records prove that the police have used Cellebrite in at least one case against a group of environmental activists, in which they were able to extract incoming and outgoing calls, photo albums, social media messages, emails and plenty else from the activists’ phones.

The ATIC also uses the Cellebrite software and has conducted 3,893 extractions since 2015. The office of Honduras’ secretary of defense confirmed it does not use Cellebrite.

This type of state surveillance “is often much more intrusive than you would think it would be,” said Tamir Israel, of Human Rights Watch. “There is also a chance for more serious repercussions to happen,” Israel said, referring to torture, state killings and imprisonment that have occurred immediately after surveillance or even years in the future in other countries. “That’s why it's important to have very clear checks and balances around every step of this at every point in time.”

These companies are required under international human rights laws to act responsibly and conduct due diligence in their sales, but enough abuse has been exposed over the years to know this is not happening on an industry-wide level, Israel said. U.N. experts, alongside groups like Human Rights Watch, have called for a global moratorium on the use of these technologies until more robust due process mechanisms and data protection laws are in place. Any company selling these products “must have known of the government’s connections to the illegal drug trade, and if they didn’t, they had a responsibility to learn,” said University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye. “If the companies did more than just sell a product — for instance, if they then serviced it, helped the customer use it — they owe the victims and the world an explanation for what they knew and what steps, if any, they took to mitigate or prevent harms.”

In September 2021, Cellebrite announced the formation of an ethics and integrity committee to respond to these types of critiques. The company has come under scrutiny for its contracts with countries like Saudi Arabia and Myanmar and the recent sale of its technology to the Ugandan police.

In an email to Coda, Cellebrite Director of Public Relations Victor Cooper wrote that the company pursues “only those customers who we believe will act lawfully and not in a manner incompatible with privacy rights or human rights” and noted that Cellebrite does not sell to countries sanctioned by the U.S., EU, U.K. or Israeli governments, such as Belarus, China, Russia and Venezuela. Cooper declined to comment on Honduras specifically. Coda reached out to Palantir about its contracting practices, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Daniel Osorio, a tech consultant for the police, told me he had seen the police use Palantir, Cellebrite and other technologies, but that many officers didn’t seem to have much training. “I’ve thought, who taught them the ethics of this?” he told me. “Because ethics come first.”

And all this technology is expensive. It has likely cost Honduras millions of dollars — documents obtained through open records requests indicate that the police have spent at least $136,000 for Cellebrite each year. Outside sources indicate that authorities spent $150,000 per server per year for Palantir, at least $335,000 for Galileo, and likely upwards of one million dollars for Pegasus. Hernández closed his administration with more than 70 percent of Hondurans living in poverty.

This multi-million dollar digital surveillance structure was all in place by the time Juan Orlando Hernández was set to face the biggest challenge to his presidency: the 2017 reelection campaign.

IV. THE TARGETS

Hery Flores was a student when the presidential campaign kicked into full gear in 2017. That’s when Flores met Marcio Silva, who was part of the prominent protest group Movimiento Estudiantil Universitario. As part of the group, Flores and Silva both regularly spoke out about university policies like budget cuts. They also demonstrated against Hernández’s reelection campaign.

Months before the November 2017 elections, during a protest, police entered the university and beat Silva and others with batons and launched tear gas canisters. Silva and 19 others were arrested for allegedly damaging a university building. 

That’s when the surveillance started, Silva told me recently in Tegucigalpa. “I think they had already been following us and monitoring our social media,” he said. “But because 2017 was an election year, we became a problem for those who wanted to stay in power.”

When Silva was in police custody, his cell phone was taken away, as is customary for anyone arrested in Honduras. But authorities cannot legally access phones or extract their data without a warrant signed by a judge. Court documents show no sign of a warrant being sought in Silva’s case. Nevertheless, “they hacked everything, all of my passwords,” Silva said.

