Internet Freedom Foundation Project Panoptic (2020–ongoing)

In late 2020 the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), working with volunteers from DataKind Bangalore and the Indian open-source software company Frappe, launched Project Panoptic — a public tracker of facial-recognition technology procurement and deployment by central, state, and municipal authorities across India. The tracker went live on 27 November 2020, assembled the first systematic public dataset of Indian government FRT projects, and gave IFF the substantive backbone for a multi-year campaign whose single demand is that the government "immediately put a moratorium on the development and use of FRT by government authorities." Six years on the dataset has expanded past 120 named tenders, has been the operative evidence base for a Hyderabad civil-society sub-campaign jointly run with Amnesty International and Article 19, and has fed directly into India's first major judicial challenge to police facial recognition.

Origins and the 27 November 2020 launch

Project Panoptic emerged from IFF's wider surveillance-and-biometric-rights programme as the organisation's response to a deployment pattern its researchers had been tracking on a piecemeal basis since 2018: state and municipal police forces, transport authorities, and welfare-delivery systems across India were procuring facial-recognition systems through public tenders that were technically in the public domain but in practice scattered across hundreds of state and central procurement portals, vendor press releases, and budget line-items, and were nowhere visible to the Indian public as a coherent national picture. The build was staffed by a nine-person DataKind Bangalore team — a project manager, two Data Ambassadors, four Data Experts (software engineers and a data scientist architect), and one designer (the first time DataKind Bengaluru had included design expertise on a project) — working virtually over four months on a Python / Flask / Folium stack with a SQL backend, then migrating the dashboard onto Frappe Technologies' open-source platform for handover to IFF's permanent staff. The 27 November 2020 launch presented the tracker as a public dashboard displaying information on FRT deployments across each Indian state — procurement, implementation, named deploying authority, and named stated purpose — with the campaign's substantive demand carried on the Project Panoptic site itself: a public petition calling on the government to immediately put a moratorium on the development and use of FRT by government authorities.

The tracker as evidence base

By November 2021, one year on from launch, Project Panoptic had documented 78 FRT projects across India with a combined budgeted spend of approximately 9.6 billion Indian rupees — the first systematic figure for the scale and cost of Indian government FRT deployment to enter public discourse. The dataset's later expansion past 120 government FRT tenders by 2024 confirmed the underlying pattern the campaign had identified: a deployment estate growing roughly 50% over three years across multiple Indian states and central agencies, without primary-legislation basis, without independent regulation, without proportionality assessment, and without democratic mandate. The tracker is structured as a state-by-state breathing database of every FRT system installed by Indian authorities the campaign has identified — users can hover over states on the public dashboard to drill down into named tenders, named deploying authorities (police forces, transport authorities, municipal corporations, welfare-delivery agencies, state and central government departments), named vendors, named budgets, and named stated purposes. The crowdsourced "Report an FRT System" submission feature extends the dataset beyond what desk-research from public-procurement archives can surface, asking members of the public who have witnessed or learned of an FRT deployment in their city or state to submit it to the tracker for verification and inclusion.

The 10 November 2021 #BanTheScan Hyderabad sub-campaign

On 10 November 2021 Project Panoptic launched its Hyderabad sub-campaign jointly with Amnesty International and Article 19 under the #BanTheScan banner — the Indian extension of Amnesty's wider global campaign against police live facial recognition that had been launched earlier in 2021 with a New York City focus. The Hyderabad leg's evidence base was Amnesty's Digital Verification Corps' documentation of dozens of Hyderabad police mask-removal-and-photograph incidents shared on social media between November 2019 and July 2021, paired with the campaign's own findings on the city's Command and Control Centre — designed to integrate the state's facial-recognition-capable CCTV infrastructure in real time, with capacity to process data from up to 600,000 cameras simultaneously and the possibility to expand further across the region. The campaign's neighbourhood-level coverage mapping in two Hyderabad neighbourhoods, Kala Pathar and Kishan Bagh, found that 53.7% and 62.7% of their respective areas were already under CCTV surveillance. The joint civil-society framing was that "Hyderabad is on the brink of becoming a total surveillance city" — the formulation used by Amnesty's Matt Mahmoudi at the launch and carried verbatim into Article 19's parallel statement — and that the proportionate civil-society demand in those conditions is, on IFF's framing, a "complete ban on the use of this technology by the government entities, police and other security/intelligence agencies." The Hyderabad sub-campaign supplied the case-specific evidence base that the subsequent Telangana High Court PIL drew on.

