A United Arab Emirates activist gets a ten-year sentence after being targeted with European surveillance technology. Lawyers murder victims in Mexico find Israeli-made spyware on their phones.

In 2013, Edward Snowden showed how government surveillance was pervasive even in Western democracies. But compared with some authoritarian regimes, the NSA’s activity looks like a model of restraint. The latest in advanced surveillance tools let authoritarians keep their populations in check, and these regimes face far fewer legal or institutional hurdles than their Western colleagues.

This relative impunity has made authoritarians great clients for Western surveillance companies whose products may have more limited use at home. In the past few years, the Finnish government alone has granted dozens of licenses for companies to export phone-bugging technology abroad to Mexico, the UAE, Columbia, and other countries. Both the US and the EU have limited the export of such technologies, but only to a point.

And where Western companies may be unable to send equipment, they are happy to send capital. In April 2018, Bloomberg reported that foreign investors “can’t get enough” of Hikvision, a Chinese mass surveillance company that is booming as the government implements a nightmarish police state in Xinjiang.