I asked Osorio, the tech consultant, about this later on. “When they arrest people and take their phones for a long time, it’s because they are doing an excavation,” he said, referring to the process of extracting data. Cellebrite can do this kind of extraction, but there’s no smoking gun proving that this is how they got Silva’s data.

There was strong evidence that police had hacked into his social media accounts. Pornographic images and videos were posted to Silva’s Facebook account, in what he believes was an attempt to make him look “perverted” and discredit his activism. “It was part of a smear campaign,” Silva said.

Media outlets aligned with the government started publishing charts and diagrams on student leaders and the internal structure of the protest group. “There was information that astonished us with the level of accuracy,” said Silva. “The national ID numbers, the majors we studied, our school year, even our grades.”

Police sources explained that tools made by Palantir make it easy to build profiles and see connections like this. Technology like i2 also carries out similar data analytics functions, which can map connections, according to police officers familiar with the software. It uses cell phone records to analyze gang and criminal structures, as well as social movements. Other sources noted the possibility that some of the information was embellished or made up altogether, to paint a picture that served police purposes.

After he was released, Silva started receiving death threats via WhatsApp and anonymous Facebook accounts. “We’re going to kill you, we’re going to burn you, piece of shit terrorist,” they wrote. Some even slung racist messages at him, commenting on his dark complexion. The women in his organization received rape threats. Silva never got his phone back. 

Then came election night. As the results began to roll in, Hernández was trailing his opponent by almost five points. Suddenly, people’s internet connections mysteriously went dark. When connectivity was restored the next day, Hernández was in the lead. Suspicions of fraud led Hondurans to fill the streets.

Flores and Silva were among them. So was Raúl Álvarez, a former police officer who was 24 at the time. Months prior, he had been let go from the police force along with 200 other officers as part of the supposed “purification” process. His superiors never gave a reason. He was simply notified he had been removed through an “order from the executive branch.”

“They fired the good ones and left the bad ones there,” he said.

Álvarez was never formally accused of corruption. Making ends meet washing his neighbors’ cars and frustrated with the ruling government, he decided to join the thousands demanding accountability in what looked like a fraudulent election.

Among the throngs of demonstrators, he recognized some former police colleagues disguised as protesters, perhaps trying to infiltrate the mass movement. He pointed them out to others. 

“I became a target for them because of all the information that I have,” Álvarez said. 

Weeks later, Álvarez was arrested and accused of vandalizing the Marriott hotel in Tegucigalpa and another business during protests. He was put in pre-trial detention in a high-security prison. 

To prove their case, authorities used Cellebrite to access Álvarez’s phone and extract his data. Court records reviewed by Coda listed all 690 of his contacts, 47 separate SMS conversations, nearly 200 internet search histories and more. Some files he said he had previously deleted were even recovered by the technology.

Prosecutors presented photos of Álvarez at the protests that were extracted from his phone as evidence in his trial. He does not know what authorities did with the rest of the information or how many people had access to it.

Álvarez was never convicted. He was released after two years in a maximum-security prison before the amnesty law passed. In January 2023, a judge finally closed his case. He suffered an attack after his release that left him partially blind in one eye, and his attacker said he planned to kill him. He wants to leave the country.

“Thank God I was a prisoner and not a martyr,” he said. “But my life also matters, and I think the effort that I gave to this country is already large enough.” Knowing the police have so much information on him has made Álvarez feel even less safe than before. “I keep thinking that it’s better to ask for asylum in another country,” Álvarez said.

During the Hernández years, it was not just direct political opponents that became targets of Honduras’ surveillance regime. Lawyers and activists told me they saw similar trends among civic groups in other parts of the country. Nidia Castillo, a human rights lawyer in the southern state of Choluteca, explained how the previous government also went after environmental groups, which are sometimes seen as a threat to industry, and campesino (tenant farmer) organizations. “They need to have profiles and to know who are the leaders to initiate actions of criminalization, persecution and threats,” she said.

