2025-amnesty-pakistan-shadows
Shadows of Control: Censorship and mass surveillance in Pakistan
Abstract
102-page Amnesty International report drawing on the Geedge/MESA leak
to document Pakistan's mass surveillance and censorship infrastructure
built with Chinese, European, Emirati, and North American technology.
Identifies specific detection products and deployment patterns, and
names the international vendor ecosystem behind the system.
Team notes
Operationally relevant for any Lantern user in Pakistan: this paper
is the first detailed public characterization of PK's deployed
detection stack. Adds "pk" to the censor taxonomy if it isn't
already (TODO: verify schema/taxonomy.yaml has pk; add it if not).
Less protocol-design-leverage than the InterSecLab report; more
policy/advocacy-leverage. Worth reading for the international-vendor
network mapping — a useful artifact when a deployment in $other_country
shows up and we need to guess at its detection capabilities.