How about this one?

Him?

They all have something in common.

They govern like autocrats.

These leaders are rising in an age

where technology can make their lives much easier.

And leading the way is China.

At home, they're pouring billions

into the most sophisticated censorship and surveillance

apparatus the world has ever known.

I spent nearly a decade here.

And halfway through that period, something changed.

Xi Jinping took power, and cameras started appearing —

a lot of them.

Now, the cameras are everywhere.

They hang from traffic lights, intersections, crosswalks;

on trees, fences, and subway cars;

even inside your taxi or your apartment building.

These are, in fact, government surveillance cameras,

and there are over 200 million of them here.

The government says the cameras

are used to fight crime, squash protests

and maintain control.

It's all designed to make sure the Communist Party of China

never loses power.

Basically, they want to know what their citizens are doing

all the time, and their actions are being judged.

Most of the time, it's just police

watching on the other end of these cameras.

But the idea is that one day soon, artificial intelligence

will be able to automate that job,

analyzing the day-to-day lives

of hundreds of millions of citizens.

You might think, well, that's just China.

But it's not only in China.

See that?

That camera is in Ecuador.

This is Ecuador's emergency response system,

which is known as ECU-911.

The government peddles it as a crime fighting tool.

Ecuador has around 4,000 national security cameras

across the entire country.

The cameras all feed into a few centralized rooms,

like this.

The system was not only made in China,

but it was installed by Chinese companies

and workers.

The Chinese even trained the Ecuadoreans how to use it.

Reporter: “They're telling the public that this is for safety.

We went back, we can see what the surveillance looks like.

So this is, what, 30 people in a room surveilling society.”

“Wow.”

Reporter: “Now my question, though, is:

If you wanted to stop crime,

would you have 30 people in a room?

To me, that number, 30, does not seem like a lot of people.”

“So 30 people, perhaps monitoring

a nationwide camera system might seem little,

but it's the deterrent effect of the cameras which

impact on people.

It's them moderating their behavior

based on the fact that they know that they might be being

surveilled, and they don't know how that information

might be being used.”

And that's the point.

This might be able to fight crime.

But just like in China, the cameras

have potential for other use.

“Surveillance technology exporting this kind of

surveillance capabilities to a country like Ecuador

makes money.”

This is Edin, a global surveillance expert

in the U.K.

I asked him, so what has China actually exported here?

“Well it secures our diplomatic relationship

with China, and it exports their model

of internet governorship and how our security

infrastructure is going to look like in the future.”

Chinese surveillance systems are increasingly

showing up all around the world.

Some of those countries have stronger

government institutions to regulate than others,

but they all need money to buy it.

Turns out, the Chinese can help with that, too.

We know it started at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Behind the scenes, China was selling

its state-of-the-art security setup

to visiting delegations.

This is where Ecuadorian officials first saw it.

So, China and Ecuador made a deal.

This is Martha, a former politician

turned investigative journalist.

This all happened under the former president

Rafael Correa, who was widely seen as an autocrat.

He rewrote Ecuador's Constitution.

He erased term limits.

He took control of the courts and silenced the press.

Helping him each step of the way was money from China.

So, China got Ecuador's oil and Ecuador got things

like roads and hospitals.

It also got a nationwide surveillance system.

And this is what it looks like today.

Rafael Correa has been out of office for more than two

years now, and Lenín Moreno has taken the country back

in a more democratic direction.

But even after autocrats leave office,

their legacies can live on.

After all, there is a system in place

with a sinister potential.

It just depends how it's being used.

Lidia lives in a high-crime neighborhood

on the city's mountainside.

She says the police rarely respond to crimes

that happen directly in front of cameras

and that some of the most dangerous neighborhoods,

like hers, don't have any cameras at all.

While Lidia's neighborhood has none,

there's unexpectedly one here, in a safe neighborhood.

It's the only camera around, and it can see right

into this man's house.

Colonel Pazmino was a vocal critic of former president

Rafael Correa, and he was often

followed by government spies.

He says when the Chinese camera system came in,

the spies went home.

In other words, Colonel Pazmino

thinks the system is used for more than emergencies.

He believes the state's intelligence unit

uses it to track political dissidents like him.

In China, authorities have also

installed cameras outside of dissidents' homes.

We brought this claim to Francisco Robayo,

who was ECU-911's director at the time.

He said, the system isn't for spying on or intimidating

political opponents.

He deflected, and so did the country's intelligence chief.

We were in a secret, unmarked bunker

outside of the capital, and we were not

allowed to point our camera at anything

outside of this single frame.

We came to ask Mr. Costa if the intelligence agency uses

the public security cameras to spy on citizens.

Midway through our interview, we took a break.

Remember how we were only allowed to take this one

single frame?

Well, that's because they didn't

want us filming the background that's deliberately

out of focus right now.

But when not looking through the lens of the camera,

we could still see it clearly.

Once we pointed out the feeds from ECU-911,

they admitted they also could access the

public security cameras.

Ecuador's officials maintain the system

is a crime-fighting tool.

But why the system also feeds into the intelligence agency

raises the same concerns that human rights

advocates raise in China.

These cameras are easier to abuse than use.

It just depends what your goals are.

And remember, China's goal is political control.

That's what these systems were designed for.

In effect, China is exporting more than cameras.

They are exporting the way they use their cameras.

And while other countries also offer systems,

including the U.S., many say China

is thought to be the most dangerous because it provides

funding, even to known dictators,

and provides them with a sinister model for how

to use it.

“We've seen cases where governments around the world

have used surveillance technology to infiltrate

and spy on dissidents, on activists, on lawyers,

on opposition parties.

So this actually, fundamentally undermines democracy.”

More and more leaders like Rafael Correa

appear to be rising.

Now they have access to technology, undreamt of

even 20 years ago.

And China seems willing to give them

cheap loans to buy it.

The more countries that install

China's centralized surveillance technology,

the more that China's very own autocratic use of it

may be normalized.

And like in Ecuador, the infrastructure for autocracy

stays even as leaders come and go.

“What the question for us now as people

who are now more surveilled than ever,

is how we want to live in this world, how

we want to regulate that, and what kind of surveillance

we want to be put under?”

[question asked in Spanish]