Activists with social movements in the Bajo Aguan region told me that their phones were regularly confiscated or tapped. Once when members of the campesino group COPA used code to thwart ubiquitous surveillance of their conversations, a misinterpretation of their conversation appeared in state-aligned media. Two COPA members told Coda that they had their cell phones confiscated by police, after they were questioned about the murder of their colleague. Authorities have not formally accused them of any crime, making the confiscation of their cell phones illegal. Four campesino leaders from this region were murdered in January 2023.

Christopher Castillo, a coordinator at the environmental rights group ARCAH, also became a target. His organization investigates and reports corrupt companies and individuals whose activities threaten Honduras’ natural resources. The organization has become skilled in uncovering information on corporate and government wrongdoing, making the state see them as a threat, he told me.

In Tegucigalpa, on March 29, 2021, about 15 activists from ARCAH protested outside a chicken processing plant they said was polluting the local river with its waste, turning the water brown and giving it a putrid odor. Around 10 a.m., police officers far outnumbering the activists arrived to break up the protest. At least one drone circled above. 

Seven were detained and arrested by the police on charges of “forced displacement,” punishable with up to nine years in prison. The charge is usually brought in cases of gang members who force residents to flee their homes.

Four of the activists had their phones taken away: Christopher Castillo, Jeffrey Alexander Suazo Girón, Victor Alfonso Hernández and Michael Aguilar. Coda confirmed through court records that the police used Cellebrite technology to extract extensive data from all four phones. This included WhatsApp messages, incoming and outgoing calls, photo albums, Facebook Messenger and Twitter messages, emails and memory archives.

By April 2022, the charges against the seven ARCAH activists were dropped when a judge ruled that there was not enough evidence of a crime for the case to continue. But they still haven’t gotten their phones back.

Christopher Castillo thinks he and his colleagues were targeted for a specific reason: their activism often uncovers information that threatens the interests of powerful companies and politicians. “The message is clear. What bothers us is your information,” he said.

All of these activists reported receiving death threats and said they feared that the police and security forces could harm them. “If you ask me who has this information and this technology, they aren’t the best people,” said Osorio, the tech consultant. “They can cause you harm.”

V. MEET THE NEW BOSS: XIOMARA CASTRO

Six months after Flores was detained by the police outside the gas station, he was tapped to join the administration of Xiomara Castro, who had prevailed in national elections. Castro’s December 2021 victory brought the Libre party into power for the first time.

Castro rose to political prominence after leading a protest movement in the wake of the coup. In her third presidential run, she promised to demilitarize public security and promote a community policing model. Against the odds, Hondurans decided to give her a chance.

Activists and student leaders make up a core of President Castro’s political base. In February 2022, the Castro government passed an amnesty law under which the judiciary threw out the cases of people persecuted for their political beliefs or for protesting the previous government. Flores had his case thrown out under the law. Silva is applying for his case to be overturned. Court documents we’ve received thus far do not explicitly mention the use of digital surveillance technologies against either Flores or Silva.

Castro says she wants to strengthen the rule of law and turn the police — one of the primary institutions wielding these surveillance technologies — into an effective and honest institution. But after a little more than a year in office, her long list of campaign promises hangs heavily over the administration. And support among her base has begun to falter. “It’s true there has been a change of government,” said environmental activist German Chirinos. Nevertheless, he said, “The authorities are the same — the police officers, the people in the judicial system.” 

The security minister, police director and other high level police officials repeatedly declined my requests to interview them about surveillance and initiatives to fight corruption within the ranks.

Along with former president Hernández, Honduran police arrested 11 other people on extradition requests from the U.S. after he left office. The Castro government touted this as a major success. But apart from the “big fish” strategy, it’s unclear how the new government will eradicate corruption and the influence of the drug trade on politics and security institutions. Castro’s own government and family have come under scrutiny for potential drug trafficking ties. Zelaya, Castro’s husband, was accused of taking a bribe from drug traffickers in a New York court case. A promise to bring an international anti-corruption commission has stalled. And cocaine seizures actually declined during Castro's first year in government.

