Background Back to contents 23 But infrastructure is not as innocuous and non-controversial as Huawei makes it sound. During this intensifying crackdown against protesters and activists, images of authorities monitoring protest movements in traffic control centres were shared on social media.32 With the military authoring new legislations and taking control of infrastructure and technology, there are increasing concerns that the Myanmar military can potentially utilise existing smart cities’ infrastructure – such as Naypyidaw’s fully functioning surveillance networks, Yangon’s vast CCTV spread, and Mandalay’s CCTV network – to monitor people who engage in civic participation and exercise their rights to civil liberty.33 In Mandalay specifically, after the coup disrupted the plans in 2021, the military ousted the incumbent MCDC by arresting34 the Mandalay City Mayor, Dr Ye Lwin, who led the Smart City Project, and replacing35 them with its own Mandalay regional council. The implementation of CCTV and other equipment, together with Huawei as part of the Mandalay Safe City, has reportedly transferred to the military in May 2021. The equipment arrived in February 2021.36 It is not yet clear at the time of the writing how the implementation will unfold under the military council’s management. Two local companies, ACE and Zarni Electronics, won tenders to install the equipment, but information or specifications about such tenders could not be found. CCTVs equipped with face and licence plate recognition are connected to servers accessible by police stations. The seeds for Mandalay’s surveillance system pre-date the coup – and despite this new deal with Huawei to ramp up ‘security’, Mandalay already had over one hundred monitors37 that were monitored by the police command centre since 2015.38 One of the major concerns expressed by civil society representatives interviewed for this report was the restriction on the freedom of movement and civic participation that smart cities more broadly could impose. Civil society activists stated that CCTV networks with facial recognition systems are on the horizon and that they could be used