Sensing the Surveillance State
Amnesty International has a name for what Argentina's government has built over the past two years, and it is not flattering: a "techno-authoritarian infrastructure of social control." The organization's new report, *Sensing the Surveillance State*, documents at least $1.2 million spent since 2024 on facial recognition licenses, social-media monitoring tools, and thermal-camera drones with automated tracking — all acquired, one presumes, in the spirit of good governance.
Even now, the drones are still airborne.
A Facial Recognition Deal, Itemized
The receipts are specific. Argentina's Ministry of Security, under then-minister Patricia Bullrich, signed Resolution 710/2024 in July of that year, creating an Artificial Intelligence Unit Applied to Security. In October 2025, the ministry licensed Clearview AI — a company whose facial recognition database runs to more than 70 billion images and whose reputation for scraping the internet without asking precedes it — for $33,500. A separate May 2024 rule authorized the Federal Police to monitor social media without judicial sign-off at all.
Sources within the Civil Rights Community note that "without judicial sign-off" is doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence.
Who Gets Watched
Amnesty's researchers conducted 21 interviews with journalists, activists, human rights defenders, and pensioners who had turned out to protest cuts to their retirement benefits — the last group being a demographic not typically associated with insurgent threat. In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, a December 2025 decree amended Argentina's National Intelligence Law by executive order, expanding surveillance authority without the inconvenience of a legislative debate.
Amnesty describes the resulting effect as a "chilling" one: people who believe they are being watched tend to stop speaking, organizing, and showing up, whether or not anyone ever knocks on their door. With the candor of a landlord explaining a rent hike, the government has offered no comparable transparency about who, exactly, ends up on the other end of that surveillance.
The Recommendation Nobody in Power Requested
Amnesty is calling for an outright ban on remote biometric surveillance for mass monitoring, along with actual legal rules governing how these tools get bought, built, and deployed. That the request needs making at all — after $1.2 million in purchases already went through with essentially no such rules in place — tells you where the enforcement mechanism currently sits.
The cameras were bought before the guardrails were drafted. The guardrails, as ever, remain a draft.
Sources: Amnesty International · JURIST
