In mid-March 2025, Nino, a Georgian PR lecturer in her 40s, received a call from the court. The assistant to a judge at the Tbilisi City Court summoned her to a hearing for blocking a road in the Georgian capital city two and a half months earlier. The call took her by surprise. Nino had protested against the alleged rigging of the last elections as well as the suspension of EU integration talks. She had known for a long time that the protest site surrounding the Georgian Parliament was covered with surveillance cameras but had not considered them to be so effective at identifying her.

At the hearing a few days later, she saw footage of herself at the protest, taken by the same surveillance cameras. The video showed her attempting to cross a road while others approached her from the opposite side. Nino was accused of initiating a blockade on the road. The system had identified her through face recognition software and processed her as an unlawful protester – the fine imposed amounted to 5,000 GEL (around €1,620). The court never sent her the ticket; instead, five months later, Nino's bank accounts were frozen. She was forced to set up a crowdfunding campaign to pay off the fine. Only several weeks later, her accounts were unblocked and her payments regularized.

Much like many others in Tbilisi, Nino could not afford the risk of receiving any more fines and largely stopped protesting. Her case resonated with many other Georgians who, since 2025, have stopped attending demonstrations against the ruling "Georgian Dream" party, in power since 2012 and dominated behind the scenes by its founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire whose fortune was built in post-Soviet Russia. The recent surveillance mechanisms, involving face recognition software and an extensive network of AI-enabled cameras, achieved what physical force alone could not: the authorities finally managed to break the protest movement – through fear and pressure.

From EU candidacy to authoritarian repression

In 2023, Georgia was granted the status of EU candidate, a milestone that for many Georgians meant far more than a diplomatic formality: a path to institutional reforms, legal protection, economic integration, and a structural anchor against the influence of a powerful and hostile neighbor. Freedom of expression had been guaranteed, both in law and daily practise, for over two decades. Following the allegedly rigged parliamentary elections on 26 October 2024, many Georgians took to the streets and protested for a full 580 days in a row. The European Parliament called for a re-run of the vote. In response, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, the public face of Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, announced that his government was suspending the EU accession process until 2028. The halt is widely considered unconstitutional as the Georgian Constitution explicitly requires all public bodies to facilitate the accession. Moreover, 86% of Georgians supported the accession in a poll from 2023.

Unlike during the first months of protests, demonstrators were progressively stripped of their rights: while in 2023 assembly required no permit and freedom of expression was guaranteed, by 2024, covering one's face was considered an administrative offense, and the penalty for blocking a road rose from 500 to 5,000 GEL. In 2025, both acts became criminal offenses, and even gathering on a sidewalk now required state registration. In 2026, calling the government illegitimate or criticizing it online using terms deemed offensive also became a criminal act. Transparency International concluded that "the laws amended by 'Georgian Dream' have effectively abolished the freedom of assembly guaranteed by the Constitution of Georgia".

Shako, a civil servant and demonstrator who opposes the state's repressive measures, comments: "They can't make the protest disappear from people – so they try to make it disappear from the streets."

For Nino, the fine for her alleged street blockade impacted her whole life: "Now, I practically don't go outside – I only go to the marches". The demonstrations she still attends are the larger Saturday gatherings organized around a specific issue. They differ from the Rustaveli protests, named after the avenue on which people gather daily outside the Parliament building. "That penalty, after I was identified by the cameras – it was impossible for me to pay alone. I crowdfunded it in half an hour – but what about someone who doesn't have the connections I have? I didn't want to put others in a position in which they had to keep supporting me. So I stopped going to the Rustaveli protests."

Face recognition: the technological backbone of the crackdown

Before the crackdowns, Luka's life had followed the rhythm of his late twenties: wine festivals, friends, ordinary weekends. The turning point came when he saw a police officer break his friend's bones during a beating. After that, something shifted.

Luka had been protesting since November 2024 and has since accumulated three fines for blocking the road. Under Georgia's enforcement system, fines are not served in real time: notifications arrive weeks or months later, by which point the debt has already triggered an automatic bank freeze. For Luka, that means his account can be seized at any moment. "Now I have three fines. Every notification that arrives, every complaint I have to file, every unknown number calling – still, to this day – causes me enormous stress. My quality of life is worsening every day that they [Georgian Dream] remain in power," he adds.

