You follow them even in their homes.. How did Palestine become a laboratory for Israeli surveillance techniques?

Information is a force to be reckoned with, as many incidents in recent years have proven.

The authorities have always used the power of censorship and information to subdue their citizens, and if we are talking about the occupying power that derives its legitimacy from repression alone, then the matter certainly becomes more important and dangerous.

Therefore, collecting data on the entire Palestinian population was and still is an integral part of the Israeli occupation policies and its strict grip, and with the development of technology and new technologies, that grip becomes stricter and stronger.

Previously, data was collected indirectly through espionage networks and traditional information gathering methods, but now things have become easier and more dangerous at the same time.

As part of the "smart city" project implemented in the city of Hebron, for example, surveillance cameras are spread in all neighborhoods, monitoring and watching the Palestinians at every moment, and following their movements even inside their homes, provided that this information is sent to a computerized database that literally records "every incoming and outgoing belonging to the Palestinians.

Digital Panopticon

According to the Hebrew newspaper "Haaretz", Israeli soldiers responsible for digital surveillance in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem are not allowed to return to their homes before they reach their goal, as any soldier who fails is required to upload 50 photos of Palestinians to the tracking system called "Blue Wolf". (Blue wolf) to remain in the service until it reaches the required number of images, which it then uploads to a database used to track and spy on Palestinians.

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.@lizzadwoskin describes a terrifying system of Israeli surveillance over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank that includes widespread deployment of facial recognition technologies.

https://t.co/1P6YgccLWa pic.twitter.com/pT2HgNqqG6

- Michael Page (@MichaelARPage) November 8, 2021

The smartphones of these soldiers are provided with an application of the same name, “The Blue Wolf”, and they are required to photograph the faces of Palestinians and their identity cards under any pretext, provided that this information is linked to other data registered on a computerized database that includes information related to permits, and if it is prohibited from moving and approaching settlements, Or he has security violations, according to the classifications of the occupation.

In order for the application to work with the required efficiency, the database must be expanded to the maximum extent. It is no wonder, then, that the occupation soldiers were competing in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly, with prizes for the units that collected a greater number of pictures.

Sources within the ranks of the occupation itself describe this database as a "private Facebook for Palestinians".

Later, when scanning the face of a person registered with the application, the phone flashes in different colors to alert the soldiers if the person is going to be arrested, arrested, or left alone, that is, they leave the decision to determine the fate of an individual in the hands of the codes of a software application to recognize the face, this happens while the world is still in A debate is taking place between should we leave critical decisions such as launching bombs and final military decisions entirely to the machine, or should the final decision be left to man?

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Israel chose its answer, then, and it is an expected response from an occupying power that focuses its efforts on monitoring Palestinian votes and restricting freedom of expression.

Perhaps we are not exaggerating if we say that surveillance in Palestine is similar to the "Panopticon", a mechanism of social and psychological control proposed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century.

In the middle of the panopticon stands a guard in a watchtower, surrounded by prison cells that are entirely in his field of view, so that the prisoners do not know whether they are being watched or not at any time, and so they always keep their behavior in check.

In the middle of the Panopticon stands a guard in a watchtower, surrounded by prison cells that are entirely in his field of vision, so that the prisoners do not know if they are being watched or not.

(Reuters)

French philosopher Michel Foucault argued in his analysis of the "panopticon" that its purpose is to "arrange situations so that the results of observation are permanent, even if the observation itself is discontinuous".

The same paranoid logic stands behind the Israeli surveillance mechanisms. The goal here is not only to watch the Palestinians through the cameras placed everywhere, but more importantly to make them feel that they are being watched all the time, no matter where they are.

Thus, Israeli digital surveillance is the latest iteration of the Israeli army's "you're always on the lookout" tactic, by which Israeli military patrols are heavily deployed in Palestinian communities for the sole purpose of showing the extent of the occupation army's reach and control.

Two former Israeli soldiers who spoke to Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans opposed to the occupation, discussed the monitoring program on condition of anonymity.

These testimonies provide the first large-scale public description of Israel's surveillance program and mechanisms.

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According to the organization, the Israeli occupation army has installed cameras with a face scanner in the city of Hebron to help soldiers at checkpoints to identify Palestinians even before presenting their identity cards, as part of a project called "Hebron Smart City".

The project aims to monitor all residents of the city at all times, sometimes including monitoring private homes.