Key laws that enable abusive surveillance, including the wiretapping law, remain. “Until they are overturned, we’re not going to accomplish anything,” said ARCAH activist Christopher Castillo. In November 2022, he was stopped by the police again outside his house, without cause. 

In early December 2022, Castro’s government declared a state of exception in certain gang-controlled neighborhoods in the country’s two largest cities in an attempt to fight extortion, which grants broad powers to security forces. At least four environmental leaders have been killed so far this year. UN human rights experts have called for an independent investigation into the killing of two activists in the north, who had previously been arbitrarily detained after opposing a mining project sanctioned by the Hernández government.

Maria Luisa Borjas, the former police officer, has been following the new government closely, particularly its security policy. “There are no clear policies to combat corruption, neither in the government in general, nor in matters of security, nor in the Armed Forces,” Borjas said. She criticized the amnesty law — which has become one of the Castro’s government’s most controversial policies — for providing impunity to corrupt officials instead of fulfilling its intended purpose of liberating political prisoners.

VI. ‘YOU DON’T WANT ME TO KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE’

When the police gave me an extensive tour of their investigative unit, agents offered sweeping details about their work, on everything from collecting evidence at a crime scene to deactivating explosives. Many emphasized the need to follow protocol and obtain warrants for searches.

It all made me wonder if the institution is finally achieving real reforms.

But at the end of my tour, my confidence evaporated. A police officer offered to give me a ride home. I politely declined, saying I didn’t want to inconvenience him. “You don’t want me to know where you live,” he said. “Even though I could find out anyway.”

He explained how based on my phone number he could find records from the phone company that document my address or even use GPS data from my phone to figure out where I spend most of my time.

“You couldn’t do that, because you would need a warrant,” I said, repeating what the police had gone through so much trouble to emphasize to me when they explained all the technology in their power.

He responded that he could just send the woman who operates the computer to go buy a soda, and he could log into the computer without her knowing.

“But that would be corrupt,” I said. “And you’re not corrupt, right?”

Of course not, he said. He had just been joking.

This reporting is sponsored by the Bruno Foundation, set up by journalist and writer Martin Walker. Walker is a celebrated international reporter, historian, and author of the popular Bruno detective series. Bruno’s eponymous protagonist has a distinct awareness of justice, intrigue, and tenacity – traits the Bruno Fellowship encourages.

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The post How surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras appeared first on Coda Story.

But with authoritarianism seemingly on the rise across the world, did we get it wrong? Maybe tech is just making life easier for the tyrants.

In eight episodes, reported from around the world, journalist Natalia Antelava and the team from Coda Story focus on the stories of people caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship, and ask whether tech is doing more for dictators than it is for democracy.

Listen to Coda's collaboration with Audible on the original series Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us.

Episode 1: Escaping China’s Surveillance Net

A young man is detained by police in China’s Xinjiang region, and stumbles on an unlikely means of escape. He double-crosses his interrogators and runs as far as he can - all the way to the frozen Arctic. But will he ever really be free from China’s surveillance web? Even in his new home in northern Norway, the eyes of the Chinese state are never far away.

Episode 2: Tech and the Taliban

Smartphones and mainstream apps power a volunteer team racing against the clock to help Afghans leave the country before the Taliban takes over. For those left behind, those who opposed the Taliban, how do they stay safe? Because this Taliban regime is very different from the one that ruled 20 years ago. This one uses social media and biometric databases. 

Episode 3: Russia’s Leaky Databases

In 2021, Russia’s main opposition is using digital technology to challenge Putin’s government as never before. It’s building databases of supporters to help further the cause, just like political organizations the world over. But then, those supporters start getting visits from the police.

Episode 4: Thailand: The Genie Escapes

In Thailand there’s one subject that’s been taboo for decades: the Thai Royal Family. So how do the authorities react when the topic appears on social media, and the genie is out of the bottle? And what does that have to do with the disappearance of a social media activist in neighboring Cambodia?

