Surveillance Tech and Its Euphemisms in Latin America
Surveillance control · 23.09.2026

A fresh report on surveillance in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay — and there's plenty to marvel at. Take, for instance, how the surveillance industry refuses to call things by their real names.

Spyware in procurement documents hides under labels like "forensic module" or "data exfiltration technology." Zero-click exploits, which infect a phone without a single click from the victim, are modestly termed "vectors without user interaction." And IMSI catchers — fake cell towers that trick every phone in the area into connecting and harvest their identifiers — are filed under "cellular monitoring units." One term, "digital forensics," cleverly works both ways: sometimes it's the legitimate extraction of data from a seized phone, sometimes it's a euphemism for that very same spyware.

Then there's the beauty of it at a regional scale. Peru bought a system called "Pisco" from Israel's Verint/Cognyte for roughly $22 million — to intercept satellite, voice, and IP communications. Meanwhile, Sandvine reportedly sold a traffic analysis package to carriers in 11 Latin American countries for about $12 million — though in 2024 the company was actually added to the US Commerce Department's sanctions list for selling technology used in political surveillance, only to be quietly removed from it later that same year following "corporate reforms."

Among the three countries, Chile leads in deploying the most intrusive tools, including commercial spyware. Argentina buys piecemeal, through a scattering of local intermediaries. Uruguay has taken a calmer route, relying not on infecting phones but on network traffic interception built directly into infrastructure.

The common thread across all three is dependence on a handful of foreign vendors, with local players acting, at best, as distributors. Needless to say, this does nothing for transparency or democratic oversight.

Source: https://socialtic.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/report-Intrusive-intelligence_english.pdf