Opinion

Examples abound: Authorities in India exploit facial recognition technology to locate protesters, as well as to sweep and search poor neighborhoods largely populated by migrants; Pakistan bought an $18.5 million system to keep an eye on online traffic; in Serbia, officials hope to "cover every significant street and passageway" of Belgrade with monitoring equipment. The evidence so far doesn't prove that these tools even do their job of stopping crime, but they certainly make it easier to crack down on dissent. Many of the systems the countries rely on come, at low cost, from China -- in whose massive infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road initiative, 55 of the 67 swing states included in the report participate.