Episode 5: Silencing India’s Critics

Police say they’ve uncovered a plot that implicates some of India’s most distinguished lawyers, intellectuals and activists in a conspiracy to bring down the government. Central to the case are letters they’ve found on a laptop belonging to one of the suspects. But how - and why - did the letters get onto that laptop? When US-based forensic investigators take a look they’re shocked at what they discover.  

Episode 6: Telegram vs The Dictator 

In 2020, the President of Belarus has his back to the wall. Hundreds of thousands of protestors are on the streets in demonstrations that are amplified and coordinated via a messaging app - Telegram. The regime shuts off the internet, but even that can’t stop the ‘Telegram revolution’. So what’s the next move for Europe’s last dictator?

Episode 7: The Data Trap

When US sheriff’s deputies keep turning up at his house, a father in Florida can’t figure out why they’re so interested in his teenage son. Before long, the whole family is caught up in the local sheriff’s ‘data driven policing’ program. 

Episode 8: The Border Industrial Complex

Migrants from all over the world gather in the French port of Calais. It’s the last stop on a perilous journey. Their destination, the U.K., is on the horizon. They’ve used their smartphones to navigate here, to stay in touch with families, and negotiate with smugglers. But now they’re up against millions of dollars worth of security and surveillance infrastructure, and they have a decision to make.

The post ‘Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,’ a new podcast series appeared first on Coda Story.

The rise of the killer robot

Forget fantasyland Westworld machine murderers. Real-life lethal robots are now fighting their way into warzones and police departments worldwide. 

Coda’s Ilya Gridneff explored the rollout of a new generation of autonomous machines on Ukraine’s battlefields. Naval drones and unmanned, machine gun-equipped ground vehicles are “poised to upend modern warfare,” Gridneff wrote. The emergence of these “killer robot” devices raises all sorts of terrifying questions about the ever-blurring boundary between machines and humans and the existential risk of ceding too much control from the latter to the former. 

They’ve made it to California, too. Lawmakers in San Francisco, one of several U.S. cities doubling down on police surveillance in response to concerns about crime, recently faced severe backlash after nearly approving a measure that would have let police use robots to kill. The neighboring city of Oakland also explored (and then scrapped) a plan to arm police robots with guns. 

America’s post-Roe abortion surveillance matrix

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case establishing a constitutional right to abortion, privacy experts were quick to point out the dangers of the decision in the digital age. As we wrote after a draft opinion was leaked in May, people’s search histories, text messages, location data, social media activity, purchasing records and use of reproductive health phone apps could all be used as evidence in legal cases against those who seek the procedure in states where the procedure is outlawed. 

“As soon as abortion becomes criminalized, then any sort of digital trace that people leave online at any stage of their journey could be evidence that might be used against them,” Nikolas Guggenberger, now-former executive director of Yale’s Information Society Project, explained. And that’s nothing to say of the incredibly messy universe of questions it might raise for speech on social media platforms. Already, companies have been accused of suppressing content about abortion and abortion-inducing drugs.

The spy in your pocket

It’s impossible to talk about authoritarian tech trends without talking about spyware. There is a huge global appetite for this technology by governments of all stripes. We’ve covered the topic extensively in our Authoritarian Tech newsletter — subscribe if you haven’t yet! — and the updates are coming in so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. In California, WhatsApp and Apple have sued the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, and a group of journalists from the Salvadoran investigative newsroom El Faro are also taking NSO to court for building software that infected reporters’ phones and tracked their every move. 

For journalists targeted with spyware, the personal and professional harm can be severe and long-lasting. Over the summer, we covered the story of Togolese reporters who appeared on a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers that NSO clients targeted for surveillance. A year after the revelations, the threat of being infected with spyware continues to haunt them.