With his own account vulnerable to instant freezing, Luka began routing his money through someone else's — effectively surrendering the ability to save. The heavier cost, he says, has been psychological.

By December 2024, protests had spread across dozens of cities in Georgia, with many local outlets describing them as the largest demonstrations since the country's independence in 1990. The government responded with brutal force: the police used water cannons and rubber bullets to repress attendees while beatings from both law enforcement and government-aligned "titushky" (mercenaries) were documented. The Public Defender's Office recorded 282 cases of physical abuse. At least 486 people were detained in November and December 2024 alone. Still, the crowds kept returning, spending Christmas and New Year's Eve on the street. Thematic protests led by teachers, musicians, athletes, and doctors arose, spreading to 37 of Georgia's 55 cities and more than 40 cities abroad. Violence did not dissuade them.

Then, the identifications began and fines started to arrive. By March 2025, at least 2 million GEL (around €640,000) had been imposed on protesters, as the Georgian Young Lawyers Association reports. All of a sudden, authorities were able to precisely identify demonstrators who would then be summoned to the court only weeks later. At first, people did not know how they could have been spotted so easily. The answer, however, had been in place for 13 years.

Under the wing of Russian surveillance machines

Georgia's surveillance infrastructure was not built specifically for the 2024 protests. Nika Simonishvili, an attorney who has handled dozens of protest cases in court, learned about the facial recognition software by chance: "One time during a proceeding, a prosecutor let it slip: 'We use Artificial Intelligence'. The other representative immediately grabbed her arm: 'Stop, be quiet', she told her. Then, the prosecutor said: 'We use a special program'", Simonishvili recalls.

The "special program" the prosecutor referred to is called Polyface. Since 2013, the Ministry of Internal Affairs has been procuring the facial recognition system from Papillon AO, a company based in Moscow. Papillon AO has been sanctioned by Switzerland, Ukraine, Japan, and the United States. Its products are used primarily by Russian law enforcement and Russian proxy states, including Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Russia, now providing surveillance technology to Georgia, invaded the country in August 2008 in a five-day war, after which it recognized the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states — a position never recognized by the international community. Russian troops have remained there ever since. Nearly two decades later, Moscow still controls roughly 20% of Georgian territory and the so-called administrative boundary lines that divide occupied from unoccupied Georgia function, in practice, as a live and creeping border.

The surveillance system has undergone five upgrades in the past eleven years and was granted a perpetual license in October 2024. According to a 2018 upgrade contract, ministry operators would have been trained directly by Russian personnel. As of April 2026, a core component of the Georgian state security infrastructure remains under the legal jurisdiction of the occupied Georgian territory. This means that Papillon AO, like any other Russian company operating in Georgia, is obliged by Russian law to cooperate with Russian security services if compelled.

Several demonstrators interviewed for this article saw themselves in the footage for the first time during the hearings and admitted to being shocked about how precisely they were captured by the system. "People say I'm always calling them soul-readers, these cameras. The zoom they have…", Simonishvili explains.

"Levani (a friend of mine) was barely at the edge of the frame, but the camera was zoomed in to the point where every expression, every smile, was visible. It was unimaginable," says Elene, a civil society researcher who, for one year, monitored protest footage for the demonstrators. Nino recalls a clip that spread widely — the camera so precise that the text on a sheet of paper held by a demonstrator was fully legible; in another, someone's phone screen was readable as they typed.

Through the lens of the system

Polyface 3.7.0, the latest upgrade purchased by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was delivered in early June 2025. By then, the mass remote identifications and the penalty enforcement had already begun. Polyface is built on a deep learning recognition algorithm developed by 3DiVi, a Russian AI company based in Novosibirsk and backed by a Russian state venture fund. It records high-definition images of large crowds, even in poor lighting, and can identify faces under masks or partially occluded.

The tender documentation shows that the ministry explicitly requested licenses for an unlimited number of operators; until 2025, the system was capped at 30 simultaneous operators. The change suggests a rising demand within the ministry to monitor larger demonstrations.

To match faces to identities, the system uses the "Unified Information Bank", which provides access to civil registry photographs. The software can also run searches against pre-loaded images from social media and other external sources – a feature the ministry requested in 2024, indicating cross-platform surveillance as an intended use.

