Cartoon, circa 1970
Just 2 links to articles on this site which are primarily about the science & technology of social control but have been put under different categories:
“Hong Kong – its relevance to the rest of us…
&
Cameravirus…Facial recognition cameras, etc.
These have considerable similarities, the second reproducing much of the first though differing in focus and with additional material
https://roarmag.org/magazine/algorithmic-control-smartphone-internet-apps/
“There is little doubt that innovations in mobile technologies are part
of emerging methodologies of social control. In particular, games and
applications that make use of the Google Maps back-end system —
including Uber, Grindr, Pokémon Go and hundreds of others — which should
be seen as one of the most important technological developments of the
last decade or so, are particularly complicit in these new regulatory
practices. Putting the well-publicized data collection issue aside, such
applications have two powerful ideological functions. First, they
construct the new “geographical contours” of the city, regulating the
paths we take and mapping the city in the service of both corporate
interest and the prevention of uprisings. Second, and more
unconsciously, they enact what Jean-Francois Lyotard once called the
“desirevolution” — an evolution and revolution of desire, in which that
what we want is itself now determined by the digital paths we tread.
…
On a smaller scale, this point can be seen in concrete terms with a case
study of London. A recent Transport for London talk discussed the
possibility of “gamifying” commuting. In order to facilitate this
possibility, Transport for London have made the internet API and data
streams used to monitor all London Transport vehicles open source and
open access, in the hope that developers will build London-focused apps
based around the public transport system, thus maximizing profit. One
idea is that if a particular tube station is at risk of becoming clogged
up due to other delays, TfL could give “in-game rewards” for people
willing to use alternative routes and thus smooth out the jam.
While traffic jam prevention may not seem like evidence that we have
arrived in the dystopia of total corporate and state control, it does
actually reveal the dangerous potentiality in such technologies. It
shows that the UK is not as far away from the “social credit” game
system recently implemented in Beijing to rate each citizen’s
trustworthiness and give them rewards for their dedication to the
Chinese state. While the UK media reacted with shock to these
innovations in Chinese app development, a closer look at the electronic
structures of mapping and controlling our own movements shows that a
similar framework is already in its development phase in London too. In
the “smart city” of the future, it won’t just be traffic jams that are
smoothed out. Any inefficient misuse or any occupation of public space
deemed dangerous by the authorities can be specifically targeted.
…
Of course, when it comes to mapping pplications that promise to help us
access the best quality objects of our desire with the greatest
efficiency and the least cost, these tempting forces of joint corporate
and state control are entered into willingly by participants. As such,
they require something else in order to function in the all-consuming
way that they do. Far from simply channeling and transforming our
movements, they also need to channel and even transform our
desires….If the boundaries between the way we search, desire and
acquire our burgers, lovers and Pikachus are dissolving, it is not so
much the old point that everything has become a commodity, but a new
point that this kind of substitutional electronic objectivity endows
corporate and state technologists with unprecedented power to distribute
and redistribute the objects of the desire around the “smart city”.”….
The various forms and objects of each individual’s desire no longer
represent discreet and separable elements of a subject’s life. Instead
we enter a fully cohesive libidinal economy in which we are increasingly
regulated and mapped via the organization of what and how we desire.”
Antwerp begins fingerprint scanning ahead of new ID card launch:
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/131288/antwerp-begins-fingerprint-scanning-ahead-of-new-id-card-launch/
“It is important to know that the fingerprint is only present on the
card (in the chip) itself, and is not stored in a central database,” the
Antwerp alderman in charge of the process, Nabilla Ait Daoud, told ATV,
adding that only the responsible authorities can read the chip and see
the fingerprints. … In the rest of Belgium, the new ID cards with the
holders’ fingerprints will begin being issued by all Belgian
municipalities by the end of 2020.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/13/police-surveillance-technology-operation-legend/
“Awash in these federal funds, cities have doubled down on their surveillance investments, even as they face general budget shortfalls in the tens of millions. On August 4, two days before Operation Legend was formally announced in the city, Memphis signed a new contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli forensics manufacturer popular with law enforcement, whose products can hack and extract data from smartphones…Chicago, meanwhile, announced on August 14 that it would employ “enhanced” technology for “around-the-clock” monitoring of social media to identify looters. One hundred federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives were sent to Chicago through Operation Legend in late July. Though Mayor Lori Lightfoot at first assumed a hostile attitude toward the initiative, in August she also announced a new task force on looting in partnership with the FBI…In Memphis, a unique consent decree from 1978 prohibits law enforcement from engaging in “political intelligence” — collecting information on individuals for political purposes. This decree was the backbone of the 2018 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, which held that Memphis had violated the law. City law enforcement has lobbied to amend and strike the decree, but so far, it has held.