The S.Q. Masood Telangana High Court PIL

The campaign's single most consequential litigation intervention to date is the public-interest-litigation petition filed in the Telangana High Court by the Hyderabad social activist S.Q. Masood in January 2022 with IFF's legal-counsel support. The case sits inside the campaign's wider Hyderabad work: on 19 May 2021 Masood had been stopped by eight-to-ten Hyderabad police officers while returning home from work in the Shahjahan Begum locality and asked to remove his mask — during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic — so that the police could photograph him; when he refused, the officers photographed him anyway. The January 2022 petition, with Manoj Reddy as Masood's counsel and IFF associate counsel Anushka Jain on the IFF support side, argued that the Hyderabad police's deployment of facial recognition was without statutory basis, that it violated the right to privacy recognised by the Indian Supreme Court in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), that it was unnecessary and disproportionate to any stated purpose, and that it was being deployed without safeguards against misuse. The Telangana High Court issued notice on the petition in January 2022, making it India's first major judicial challenge to police facial-recognition deployment — a precedent now referenced by other Indian high courts hearing FRT cases. The petition's wider claim — that Telangana's deployment of FRT for law enforcement, essential-services delivery, and election administration, in combination with the volume of CCTV cameras already in service, has made Telangana the most-surveilled state in India and Hyderabad among the most-surveilled cities in the world — has been substantiated by the joint Amnesty / IFF / Article 19 research the case draws on. The case remains pending as of 2026; the moratorium the wider Project Panoptic campaign asks for has not been imposed.

Coalition shape and campaign repertoire

Project Panoptic is structured differently from the other coalition-mode anti-FRT campaigns in the corpus. It is led by a single Indian organisation (IFF), with two named technology-partner contributors (DataKind Bangalore as volunteers for the build, Frappe as platform host) and two named civil-society partners on the Hyderabad sub-leg (Amnesty International and Article 19); the operative coalition vehicle is the tracker dataset and the public petition rather than a multi-organisation signature block. The campaign repertoire combines original investigative tender-research that maintains the database, the "Report an FRT System" crowdsourced citizen-reporting feature that extends the dataset, the public moratorium petition for sustained public-facing demand, IFF's parliamentary-engagement and policy-submission work feeding the tracker's evidence into Indian government technology bills and the IndiaAI Mission's AI-governance consultations, the Hyderabad #BanTheScan sub-campaign for city-pressure deployment-specific organising, and the Telangana High Court PIL for the strategic-litigation track. The Project Panoptic dataset is the substantive backbone of all four lines; the campaign is, in that sense, a tracker-and-petition campaign in form, with the litigation, parliamentary, and sub-campaign work running off the same evidence base.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

The campaign matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on three connected counts. First, it is the corpus's only sustained Indian civil-society campaign on facial recognition and biometric mass surveillance, and the South-Asian counterpart to the corpus's existing UK and EU biometric-mass-surveillance campaigns: structurally distinct from the Big Brother Watch UK Stop Live Facial Recognition coalition (single-jurisdiction, coalition-statement-and-parliamentary-engagement architecture, 65 cross-party parliamentarians and 31 civil-society signatories around a single substantive stop demand) and from the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative (EU-wide, signature-collection-and-Treaty-mechanism architecture against remote biometric identification across publicly accessible spaces), Project Panoptic operates on a public-database-and-citizen-reporting architecture that is the corpus's first instance of a campaign-as-public-tracker vehicle anchored by a single national civil-society organisation. Second, the campaign closes the corpus's principal South-Asian biometric-surveillance anchor — the operating environment combines the world's largest single biometric-identity stack (Aadhaar), a fast-growing state and commercial facial-recognition surveillance estate, a record-leading rate of internet shutdowns (the 2023 joint No Internet Means No Work, No Pay, No Food report by IFF and Human Rights Watch is the corpus's clearest articulation of how shutdowns interact with biometric and algorithmic public-service delivery), and a body of Indian constitutional doctrine in which the right to access the internet and the right to privacy have been judicially recognised — and the campaign's Hyderabad sub-leg connects FRT directly to that wider Indian surveillance pattern. Third, the campaign's tracker-and-petition repertoire — the public dashboard, the state-by-state breakdown, the crowdsourced "Report an FRT System" citizen-reporting feature, the public moratorium petition, and the strategic-litigation track running off the dataset — is the field's principal South-Asian template for civil-society engagement on AI-driven state surveillance, and is the working model on which subsequent Indian and regional civil-society organisations have drawn when designing their own algorithmic-accountability and surveillance-monitoring campaigns. Project Panoptic is the single most-cited Indian civil-society dataset on state FRT deployment in domestic and international reporting, and is the substantive evidence base the corpus's South-Asian biometric-surveillance shape now sits on.