On 9 September, Amnesty International released a report that exposed the depth and scale of Pakistan’s surveillance infrastructure. The findings build on earlier revelations before the Islamabad High Court, where the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) admitted to directing telecom companies to “finance, import and install” a mass interception system known as the Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS). This technology enables the monitoring of at least 4 million people in real time – a staggering intrusion that targets roughly 2% of the country’s 220 million citizens at any given time. Amnesty’s investigation now confirms that the network extends far beyond what was initially disclosed, relying heavily on technologies imported from the US, Europe, China, and the UAE. The roots of this apparatus trace back to Pakistan’s first national firewall known as Web Monitoring System (WMS), imported from the Canadian company Sandvine at a reported cost of USD 15 million (a technology that was later replaced by China’s firewall that makes WMS 2.0 being used now), which laid the groundwork for today’s sweeping regime of surveillance and censorship.
Pakistan’s history of surveillance stretches back far beyond the last decade. As early as 1997, the Supreme Court declared state surveillance unlawful and in violation of Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy. The case involved the phone tapping of judges, senior officials, and politicians under orders from then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. In its landmark judgment, the Court affirmed that privacy is not a privilege but a constitutional right extending well beyond the four walls of the home. Notably, the issue over surveillance partly contributed to the dissolution of Bhutto’s government, which serves as a reminder that unchecked monitoring has always carried profound political and democratic consequences.
Three decades later, the technology may look different, but the logic remains unchanged. What began with wiretaps, then popularised by IMSI-catchers has now expanded into a full-fledged infrastructure of mass surveillance employing modern technology through centralised biometric databases, Safe City projects, and interception systems that monitor millions of people simultaneously. The only difference is the scale at which this is done today. What was once targeted surveillance of individuals or groups has been transformed into automated systemic monitoring of entire populations.
What is most troubling about Amnesty’s report is not its revelations, but how unsurprising they feel. For many Pakistanis, surveillance and censorship are not abstract concerns, rather they are lived realities. In just the past year, citizens have lived through 21 internet shutdowns, ranging from blanket blackouts to bandwidth throttling and targeted website bans. These disruptions were not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern of state control over digital space. Repeated throttling of the internet was attributed to implementing the Chinese firewall or WMS acquired for 30 billion PKR (over 1 billion USD) on the country’s networks.
Pakistanis are not unfamiliar with attacks on their civil liberties. Over time, many have either grown accustomed to the state’s routine disregard for their rights or developed strategies to navigate around it. What remains elusive, though, are clear answers or accountability from the authorities spending billions of Rupees of taxpayer money on setting up mechanisms that would further stifle their fundamental freedoms.
Pakistan’s history is marked by repeated patterns of state brutality – from indifference to attacks on the Hazara community by top leaders of the country, to harassment of Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) organizers and participants, to the disregard for Baloch demands for justice, to the political victimisation of opposition leaders. These recurring abuses reveal not isolated excesses, but a consistent reliance on surveillance as a governing strategy, one that entrenches authoritarian control by keeping entire populations under watch.
This surveillance has long been a hallmark of authoritarian governance, used to stifle dissent and consolidate unchecked power. At its core, it flips the democratic contract on its head: instead of treating citizens as rights-holders, it treats them as suspects in a crime yet to be named – a crime that often amounts to nothing more than exercising their democratic freedoms and expecting the state to protect them. In Pakistan, this dynamic is all too familiar, recognized even by those who deliberately avoid political debate for fear of the consequences of being watched and speaking freely. Freedom of expression, already limited by constitutional caveats, remains the most stifled right in the country, where almost any act of constitutionally permitted expression risks being branded a threat to national security.
Surveillance as Control
Generations have lived under the quiet pressure of being watched, where the awareness of surveillance itself becomes a tool of control. The result is not security, but self-censorship, and a silenced public forced to measure every word and action against the possibility of state reprisal. The Supreme Court of Pakistan’s ruling that unchecked surveillance undermines dignity, privacy, free expression, and even judicial independence rings louder than ever.
