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Who buys and controls the CCTV?Myanmar's slippery slope to mass surveillance

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Abstract: In this report, ARTICLE 19 and Digital Rights Collective investigate how closed-circuit televisions (CCTV) are procured in Myanmar.An underlying concern for this report is the transparency of public procurement and spending and accountability of government operations. Public procurement is supposed to provide for citizens’ needs, and therefore it must be accountable to the public. Access to information is key to this accountability. Transparency of public procurement allows civil society to act as an effective watchdog on government systems, making recommendations for change and bringing this crucial area – where public and private sectors meet – under better public scrutiny.CCTV cameras form an essential prerequisite for artificial intelligence (AI)-based biometric surveillance technologies that make up smart cities’ infrastructure, such as live and retrospective facial recognition, automated number plate recognition, and emotion recognition, among others. Given the grave human rights implications of CCTV infrastructure and its increasing scale in the country, we seek to understand the compounding risks of this technology against the backdrop of a military coup. This is crucial to study, given that CCTVs are an important building block for remote biometric identification and mass surveillance, both of which are steadily becoming entrenched across Myanmar.