Yet the Memphis law does not apply to federal law enforcement. “That’s the harsh truth. The decree only covers the city,” explained Tom Castelli, legal director for the ACLU of Tennessee, though per the decree, the city cannot collaborate on unlawful surveillance with outside agencies. Still, Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings has alluded to partnering with the FBI to get around some of the decree’s restrictions, later confirming through a city spokesperson that he “told [federal officials] that we are restricted by the consent decree and depend on them to catch threats articulated on social media.”…”
More than just carting a lot of heavily armed filth into some selected cities. The extent to which some of the surveillance networks have been constructed is notably spooky.
“There was a report about an old man surnamed Xie, of Shanghai’s Pudong District, who passed away in January of this year. Recently, his family received a traffic ticket that claimed the elderly Mr. Xie ran a red light at an intersection on October 1. The fine: 20 yuan. When the police discovered the mistake, they personally went to the Xie household to apologize, claiming they would upgrade and update the system as soon as possible, increase manual verification, and improve the recognition accuracy of their systems as much as possible.
It was a humorous and intriguing case of misjudgment by the traffic police artificial intelligence system. But the story leaves us with two conversation points: First, the only reason they had to admit the system made a mistake this time was because Mr. Xie had already passed away. If the system mistakenly targeted a living person, how would they be cleared of wrongdoing and get rid of this random ticket? Second, is it really okay to use a public intersection as a biological information collection point, and then to make that private information public?
According to the police officers, the computer system mistakenly identified someone else running the red light as Mr. Xie. The system matched the individual with old household registration data. So first there was an error with the data collected by the crosswalk camera, and then it associated that data with the wrong person. One possibility is that the image, which was taken haphazardly at the front end, was superimposed onto an equally messy database. The AI used by the traffic police made a quiet mistake in a place hidden from human view…”
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/10/translation-dead-mans-jaywalking-ticket-raises-questions-about-ai-policing/
Sharp Eyes Surveillance Program Expands Dramatically –
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/10/sharp-eyes-surveillance-program-expands-dramatically/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48276660
SanFrancisco bans facial recognition cameras
Some Simple Suggestions for a Daily Approach to Smarter Communication and Digital Footprint –
https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/11/11/radiofragmata-taking-ourselves-seriously-article-1-digital-harm-reduction/#more-85796
“Cellebrite claims its tech can now crack Signal, which is regarded as
the most encrypted app and is commonly used by journalists to
communicate with sources … In an earlier, now deleted, version of the
blog post, the company went as far as to say: “Decrypting Signal
messages and attachments was not an easy task. It required extensive
research on many different fronts to create new capabilities from
scratch. At Cellebrite, however, finding new ways to help those who make
our world a safer place is what we’re dedicated to doing every day.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/.premium-israeli-spy-tech-firm-says-it-can-break-into-signal-app-previously-considered-safe-1.9368581
From T:
https://www.frontierweekly.com/views/jul-20/10-7-20-
“Foer’s[13] World without Mind is essentially a book about the forces in
the world that have spurred confusion, conformism, and, sad to say,
stupidity. Though the defeat of the higher ideal is hardly final, Foer
examines how the truth is manufactured by the big-techs in a make
believe world. The author hopes to persuade us that another course is
still possible. The Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped
them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Face book, Amazon) – says Foer.
