About this episode
François Picard welcomes Alexander Abdelilah, an investigative journalist for Forbidden Stories who has just published a report on how the Iranian regime secretly acquired FindFace in 2019, a powerful facial recognition system developed by Russian company NTechLab. Abdelilah explores how this system operates both technically and politically. FindFace allows authorities to run recorded footage from CCTV cameras, street recordings, or even social media videos through an algorithm capable of matching a face in a crowd and tracing individuals who participate in protests. Read moreExclusive: Iran, massacre under a blackout While the Iranian case illustrates the risks of such technologies in an authoritarian context, it also raises broader questions about the growing use of facial recognition in democratic societies.