Amnesty International’s report confirms what activists and journalists have long argued: surveillance is less about security and more about control – something that aligns with the global understanding of this practice. Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes exposed how the language of “security” is often used to justify sweeping intrusions into private life.
Marketed as protective, these tools in practice reproduce and entrench discrimination. Communities that already face marginalisation, including women human rights defenders, gender and sexuality rights activists, ethnic groups, religious minorities, political oppositions, among anyone with a voice become easier to monitor, easier to silence, and easier to target.
Imported Authoritarianism
As evident by many reports and investigations, this unlawful mass surveillance and censorship regime is not homegrown. Instead, it has been imported, outsourced, and enabled by foreign profiteers who view repression as a business opportunity. From centralized databases tied to national ID cards that has already suffered breaches – most recent one reported on September 8, to Safe City projects monitoring urban centres with tens of thousands of cameras – later used to harass people, alongside advanced interception systems like LIMS, and WMS purchased off-the-shelf, Pakistan’s surveillance architecture is operationalized by foreign technology and expertise, not by some accident, rather by design.
As Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, recently noted in her report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” repression today is deeply economic, where states purchase the tools of control from global suppliers, who profit significantly from monitoring and silencing entire populations being oppressed.
So when Pakistan imports surveillance systems designed and sold in the global North, it imports not just hardware, but a logic of occupation: a way of treating its own people as enemies to be tracked, catalogued, and subdued.
Journalist Karen Hao has argued that technology companies are fast becoming the next generation of defence contractors, and Pakistan proves the point. The very actors who profit from turning online presence into monetised datasets are also the ones supplying interception systems, content filtering infrastructures, and biometric technologies under the banner of “national security”. Investment in technology marketed to authoritarian regimes demonstrates the global demand for digital tools that, while not physically lethal, facilitate and legitimise acts of violence. This is digital authoritarianism for export, sold as packages to governments that would rather monitor dissent than engage with it. In this economy, repression becomes a commodity that is traded across borders with profit as the only measure of success.
Human Cost of Digital Authoritarianism
The consequences are not abstract but are directly seen on people living through regimes weaponizing technology against their civil liberties. Movements like the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) know this reality intimately. PTM organizers and supporters are routinely subjected to surveillance, harassment, and intimidation, their communications intercepted, their public gatherings monitored, their mobility restricted, and their leaders pressured by security agencies. In Balochistan, men and women campaigning against enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings face the same apparatus. Their protests are filmed, their phones tapped, their lives made precarious not just by state violence but by the constant reminder that they are being watched.
Awareness of constant observation fundamentally alters behaviour, leading individuals to self-censor or withdraw from public discourse, whereas silence becomes a strategy to avoid being targeted or subjected to physical harm. This chilling effect is the deliberate outcome of the state’s strategic deployment of technology as a tool of control. Authoritarian power is sustained through the deliberate suppression of dissent, with surveillance operating as a structural tool that imposes tangible risks on opposition. By making dissent and visibility dangerous, such systems reinforce hierarchical authority. As a result, repression is disproportionately concentrated on already marginalised groups, systematically curtailing their capacity and sense of security to participate in public discourse.
It is clear that surveillance in Pakistan is not about preventing crime or safeguarding public order. Its purpose is to break the will of communities that demand accountability by casting them as perpetual subjects of scrutiny. Western tech corporations, meanwhile, have every incentive to fuel this authoritarian turn, designing invasive tools that make repression simple to buy, import, and operate, with profits counted in the billions. The only ones left paying the price are citizens, who are promised protection but handed violence, repression, and the steady destruction of dignity. What emerges is not security, but a surveillance state turned inward, policing its own people for political gain while foreign profiteers walk away with the spoil.
(Hija Kamran is a policy advocate specializing in technology and human rights in the Global South.)