The country of Georgia has built much of its protest-policing surveillance on a Russian-made facial recognition system, according to an investigation by the watchdog group AlgorithmWatch, which says the technology has let authorities identify and fine demonstrators while raising sharp questions about national security. The report frames the deployment as a tool of mass surveillance and ties it to a Moscow-based supplier with links to Russian state security.
At the center of the investigation is a system called Polyface, which AlgorithmWatch says Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has been procuring from the Moscow company Papillon AO since 2013, across six contracts, with its latest upgrade delivered in mid-2025 and a perpetual license granted in late 2024. Papillon AO has been sanctioned by Switzerland, Ukraine, Japan, and the United States, and its products are used primarily by Russian law enforcement and allied states. The matching software, the report says, is built on an algorithm from another Russian company, 3DiVi.
According to the investigation, the system draws on a central register of civil identity photographs to match faces, can run searches against images pulled from social media, and is able to identify people even when their faces are partly covered. AlgorithmWatch describes three ways it is used: scanning live camera feeds to automatically capture each face in a crowd, letting operators manually zoom in on a specific person, and flagging anyone on a pre-loaded watchlist of activists and previously fined demonstrators. A tender, it says, removed an earlier cap on the number of simultaneous operators.
The report links the system to a wider crackdown on demonstrations against the ruling Georgian Dream party, in which penalties for blocking a road rose sharply and, by one tally from the Georgian Young Lawyers Association, millions of lari in fines had been imposed on protesters by March 2025. Eto Buziashvili, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told AlgorithmWatch that wiring Russian-developed biometric technology into national infrastructure poses a substantial risk to Georgia’s security.
The findings echo other accounts of Russian surveillance technology spreading abroad, from a report that Iran secretly acquired Russia’s FindFace system to documentation of how Turkey has used facial recognition to identify protesters.
Sources: AlgorithmWatch
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By Ji-seo Kim
