Iran's Use of Facial Recognition Software to Repress the Opposition

On March 5, 2026, the Berliner Zeitung published an article on Iran’s use of surveillance technology to target the opposition. It reports that Iranian authorities rely on Russian facial-recognition software to identify and track protesters via cameras in public spaces such as universities, metro stations, and city squares. interface’s Corbinian Ruckerbauer was interviewed on the implications of such tools in authoritarian contexts, explaining that advanced facial-recognition systems intensify repression by making it more scalable and cost-efficient: instead of relying on a large police presence, authorities can remotely identify demonstrators and combine this information with other datasets, thereby strengthening the regime’s repressive capacities.