From Nairobi to Shenzhen to Sao Paulo: the global surveillance stack is being built fastest in the places with the least power to resist it, and almost nobody in Silicon Valley is talking about it - Silicon Canals

"the Americans ask too many questions about use cases, and the Chinese just ship. That sentence has been rattling around my head ever since. Not because it's surprising - anyone paying attention to the global surveillance technology market already knows this - but because of how cleanly it captures a dynamic that almost nobody in the Western tech ecosystem seems willing to name directly."

"the most consequential infrastructure buildout of the 2020s isn't happening in San Francisco or Berlin. It's happening in Nairobi, Shenzhen, São Paulo, Dhaka, and Lagos. And it's not a buildout of cloud computing or fintech rails or AI copilots. It's a buildout of surveillance - comprehensive, layered, and accelerating - in precisely the places where civil society has the least institutional capacity to push back."

"When I say surveillance stack, I don't mean a single camera on a pole. I mean the full vertical integration: biometric ID systems at the base layer, facial recognition and behavioral analytics in the middle, predictive policing and social scoring at the application layer, and cloud infrastructure tying it all together. Each piece is sold separately but the result is cumulative and architectural."

A procurement official in Southeast Asia revealed that Chinese surveillance technology vendors are winning contracts over American and European competitors because they impose fewer questions about use cases and implementation. This reflects a broader pattern where comprehensive surveillance systems—combining biometric ID, facial recognition, behavioral analytics, predictive policing, and social scoring—are being deployed across developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These systems are sold piecemeal through separate procurement cycles by different vendors, but collectively create integrated surveillance architectures. This buildout occurs in regions with limited civil society capacity to challenge such deployments, representing the most significant infrastructure development of the 2020s outside traditional tech hubs.

Read at Silicon Canals