For example, Facebook can predict user’s race, sexual orientation,
relationship status, and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone.
‘The crowd’ gets what it wants and deserves. We’re in the earliest days
of this revolution, of course, says Foer. The whole effort of all the
neo-tech is to make human beings more predictable, to anticipate their
behavior, which makes them easier to manipulate. Even the father of
Capitalism, Adam Smith, didn’t anticipate this manipulative market of
this extent through information. Knowledge never entered deeply into
Smith’s thinking about trade. But now “Knowledge factories” have become
a reality.
With the big tech entry we also entered a kind of ‘noisy world.’ It is a
condition called ‘Total Noise.’ It’s is no more a stable and
predictable knowledge; it is peripatetic, where a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.[14] The new way of offering us
information is always in the order of shock and disbelief. Everyone
acquainted with ‘social media’ is aware of this new environment. See for
example a well-known method of social media news: “9 out of 10 Americans
Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” The moment you come
across such news, you will invariably drawn to read it or hear it
instantly. Millions of readers couldn’t contain themselves and followed
that link. “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”[15] On most occasion
the content would be absolutely either irrelevant or full of vanity. The
news is not just news, it’s always ‘breaking’ or ‘trending.’ Indians
have, of late, become ‘news maniacs,’ and the social media is more
virulent and corrupting in India than anywhere else in the world. Almost
every linguistic region has more than two dozens of vernacular
audio-visual media and hundreds of social media cites. News ‘production’
has already reached the level of ‘industrial production’! “
Following Facebook bans etc, Instagram are now banning their use by revolutionaries:
https://de.crimethinc.com/2020/12/21/surviving-the-social-media-crackdown-the-instagram-ban-and-how-to-keep-following-us
Drones now used to drop teargas on Palestinian demonstrators:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-police-using-drones-to-drop-tear-gas-on-palestinian-demonstrators-1.9752997
“The drone is operated by remote control and can drop between six and 12 canisters from the air, proving to be ‘very effective,’ according to Israeli police”
Israel: new bill for the establishment of a nationwide array of facial recognition cameras – https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/s1pz2hfao
Translation:
“The memorandum of the bill, it seems, was drafted in response to a High
Court review with the proper purpose of regulating the activities of the
system that has hitherto operated in secret.” … The memorandum was
formulated against the background of the High Court’s criticism of the
police’s use of the system known as the “Hawk’s Eye”. This is a system
of special cameras that are placed along Israeli roads, and which
capture and document the license plate numbers of the cars that travel
in them. … Now, the facial recognition system itself is not so
detached from the Hawk’s Eye system, as it also captures the interior of
the vehicle and the face of its passengers (although it is not clear
whether it uses face recognition technology to automatically identify
the passengers). However, the bill memorandum takes the issue one step
further, and is not satisfied with regulating it as part of the activity
of the Hawk’s Eye system on roads only, but allows the placement of face
recognition cameras throughout the public space, in a fixed,
semi-permanent configuration (up to 3 months) and mobile (“on a Body
moving in space”).
***
Rough translation of the full article that appeared in Calcalist
journal:
“Regime force”: Police want to operate a nationwide array of face
recognition cameras
Last week, a memorandum was published for public comment on a bill
concerning the establishment and operation of a nationwide array of face
recognition cameras to be operated by the police. If approved in this
form, it will allow it to monitor the movement of Israeli residents in
the public space in real time, with almost no significant restrictions
or supervision, and even share the information with other bodies.
Omer Kabir, Calcalist | 12.07.21 | 07:48
Over the years, and in the last year in particular, quite a bit has been
written about the danger of the slippery slope. How moves such as the
establishment of the biometric database or the operation of the Shin
Bet’s geopositioning tool against Israeli citizens as part of efforts to
limit the spread of the corona are not a full stop at the end of a
sentence, but may be the beginning of a long story of deterioration and
expansion of espionage and surveillance systems. How as soon as one dam
is breached, the pressure on the dams down the road increases and there
is a danger that they too will be breached and flooded, and so on and so
forth.
