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Content type: Examples
17th June 2021
The Belarusian government is using the "Kipod" facial recognition software developed by the local software company LLCC Synesis to track and identify dissidents. Synesis was previously sanctioned by the EU for providing authorities with an AI surveillance platform capable of tracking individuals. Kipod uses biometrics machine learning algorithms to analyse material. Synesis has denied that the technology could be used to identify protesters, but the Belarusian government decreed the…
Content type: Examples
17th June 2021
In August 2020, controversial Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko cut off most of the nation's access to the internet in hopes of disrupting the protests against the vote-rigging that saw him installed as president. Online news sites were left largely offline from election day onward, and demonstrators had to scramble to find wifi connections and working VPNs or proxies in order to share whatever news they could find. Protests therefore relied on popular bloggers on Telegram channels to…
Content type: Examples
17th June 2021
Despite its indications of support for the pro-democracy protesters, in October 2020 the EU bought the Belarusian authorities 15 surveillance drones, raising concerns that the video equipment they carry would be used to identify and arrest individual pro-democracy protesters. The EU foreign service paid for them out of an €850,000 neighbourhood project handled by Latvia and Lithuania, and denied that they could be used to identify individuals. The drones were intended for use to patrol EU…
Content type: Examples
17th June 2021
The 2020 Belarus protests were the largest in the country's history and brought an unprecedented crackdown, in which protesters nationwide were tortured and criminally prosecuted as a means of repressing peaceful assembly. A report finds that these cases became political as the government violated the presumption of innocence and meted out disproportionately harsh sentences. The report found no reports of disciplinary action taken against law enforcement officers who exceeded their authority by…