While Saudi Arabia markets itself as the Middle East’s rising technological powerhouse, a far harsher reality lies beneath the glossy promotional campaigns: a digital state tightening its grip through cameras, software, and artificial intelligence. What is sold as “digital transformation” and “Vision 2030” is, in truth, a transformation of control — from concrete prisons to digital ones, from the human censor to the algorithmic monitor.
Smart Cities with Security Minds
NEOM, Qiddiya, and the Red Sea Project — dazzling names presented as symbols of Saudi modernity. Yet, behind their architectural ambition lies a different blueprint: cities built on systemic surveillance, driven not by “smartness,” but by control.
Cameras blanket public roads. Facial recognition tracks movement. Behavioural data is analysed in real time — not to optimise traffic, but to construct detailed maps of citizens’ lives.
One engineer who worked on NEOM described the system bluntly:
“Every step in the project is logged. Every movement is tracked. Even the route you take to work can later be used to assess your behaviour.”
Within this model, the smart city is not the future — it is a theatre of monitoring, where life is administered as datasets under the state’s gaze.
Technology in the Service of Repression
Reports by Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, and Foreign Policy have exposed that Saudi Arabia did not merely build domestic surveillance infrastructure — it imported some of the world’s most dangerous spyware: Israel’s Pegasus.
This software, capable of infiltrating any phone without its owner’s knowledge, has turned privacy into a technological myth. Phones are breached without consent. Microphones activated remotely. Cameras turned into spies inside private spaces. In Saudi Arabia, surveillance is not a side effect of innovation — it is the infrastructure.
Riyadh’s partnership with NSO Group, the makers of Pegasus, was not just a commercial transaction. It was a covert security alliance. While the Saudi regime publicly recites slogans of support for Palestine, it buys Israeli spyware to weaponise against its own citizens — a contradiction exposed not by politics, but by facts.
From Khashoggi to Digital Exile
After the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, international investigations revealed that Pegasus had been implanted in the phone of his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, weeks before his assassination, giving Saudi authorities precise access to his communications and movements.
The pattern continued: Saudi dissidents in Europe, including Yahya Assiri and Ghanem Almasarir, later confirmed in court that their devices had been hacked using Saudi spyware operations.
This is a state that hunts dissent beyond its borders, deploying digital weapons no less lethal than the blades used in the consulate. Tweets are chased as once were slogans, and digital spaces silenced as were mosques and public forums before them.
Repression Marketed as Reform
While Saudi officials speak loudly of “women’s empowerment” and “quality of life,” activist Loujain Al-Hathloul was among the first targets of spyware — surveilled, arrested, and tortured for demanding the right to drive. The state celebrates reform while imprisoning those who demanded it.
Government platforms such as Tawakkalna and Absher collect the data of millions — movements, transactions, medical records, behavioural patterns. Packaged as public services, these tools function as expanded surveillance networks, erasing the already thin line between governance and monitoring.
When Data Becomes a Weapon
In democracies, data can enhance public service. In Saudi Arabia, data serves domination.
Every digital ID, payment, official app interaction — all threads feeding into one central web of tracking. The government knows who travels, who meets whom, who speaks, who tweets, who questions, who conforms.
Without judicial oversight or enforceable privacy legislation, society exists not as citizens, but as open files in a state database, continuously analysed and permanently logged.
A Digital Space That Fears Speech
Dissent no longer needs to reach the street for punishment — a retweet is enough. The Saudi digital space has become a minefield of monitored expression, where words are screened before they are posted, and personal accounts can be transformed into criminal evidence.
Activists abroad replace their phones routinely and communicate through encrypted apps with perpetual anxiety. Citizens at home live with the unshakable belief that every text could be an indictment. The result is not innovation — it is silence engineered by code.
From Future Vision to Digital Prison Walls
The Saudi state that promised openness and innovation is moving in the exact opposite direction: towards a system without freedom, without privacy, without accountability.
Its artificial intelligence does not empower society — it polices it. Its digital transformation does not build institutions — it builds a surveillance state that reduces citizens to security data entries.
In the absence of transparency, regulation, or oversight, the so-called “smart future” offered by Riyadh is nothing more than a new name for the largest kind of prison — one locked not by steel bars, but by data.