For the most part, this is a theoretical warning, a statement of mine or
of experts that this is one of the dangers we face if we can talk about
what is at stake. But sometimes, we not only see the slippery slope at
the tip of our feet, but also the forces that are beginning to push us
down. And this is what happens with a bill memorandum released Thursday
evening for public comment. The matter of the memorandum is the
establishment and operation of a national array of face recognition
cameras to be operated by the police, and if approved in its current
wording it will be able to monitor the movement of Israeli residents in
public space in real time, with almost no significant restrictions or
supervision and even share information with other bodies.
The memorandum was formulated against the background of the High Court’s
criticism of the police’s use of the system known as the “Hawk’s Eye”.
This is a system of special cameras that are placed along Israeli roads,
and which capture and document the license plate numbers of the cars
that travel in them.
In this way, the system, which has been in operation for about a decade
but almost secretly, can create an extensive database of vehicle traffic
in Israel that is used by the police to solve crimes.
Although operating the system can be legitimate under certain
conditions, although here too it can be argued otherwise, the fact that
it is operated secretly without the public knowing that information was
collected about it, how it is stored and for how long, who is entitled
to access it and under what conditions is particularly serious. In the
UK, for example, the activity of a similar system is regulated in a way
that includes significant transparency regarding its various aspects of
use.
The High Court sharply criticized the operation of the “Hawk’s Eye”
system, warned that it could violate basic rights such as freedom of
protest, the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, and
ordered the government to explain why it would not immediately stop
using the system and delete all data collected so far.
Police cameras on very street, and even in the mall
The memorandum of the bill, it seems, was drafted in response to a High
Court review with the proper purpose of regulating the activities of the
system that has hitherto operated in secret. Across the country, a face
recognition system, or as it is described in the memorandum: “‘A special
photo system’ … has a processing capability that allows a person or
object to be uniquely identified in real time and thus to track or
detect a person.”
Now, the facial recognition system itself is not so detached from the
Hawk’s Eye system, as it also captures the interior of the vehicle and
the face of its passengers (although it is not clear whether it uses
face recognition technology to automatically identify the passengers).
However, the bill memorandum takes the issue one step further, and is
not satisfied with regulating it as part of the activity of the Hawk’s
Eye system on roads only, but allows the placement of face recognition
cameras throughout the public space, in a fixed, semi-permanent
configuration (up to 3 months) and mobile (“on a Body moving in space”).
The memorandum clarifies that the system is not intended for roads only,
saying that “a special photography system will be set up, intended and
operated so that only the public space will be photographed and not the
private domain.” That is, it will allow the police to place cameras on
every street in every city, and in theory also inside buildings like
malls or government offices. Any place that is not a person’s private
space. However, even this limitation has a caveat according to which
when it comes to a mobile camera it will be placed “in a way that does
not infringe, to the extent necessary, on a person’s privacy.” That is,
it seems that under certain conditions it will be possible to use this
system in order to infringe on a person’s private domain.
The uses requested by the police are also particularly wide and allow it
to actually operate the capabilities of this system almost indefinitely.
These include uses such as prevention or thwarting of offenses,
investigation of crime patterns, detection of crime-type offenses,
prevention of serious damage to mental security or property, locating a
missing person and enforcing entry bans and deportation orders. It is
also noted that information stored in the system can also be used for
the proper purpose of saving or protecting human life, or for the less
critical purpose of confiscating property.
Now the opening for unlimited use is significant. If, say, a certain
person has a restraining order from the center of Tel Aviv for one
reason or another, in theory such a system can be used to scan the faces
of all who come to the city center at any given moment, just to check if
that person is among them. And when it comes to investigating crime
patterns – here the canvas is so wide and the definition so loose that
the police can paint on it whatever they want and find endless
justifications for operating the system across the country without
significant restriction. In addition, the system can be used for
“research” purposes, but omitting identifying information.