Engineering a perfect society – through mass surveillance

The scope of mass surveillance in China is so widespread that it’s difficult to truly wrap your mind around it. Coda reporter Liam Scott gave us a primer when he interviewed Wall Street Journal journalists Liza Lin and Josh Chin about their recent book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which describes the country’s descent into mass surveillance as a tool of authoritarian social control. 

The magnitude of surveillance in Xinjiang, where the government has been accused of carrying out a genocide against Uyghur Muslims, is “truly totalitarian,” reporter Chin explained, with the goal of completely “remolding” the individuals it targets. This includes a system of biometric data collection, facial recognition technology, so-called “Big Brother” programs and advanced artificial intelligence that authorities have imposed on the population to exert “total control.” Outside of Xinjiang, residents have faced extreme surveillance under Beijing’s draconian “zero Covid” policy, which reporter Isobel Cockerell has explored at length in her excellent Infodemic newsletter. 

The building blocks of the surveillance nightmare unleashed in Xinjiang and beyond, however, can be found in the U.S., home to companies that happily supplied their technologies to the Chinese government as it constructed its panopticon. These tech companies, Chin explained, “midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components.” China’s end goal with this tech, he believes, is to build a “perfectly engineered” society. If that’s not dystopian nightmare fodder, I’m not sure what is.

As we struggle to find a silver lining in all this, it may be time to take a step back and reconsider tried-and-true methods of communication. From protester signs in China to print-and-post samizdat networks in Belarus, our stories in 2022 also showed the enduring power of pen and paper. Enjoy your reading.

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The post The year in authoritarian tech trends appeared first on Coda Story.

China

China continued to be the most dangerous cross-border offender. As part of its highly sophisticated transnational repression campaign, the regime issued hundreds of lnterpol red notices — requests to police around the world to detain and send suspects back to China. In April, the Chinese government tried to force back four members of the Uyghur minority, who have been targeted heavily within and outside China, from Saudi Arabia. Among the four was a 13-year-old girl who, along with her mother, risks being sent to a detention center. Following an outcry from human rights groups, the deportation has been delayed. 

Under the banner of an anti-corruption program called Sky Net, the Chinese state has also ramped up efforts to repatriate Chinese nationals it accuses of corruption. The program has seen thousands targeted in the last few years, including the Chinese businessman Ma Chao, a member of the persecuted Falun Gong movement currently living in Cyprus. At the start of the year, members of his family in China were arrested to increase pressure on him to return. Just one month later, an Interpol notice was issued against his wife. 

Even within the U.S., traditionally seen as the ultimate safe haven for those escaping persecution abroad, China has ramped up its efforts to target dissidents. In October, the FBI charged seven individuals with conducting a campaign to surveil and coerce U.S. residents to return to China. In response to this concerning trend, a group of Democratic congressmen have introduced a bill that seeks to codify transnational repression as a crime under U.S. law.

Turkey

Turkey is one of the biggest transnational repression actors. High-profile attempts to return Kurds back to Turkey were a regular occurrence in 2022. Turkey has been able to leverage Russia’s war in Ukraine, demanding that Finland and Sweden commit to more proactively returning dissident Kurds to Turkey in exchange for Turkey’s support for their NATO membership bids. Turkey’s government has provided a list of dozens of people it wants repatriated. It continued to tap informal networks to attack and threaten journalists living abroad. Those targeted in Sweden include the Turkish-Kurdish journalist Ahmet Donmez, who, in March of this year, was attacked outside his home.

Iran

Over the years, the Iranian regime has used tactics such as assassinations, renditions and digital intimidation to target Iranian citizens in countries in Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to Freedom House. During the past three months of cascading protests across Iran, there has been renewed global interest in the dangers facing Iranian activists living at home and abroad.

In October, masked men attacked anti-government protestors outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin, leaving several injured. The British police recently warned two British-Iranian journalists and their families that they faced an increased “credible” threat from Iranian state security forces. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy network, MI5, used his annual threat update to warn of Iran’s ambitions to “kidnap or even kill British or U.K.-based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.” He said that there had been at least 10 such potential threats since January 2022.

