March 3, 2023 Next step in surveillance AI: Finding out who your friends are type='text/javascript'> googletag. China's government, which has been the most aggressive in using surveillance and AI to control its population, uses co-appearance searches to spot protesters and dissidents by merging video with a vast network of databases, something Vintra and its clients would not be able to do, said Conor Healy, director of government research for IPVM, the surveillance research group that hosted Vintra's presentation last year. Law enforcement and corporate security agents often discover they can use less invasive technologies to obtain similar information, said Florian Matusek of Genetec, a video analytics company that works with Vintra