By cross-referencing exclusive footage from the cameras with the Georgian government's tender documentation and Polyface's public documentation, this investigation has identified three ways in which the software may be used:

• Automated identification: Polyface scans a live camera feed, selects each searchable face in the crowd, and keeps it on screen for a few seconds – long enough to capture an image that can identify the person. It then moves on to the next face. This process runs continuously, without a human operating the camera.
• Operator-directed search: A staff member takes manual control of a camera, points it at a specific person, zooms in, and runs an image of the face against the database in real time. The 2018 contract allowed for 30 officials to do this simultaneously. The 2024 contract removed this limitation.
• Watchlist alerts: A list of people of interest – activists, protest organizers, previously fined demonstrators, or individuals flagged in earlier intelligence raids – is loaded into the system in advance. When a camera spots someone from this list, Polyface flags them immediately. This function has been part of the system since the original 2013 procurement.

Exclusive imagery retrieved from the security cameras show Polyface's performance. In the first clip, the camera appears to be operated by a human, focusing on the more active demonstrators who set the protest's tone. In the second clip, the camera moves on its own or semi-automatically, pausing on faces for a few seconds at a time – whenever someone looks up, turns around, or simply makes their face visible for long enough, the camera captures it and moves on to the next area. Both behaviors match documented Polyface capabilities, and there is no technical reason that prevents them from running in parallel, on different cameras, or at different times:

Uncertainty as a pressure of its own

Elene has seen what cameras can do. The possibility that authorities might retroactively scan the period when she had attended protests never left her mind. A fine could arrive at any moment — one more burden on top of her unemployment and everything else her family was already carrying.

Early on, activists set up funds: people donated money, the funds paid the penalties, and the protest could keep going. "At first, being fined felt almost like a badge – people would fundraise for you, there was solidarity", says Elene. Then, the government seized the funds' accounts, leaving demonstrators on their own. "I watched that period carefully. Some people couldn't collect the money at all – pensioners, bartenders, physical workers, people living on social security. In the end, some took out loans."

Because the fines arrived weeks or months later, demonstrators came to understand that attending a protest was no longer a temporary act. It had become a permanent, searchable data record within the surveillance infrastructure. "The software doesn't only identify who someone is – it can reconstruct a full protest history: when a person arrived, how long they stayed, how many times they came back. Once identified at one protest, the system can locate them across every other recorded event", explains Giorgi Lubaretsi, a Georgian cybersecurity expert.

Chilling effect gathers momentum

Elene found that knowing exactly what the cameras could do changed the way she moved through the city. "I haven't walked through the parliament area in a long time, even in daylight. The amount of cameras there is intense, so I take a longer route to work. Once, the road was already blocked due to the protests, and I still used the underground tunnel to cross, out of fear", she says before adding: "I've cut my Facebook communication to zero. All communication is on Signal now. I rarely speak to anyone on open platforms anymore."

Several demonstrators described how they stopped chanting, using whistles, carrying posters, taking pictures, or even wearing distinctive clothes out of fear of identification.

"I became paranoid. I would start covering my face the moment I left home, and I wore neutral clothes, but I still felt I could be identified", 22-year-old Tamuna, a student and frequent protester, describes her feelings at the time. "No more whistles, no more posters. I avoided talking to or standing near certain people, the ones I thought the state was targeting. I stopped going to the marches, too, because they installed too many cameras at the intersections the marches passed through. I still avoid that area, even in daylight."

Face masks worn by demonstrators for protection made the protest itself feel unrecognizable. People could no longer pick out friends in the crowd, and the act of self-protection became a source of anxiety. "When everyone started wearing masks, I started feeling anxious at Rustaveli. You can't see faces, you lose contact, you can't recognize people. It's very stressful", says Nino.

The chilling effect reduced both the scale of demonstrations and people's willingness to show up. "The scale changed enormously", Nino confirms. "When the funds were seized, too, and there was no more hope of help, far fewer people came out."

Tamuna looks back at her optimism towards the beginning of the protests: "I felt I was standing on the right side of history – it carried enormous weight for me. I attended the protests five times a week without fail." But the deployment of the surveillance system changed this drastically: "Once I heard the court was using camera footage to identify people, the first thing I felt was anger for being watched, for being punished unfairly. Then, fear kicked in, gradually. I changed my route to protests. I started covering my face. Then they criminalized face covering, too. I wanted to avoid the penalties – I had to. That fear was one of the main reasons why I stopped going. It wasn't my choice."