Saudi Arabia

Since U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in 2018 inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been under a measure of diplomatic pressure. That has not stopped him from expanding the Saudi government’s transnational repression efforts. In August, the same month that President Biden met with the prince, three people were sentenced in Saudi Arabia after being surveilled while abroad. One was a 34-year-old mother who had tweeted about the Kingdom while in the U.K. 

It was also in August that a former employee of Twitter was convicted in the U.S. for using his access to Twitter’s data to spy for the Saudi regime. Last week, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against bin Salman that sought to hold him accountable for Khashoggi’s murder. The judge said that, while he felt uneasy about it, his hands were tied because the Biden administration had made a recommendation to give the Saudi leader political immunity. Having cemented its position as one of the worst transnational aggressors of 2022, the Biden administration’s policy is likely to provide wiggle room for the Saudi regime in 2023.

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The post The year in cross-border repression campaigns appeared first on Coda Story.

The White House vehemently denied the claim, but the report reinforced the cyberwar threat hovering over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After Biden announced sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, American officials warned businesses and local governments to brace for the possibility of ransomware attacks, which have been held up as a possible strategy for Russia to blunt the impact of sanctions from the U.S. and Europe. Russia is widely known to be a hotbed of ransomware activity. 

Ransomware attacks rose by more than 60% globally from 2019 to 2020, and nearly 75% of revenue generated from ransomware attacks in 2021 went to Russian-linked hackers, recent analyses have found. Increasingly, ransomware attacks share the same outcomes as disinformation campaigns, spreading social and political instability, fostering chaos, and eroding faith in government and institutions. As Russia mounts a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is a global cyber conflict on the horizon? 

Richard Forno, director of the graduate cybersecurity program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County discusses the cyber threat landscape in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.  

Everything is obviously moving very quickly. There are reports that the Biden administration was presented with options for cyberattacks against Russia, such as disrupting internet access and shutting off power, which the White House then vehemently denied. How are you thinking about this moment and the cyber threat?

I just published an article about the big picture and what this means for cyber in the United States.  

In general, the big money quote is this shows that cybersecurity, all cybersecurity, is local. It’s not something that happens in a vacuum on the internet in cyberspace. It has local in-purse ramifications. And geopolitics, i.e., the war, the invasion of Ukraine, events around the world can have cyber consequences here at home.

Not just for large companies and pipelines, infrastructures. But for everybody. Whether it’s a home user whose network might get compromised because they’re working from home, or they’re an individual who can’t fill up their gas tank because there’s been a hack of a pipeline and they can’t get fuel to the gas stations. So, there are a lot of consequences that can result from something that started kinetically, with explosions and missiles and tanks, halfway around the world.

There’s been some conversation about if this could kick off a genuine tit-for-tat cyberwar. What do you think?

I kind of cringe at the word cyberwar. It’s kinda catchy, but the reality is that it’s a tool in a nation’s arsenal. Certainly, Russia and the U.S., in some ways, have shown that they’re not afraid to use it. It’s a tool that can certainly be escalated in its use. 

The Russians and Chinese and others have been mapping out our infrastructure for decades precisely to have that knowledge available for situations like this where they might want to escalate.

It could very easily get into a tit-for-tat kind of a situation.

I talked to a cybersecurity expert a few months ago about the risks of geopolitical cyberwar and responding to cyberattacks from other countries in kind, and his position was that it’s very risky because he believes that the U.S.’s defenses around cyber are poor. Do you agree with that?

I totally agree. We, the United States, have always viewed offensive cyber as sort of the cool, sexy aspects of cyber. But cyber defense is kind of routine and boring and an everyday humdrum. It’s not as sexy, not as glamorous. And I think he’s exactly right in this regard. We’ve gotten better over the years, but I think when you look at where the dollars have gone, the interest has gone – political interest – it’s more on the offensive side looking at our adversaries while we continue to have this soft cyber underbelly in our infrastructure. Russia has addressed cyber much more holistically and completely than we have.

