As Israel is reported to have used artificial intelligence (AI) to track the movements of Iran's top officials, intelligence agencies in many countries are on high alert. In particular, Russia is said to have temporarily shut down part of the special surveillance system used to protect President Vladimir Putin and launched an emergency security check. Concerns are growing that CCTVs installed for national security could instead become espionage tools for enemy states.
On the 8th (local time), the Financial Times (FT) in the United Kingdom reported that Russian security authorities had suspended parts of a separate surveillance system operated to protect President Putin and his close aides. Separate from roughly 300,000 CCTVs across Moscow, the system was reportedly restarted only after engineers conducted a comprehensive check of whether it was connected to the internet.
Behind Russia's move is a recent assassination operation targeting senior officials in Iran. According to FT, Israeli intelligence obtained traffic-camera feeds and various video data across Iran, then used AI to analyze millions of hours of footage. It was reportedly used to identify the travel routes and security patterns of senior officials and to track specific meeting locations and times.
FT assessed the incident as evidence that AI is reshaping the landscape of surveillance technology. In the past, video analysis was limited to functions such as facial recognition or license plate tracking, but recent technology can find specific behaviors in vast video datasets using only natural-language commands. For example, by searching for "two people exchanging a bag," "a person who changed clothes several times in one day," or "a recently repainted vehicle," AI can pick out the relevant scenes from footage captured by thousands of cameras. A European security official told FT, "We're now in an era of looking for behaviors, not objects," calling it "a development close to the holy grail of surveillance technology."
FT reported that Russia is also taking this risk seriously. Aleksandr Bortnikov, Director-General of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia, recently warned security officials about the vulnerabilities of video surveillance systems, saying, "The example of eliminating senior Iranian officials is a clear warning signal." He particularly pointed out that software backdoors (hidden access points) present in surveillance camera systems could be exploited by enemy states.
The problem is that AI can reconstruct a specific person's life patterns and relationships by combining not only CCTV but also social media, hacked communications records, smart-device data, and movement histories. Once a target is identified, months of activity records are organized in an instant, effectively creating a "digital file."
This technological competition is also gaining momentum in China. FT reported that China is investing in building next-generation AI surveillance systems capable of behavior-pattern analysis and natural-language video search. However, Western intelligence authorities note that "if China installs cameras, we only need to find a way to infiltrate," seeing the surveillance network itself as potentially a vulnerability in reverse.