Elene describes the guilt that followed: "When I stopped going to protests, I was ashamed, as if I was behaving like a cowardly child. At first I couldn't even share it with friends."

Civil servant Shako experienced the same kind of trauma. Once blocking the road or the pavement became a criminal offense and he heard about face recognition cameras identifying protesters, the decision made itself. With three young children at home, the risk of being taken away from them was one he could no longer justify.

Erekle, a high-school teacher from Tbilisi, adds to the picture of a changing atmosphere among the protesters. "For months I went almost every day. Now rarely", he says. "When blocking the road was criminalized, I moved onto the pavement. When the law prohibiting demonstrating on pavements was passed, I moved further back. It feels like retreating in war. But this is not the end of the battle. They [the government] still haven't managed to put the fire out."

The moral distance between those who still risk attending the protests and those who can no longer afford to is increasing. For more than 580 days, this has been the daily routine for many people in Tbilisi.

Luka, the winemaker, still goes to protests regularly and is angry at people like Nino who have stopped. "Honestly, I'm surprised by people who stopped going because of fines. If they hadn't been scared back when masks were allowed [to avoid cameras], standing on pavements was allowed and there were a thousand ways out, we'd be standing stronger now."

"The people still standing there, they're so estranged from us, so hurt", counters Elene. Erekle adds to this: "The system is changing the way we protest. Sometimes it slows it down, splinters it, or tries to shift the attention elsewhere. Society fractures more easily than a peach."

The democratic facade

Face recognition systems are not unique to authoritarian states. The same architecture exists in cities across Europe and elsewhere. What differs – for now – is the political will. In Georgia, it has been used to silence protest.

Eto Buziashvili, a researcher at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington, US, adds a strategic dimension to the picture: "Papillon Systems is a core part of the Russian security infrastructure. Integrating this kind of Russian-developed biometric technology into the national infrastructure represents a substantial risk to Georgia's national security. Deploying adversarial AI surveillance is a mechanism for long-term dominance over another country's citizens in the information domain."

Buziashvili identifies two distinct risks: "Integrity attacks could involve software being programmed to 'ignore' particular individuals, for example, to ignore a foreign intelligence officer of a hostile country, while creating a detailed map of the power structure within the host country, from high-level officials down to grassroots activists, and selectively target political dissents."

In this case, the use of imported technology to influence state operations is plausible. Buziashvili recalls Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, when Georgian internet traffic was re-routed through Russian servers and used as a main tactic to isolate the Georgian government. "When an adversary gains access to face recognition archives, they can use the database for intelligence profiling. There is a tragic precedent: during the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan, they inherited US-built biometric systems and used them to identify and target Afghans who had worked with the United States."

Elene has spent months watching the footage. Whether Russian authorities have actually accessed the data remains unconfirmed. But for her, the possibility alone is enough to frighten her: "The thought that another country, and Russia of all places, might have my biometric data. I don't know what they'll do with it. We are going down the same path as Russia. The goal of this kind of total control is that a person constantly feels fear, that in every action, even the most legitimate one, they're followed by the sense that they're doing something illegal, wrong, unjust."

The fines were the beginning. Standing on a pavement without state registration is now a criminal offense, punishable by jail. The cost of attending a protest in Georgia is no longer money; it is freedom. What's at stake is the most basic question of Georgia's post-Soviet existence: which direction does the country want to take? Not since the early 1990s, when independence from the Soviet Union was won, and the Rose Revolution of 2003 has the country debated it so fiercely. What the cameras record, in the end, is not disorder. It is the constitutional right to demand that Georgia keeps the European future that its citizens have voted for.

580 days in, hundreds, if not thousands, still gather on Rustaveli every evening, each of them being watched. "Before, their capacity was limited – maybe 2,000 people they could actively monitor", Nino estimates. "These cameras give them unlimited capacity. Even an 'insignificant' person can now be tracked cheaply. That's what's frightening, whatever harmless things you do."

The names of demonstrators have been changed, and identifying details omitted, to protect interviewees from retaliation amid ongoing proceedings against protest participants.