Serbia copies Russia and Iran to track dissidents – accused of using facial recognition software

Serbia removed reference to biometric technologies from its draft law on the Police, but its Interior Ministry has nevertheless installed powerful facial recognition software that is already used by Russia and Iran to track dissidents.

Serbia's Interior Ministry has added to its arsenal of facial recognition technology, the NeoFace Watch, developed in Japan, according to a ministry source who confirmed previous indications that authorities are also using the Russian FindFace program.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the NeoFace watch, developed by pioneering Japanese biometrics firm NEC, and the FindFace watch from Russian NtechLab have both been purchased and installed.

The purchase of an “NEC facial recognition system” was mentioned in the ministry’s public procurement plan in 2019, but the official tender was never published.

That same year, the tech nonprofit Qurium discovered a FindFace server in Serbia hosted by mCloud, which also housed the NoviSpy spyware that reports say was used by Serbia's BIA intelligence agency to target journalists and activists.

The following year, NtechLab co-founder Alexander Kabakov told Forbes that, beyond Moscow, the company has clients in Argentina, Brazil, and Serbia.

spring The Ministry confirmed that both FindFace and NeoFace Watch are operational. According to the US Treasury Department, FindFace has been used in Russia to monitor independent journalists, political activists and individuals seeking to avoid mobilization for the war against Ukraine. Iran also uses the software, according to a recent investigation by the editorial staff of Forbidden Stories.

The use of the software comes despite the fact that a new draft law on the Police does not mention biometric technologies. References in previous drafts were removed due to public outcry over the threat of surveillance and potential privacy violations. Neither the ministry nor the software developers in Russia or Japan responded to requests for comment.

BIRN has previously reported on the Serbian Interior Ministry’s purchase of Swedish forensic software Griffeye, which offers facial recognition, online face search and metadata analysis. Serbia is also partnering with China’s Huawei to install thousands of high-definition road cameras equipped with facial recognition and license plate tracking software. And cities across the country have purchased DSS Pro platforms with facial recognition capabilities.

According to Japan's NEC, the NeoFace Watch boasts the ability to perform "more than three million searches per second" and recognize multiple faces simultaneously.

Facial recognition algorithms developed by NEC have also been licensed and purchased by a number of companies, one of which provides services to US immigration authorities, technology magazine Wired reported in January 2026.

FindFace takes a fraction of a second to compare faces to a database and issues notifications or alerts in real time.

It enables searches for video recordings based on facial features and other specified parameters and can also generate analytical reports on individuals and their behavior. According to its developers, FindFace can run on hundreds of thousands of cameras simultaneously.

The FindFace developer uses Russian data storage provider Tarantool, which maintains a database of one billion facial data points and can perform 13.4 million comparisons per second.

The software also includes features it calls “clustering” and “interaction tracking.” The former enables the grouping and filtering of video footage according to specified parameters at multiple levels, for example searching for individuals of a certain age, gender, or emotional state, searching for footage only from specific cameras, and similar functions.

The “grouping” function unlocks the “interaction tracking” feature, which enables monitoring the social circle of a person of interest or a group of individuals.