Officials claim Islamabad Safe City Cameras are not using Israeli software … any longer

A senior official of the Islamabad Police has confirmed to Profit that the cameras installed in the federal capital for the Safe City project were using Israeli-origin software at one point in time. The official said that the software had been in use from June 2021 to October 2022 and has been out of commission since then. 

The video analytics software known as Brief Cam came pre-installed in cameras for the Safe City project in Islamabad. The cameras were provided by Chinese company Huawei. Questions about the nature of the software arose recently after the assasination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A report by the Financial Times detailing his murder mentioned the use of traffic and security cameras in Tehran to gather intelligence about his movements. The software used in those cameras was not the same as Brief Cam but it was also of Israeli origin.

What is Brief Cam and how was it used in Islamabad? 

Brief Cam is a video content analytics platform used to search, summarize, and analyze large volumes of surveillance video. In practice, it sits “above” camera networks and video management systems (VMS), ingesting live streams or recorded footage, extracting metadata (people/vehicle/object attributes and events), and enabling fast review, real-time alerting, and dashboards.

BriefCam’s origin story is tightly tied to computer-vision research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Public background materials from BriefCam and independent science-news outlets describe Prof. Shmuel Peleg’s “video synopsis” invention as patented through Yissum (the university’s technology transfer company) and licensed for commercialization to BriefCam.   

In 2018 Brief Cam was acquired by global camera giant Canon. While it is still owned by the Japanese company, Brief Cam still has its original headquarters in the Israeli city of Modi'in, around 35 kilometers away from Tel Aviv. 

A high ranking official (director level) from the Safe City Authority Islamabad informed Profit that the application had been in use for a year, however, it was after the company had been acquired by Canon and integrated under “Milestone” — a Danish business also acquired by Canon in 2014. “This application has not been in use since 2022. We had used it for one year from 2021 to 2022 and during that tenure it was procured under the services of Canon Japan,” said the official. “It was used as a test run, but eventually eliminated after a certain time due to expiry of license etc.”

Another high ranking government official with direct insight into the matter corroborated this and specified that the software was used for around 16 months — from June 2021 to October 2022. When asked about news reports that mention Brief Cam being used as late as 2023, the official said there was some sort of mistake in the reports or they were using previous information. 

Possible implications

The disclosure raises questions about how surveillance technology is selected, configured, and retired inside public safety projects. If an analytics layer was deployed as part of an initial rollout and later switched off, the key governance issue becomes documentation: what was enabled, what data it processed, who had access, and what audit trails exist to verify when the license ended and when the system stopped operating.

It also highlights procurement risk created by complex supply chains. A camera vendor, an analytics vendor, and a parent company can sit in different jurisdictions, with software ownership and branding changing over time. Even when the hardware remains unchanged, the software stack can introduce new compliance, reputational, and diplomatic sensitivities, especially during regional conflict and heightened scrutiny of foreign-origin tools.

For citizens, the main concern is accountability rather than branding. Video analytics can expand surveillance from recording to automated searching, alerting, and pattern detection. That makes clarity on legal basis, retention periods, purpose limitation, and independent oversight more important than in conventional CCTV setups, because the same footage can become more searchable and actionable.

Operationally, discontinuation can create capability gaps if no alternative analytics replaced it, or it can reflect a shift toward other tools already embedded in the broader system. Either way, the episode underlines the need for routine security and privacy audits, clear public communication that can be independently verified, and procurement clauses that address software provenance, updates, and end-of-life handling, not just camera installation and maintenance.