State Digital Surveillance
Commercial spyware and biometric surveillance are now standard instruments of repression.
Severity score
36.1
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Governments deploy commercial spyware against journalists, lawyers and opposition figures, alongside biometric and facial recognition systems with no meaningful oversight. The tools are cheap enough that capability is no longer limited to wealthy states.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
10Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
74People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
32Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
1Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
80Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.