Cyber attacks have also targeted Ukrainian government and business websites. Can you explain how they could have effects that ripple outside of the country?

I don’t think it’s one-to-one, like if this happens in Kyiv, this happens in New York. I don’t think that’s the case. One doesn’t necessarily lead to another at a technical level. So Russia launches cyberattacks against the Ukrainian government, banks, etc. Where I see the probability of cyberattacks going beyond Ukraine is if the West retaliates in some way. Then it opens up a Pandora’s box where Russia can say ‘ok, we’re going to come after the U.S., the U.K., other countries and launch cyberattacks that way.’

But if malware is unleashed on Ukrainian companies operating globally, that could cause worldwide damage, couldn’t it?

Oh certainly. If you’re a large multinational company and you’re doing business in Ukraine, you may become targeted intentionally or caught up in an attack and that could have spillover ramifications.

A U.S. official recently warned after the first round of sanctions against Russia that there could be some sort of retaliatory ransomware attacks that could help Russia blunt the impact of sanctions and that’s something companies should be bracing for. Are you concerned about that as well?

Yes. Ransomware continues to be the go-to cyberattack that we’re seeing these days, whether it’s by a criminal group or a nation-state. It would not surprise me to see ransomware attacks launched by Russia or endorsed by Russia. It happened before, in 2015 with the NotPetya attack. Again, that was Russia in Ukraine but it impacted the rest of the world.

Ransomware is one easy attack. I could also see them finding ways to target specific infrastructures, or nodes in infrastructures, to disrupt critical resources. That’s a more labor-intensive approach. With cyber, like with nuclear weaponry, you can’t un-ring the bell. It’s out there.

What do you think is the most responsible thing to be doing at this moment as everything is escalating so quickly for people, businesses, governments, and companies worried about attacks?

The most responsible thing is vigilance. I’ve got a book coming out soon on local government cybersecurity here in the U.S. Nearly one-third of U.S. local governments could not tell you if they’re under attack or have been compromised. That’s pretty scary. You have to be extra vigilant. Not paranoid, but realize that one or two glitches that you didn’t normally expect to see happen, you might want to stop and think is this normal, or am I being caught up in something.

What are you not seeing or hearing discussed in the media in conversations about cybersecurity right now?

What was interesting to me this week is the number of articles and stories in the media talking about cyber. Not just in broad terms but as it affects businesses, and the tone was a little more intimate and personal than I’ve seen similar types of stories during other conflicts over the years. 

You look at places like local governments, hospital systems –they’re soft targets. They don’t have deep pockets to hire large cybersecurity teams to monitor networks. They’re left vulnerable in a situation like this were it to escalate even further.

It’s rare to see a cyber story leading the evening news. And yet there it was, I think it was NBC, a cyber warning. You don’t see that too often. And even with the Colonial Pipeline, it wasn’t starting off with here’s the warning from the government. And the tone conveyed to me a different approach than previous media coverage.

It underscores the level of vulnerability we face as a modern society. Here’s an example. I was at the dentist this morning and my dentist told me that on her way into the office, she stopped off to get gas. There were like 10 other cars ahead of her. This is a panic, or a growing panic. What if a cyberattack shuts down gas distribution? How am I going to fill up my car? That’s where cyber meets the real world.

In our ransomware Big Idea, we talked about how these kinds of attacks create mass panic and that can be an important strategic dimension of these attacks. The impact of attacks is not just practical, it’s also psychological.

Exactly, it all feeds in. Cyber is no longer just hackers but includes very much influence and disinformation using cyber capabilities. That’s been happening in Europe and in Ukraine. It keeps us employed.

I think the ball is kind of in the Russians' court as to what the next steps would be. I would not be surprised to see retaliation of some sort. More economic sanctions were announced this afternoon. There may be some cyber stuff along the way. I don’t know. It’s only 12 hours old. We are in the first innings of this.

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