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Israeli surveillance cameras on a Palestinian house near the Tel Rumeida outpost in Hebron (Al-Jazeera Net)

In general, facial recognition technology is one of the most controversial technologies, and its use has been officially banned in at least a dozen American cities, including Boston and San Francisco. The European Parliament has also called for banning police use of facial recognition technologies in public places.

(5) However, this did not prevent the occupation army from adopting these technologies, which are mainly based on artificial intelligence, along with traditional control methods that are still used today.

Occupation officials argue that filming using drones, for example, reduces the need for Israeli soldiers to storm Palestinian homes, because it enables them to gather intelligence from a safe distance.

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Physiognomy

In the previous lines, we indicated that one of the main goals of surveillance is a comprehensive feeling among Palestinians that they are being watched all the time, which will make controlling them easier, but things go much beyond that, and here let us ask you a question: Have you ever heard of military uses of “sentiment analysis” techniques? ?

The Sentiment Explorer is a controversial and still discredited form of machine learning.

Google claims its systems can discern internal emotions from a person's face and statements, a technology widely dismissed as pseudoscientific, with Microsoft even deciding it would no longer offer "emotion detection" features through its Azure cloud computing platform, citing its lack of For the scientific basis.

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But Google does not seem to agree with Microsoft in this opinion, but rather decided to present to the occupying entity its project, "Nimbus", which is the Israeli government's cloud computing project, and includes making it possible to use "Google Cloud" cloud applications for government agencies in the occupying country. .

But Israel will not only use Google's cloud services, but will infuse this cooperation with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, including perhaps the controversial "emotion explorer" technologies.

Reportedly, the contract between the two sides prohibits Google from refusing to provide services to specific Israeli government entities, such as the Israeli occupation army.

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Despite claiming to adhere to some ethical principles, Google has found itself in trouble with its employees before.

In 2018, Google entered into a partnership with the US Department of Defense in an initiative called "Project Maven", an artificial intelligence contract that could be used to improve the accuracy of drone strikes, but after employee protests over the use of technology in killing work, it chose Google not to renew the contract.

Meanwhile, Google has also terminated work on Dragonfly, a search engine and news app censored for use in China, after it was criticized by free speech advocates.

Similarly, dozens of Google and Amazon employees opposed to Project Nimbus protested, but their protests did not bear fruit as before.

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Apparently, what tech companies sell to governments is not just services, it simply puts power in the hands of dictators and authoritarians.

Google sells power to Israel, the United States, and perhaps China, and helps enable the industry of control and oversight, but the giant company does not care about that as long as it serves its commercial purposes, and perhaps Palestine provides a clear example of this trend.

Monitoring laboratory

(Al Jazeera)

Perhaps we are not exaggerating if we say that today the Palestinian territories are used as a laboratory for Israel to test espionage and surveillance techniques before selling them to oppressive regimes around the world.

This trade has troubling implications, particularly as more governments have taken advantage of digital surveillance tools against political opponents, activists, journalists, and civil society workers.

Israeli companies such as the NSO Group provide a stark example of the dangers this situation poses.

The group rose to the top of the private cybersecurity markets by recruiting veterans from Israel's elite intelligence units, who could easily put their surveillance expertise into a military context for private use.

The cyberespionage company also worked closely with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which helped it export spyware to authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies alike.

In the years that followed, Pegasus, the most dangerous spyware to date, was found on some 50,000 phones around the world, and reports claimed that the US had discussed buying the technology.

But after it was confirmed that "Pegasus" was used to penetrate the phones of employees of the US State Department itself, Washington put the "NSO" group on the blacklist.

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It's not just NSO, other less well-known Israeli companies are spreading their technologies from the occupied Palestinian territories to all parts of the world.

A leading Israeli manufacturer of facial recognition technology called Oosto outfitted checkpoints across the West Bank with biometric scanners in 2019, and then began exporting these technologies abroad a few months later, where cameras are now used. Facial recognition at entrances to shopping malls, sports stadiums, and office complexes in 43 countries.

Similarly, Israeli intelligence firm Cellebrite also pioneered technologies that hack locked iPhones for the Israeli police, and has now exported its technology to law enforcement agencies across the United States.

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All of the above was in defense of the Palestinians, but it is certain that the Palestinians are not the only ones who are threatened by the techniques of digital invasion, even if they represent a unique case because of their submission to a brutal occupying power.

Given the global expansion of surveillance technologies, resistance requires not only efforts from the Palestinians, but also a comprehensive global campaign to protect individual privacy in the face of a world of surveillance that is expanding and encroaching day by day.

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