Who buys and controls the CCTV? Back to contents 16 However, it was not possible to pursue this method after the military coup, due to the risks involved for researchers working under the drastically changed political landscape, and also because members of the MCDC have been in hiding or are being detained by the military junta. Therefore, we realigned our plans to gather as much available information as we could from media reports, investigative journalism, and leaked documents and tenders from the government to map out the extent to which surveillance systems and AI technology infrastructure had been developed in Myanmar’s cities, especially within the new context of the military dictatorship. Our understanding and analysis from the scarce information that is available online and from interviews misses the rich detail we could have uncovered through field engagement. Yet our analysis of the government, media, and civil society narratives offers the first step to foreground the gravity of the dangers of the state surveillance used by the regime on civilians in the near future. Our second difficulty is the inability to verify some of the information collected from reports. Several pieces of information for different projects are still missing or not yet reported, and it remains risky to physically visit the project areas due to the pandemic and an unsafe political environment. Thus, we present the information we have as of now, as well as the information we do not have, as one of the findings to highlight future areas of investigation. Before the military coup happened, we managed to conduct interviews during the initial scoping phase with individuals from eight civil society organisations working mainly on digital rights and technology, and those working with the government. We originally planned to use these findings to formulate questions and topics to interview people directly involved in implementing the smart city in Mandalay. As we resumed this research after a hiatus from research activities during the early months of the protests, our researchers, who are members of Myanmar civil society, obtained leaked government documents and tenders from close contacts. We searched across a total of 1,932 tender documents from 2020 using the following keywords – ‘cameras/ကင မ္ ရာ’, ‘CCTV’, ‘control room’, ‘machine/စက္’, ‘Monitor’, ‘Tech/နည္းပညာ’, ‘AI’, ‘safe city’, and ‘smart city’. We extracted a total of 11 surveillance-related tenders in both Myanmar