Unfortunately, the memorandum does not specify what those identifying
details are and in what procedure they will be omitted.
Will citizens know they are being filmed in this system? It depends. The
fixed and semi-fixed cameras “will be placed in a way that will be
visible”, and a qualified officer is also asked to consider whether to
place “appropriate signage” next to them. However, this obligation does
not apply to mobile cameras, and if the officer finds that the
circumstances justify it, he can also order the other cameras to be
placed in a way that is not visible. All is left solely to his
judgement. That is, there may be many situations where citizens did not
even know if they were being filmed.
Access to sensitive information will not be limited to the police alone
The police are not limited in time in storing the information collected
by the cameras, beyond the “period required for the purpose of placing
the cameras.” And is there a time when crime or crime prevention is not
necessary?
In addition, access to sensitive information will be broad and will not
be limited to the police only. The memorandum states that it may provide
the information to a public body that needs it for the purpose of
fulfilling its function, provided that the use is for the purposes
specified in the memorandum, or for the purpose of protecting state
security. This wording ensures that the Shin Bet and the army will have
almost unlimited access to the biometric information collected by the
cameras, while in some scenarios various government ministries can also
gain access. For example, the Ministry of Agriculture which assists in
the fight against agricultural crime.
Particularly serious is the lack of oversight by the police in the
manner of deployment and use of the system. According to the memorandum,
a “qualified officer” (a police officer with the rank of Assistant
Commissioner or higher or Commander or higher – depending on the type of
camera) can order the placement of a camera in a public space, without
the need for court or other external approval. The procedure for
supervising the ongoing need to place a camera at certain points is also
internal, and is carried out by the officer himself. The transfer of
information to other bodies is also not subject to the supervision of a
court, and according to the memorandum it is reserved for the sole
discretion of the police.
Although the memorandum does not explicitly use the name “biometric
database”, a reasonable assumption would be that it will be an important
component in operating the system. For, facial recognition technology is
worth nothing without a face-image database for comparison and
identification. And for the police, there is only a pool of criminal
suspects, not of most Israeli citizens. Today, the Biometric Database
Law regulates the transfer of information to the police under restricted
circumstances. But the nature of a slippery slope is that it is easy to
roll over in it quickly. And if the placement of a wide range of facial
recognition cameras is approved, how far will the day be when the police
realize that without full access to the biometric database the system is
not useful enough, and will advance a new bill memorandum that allows
this access?
A significant part of the manner in which the law is implemented, if
approved, will be regulated by ordinances to be determined by the
Minister of Internal Security and approved by the Knesset’s Interior and
Environmental Protection Committee. These ordinances may be required for
issues such as limiting the time of retention or use of the information,
but these still unknown and therefore cannot be discussed. We can only
talk about what lies ahead, and what lies ahead has very frightening
potential.
I can write much more (and I have written before) about the fundamental
and practical dangers of operating a biometric identification system on
such a scale, about the known problems of such systems – for example,
their difficulty in identifying minorities and women with sufficient
accuracy – or that the global trend is to stop using facial recognition
systems in public spaces, especially by law enforcement. I will probably
do so in the coming weeks, as long as the bill memorandum is promoted.
But this time, I will confine myself to just some of the harsh things
the High Court judges wrote about the Hawk’s Eye system, and that are
many times over relevant to a facial recognition system like the one the
police seek to set up. Such a system, it is written, “has a policing and
disciplinary influence, which limits our space of activity and behavior
and infringes on our freedom in the most basic sense (…) The regime’s
power of a surveillance mechanism such as the ‘Hawk’s Eye’ is not
necessarily based on actual surveillance, but also on the fact that the
individual knows that the state controls his personal information and
can follow him at any time it wishes, in advance and in retrospect. This
recognition is enough to make the surveilled suppress their behavior and
live in constant fear.”
*And this is what the judges said about a system that only collects
license plate numbers.* Take this, multiply by an array of facial
recognition cameras deployed throughout Israel, which are loosely
monitored and the discretion of the police officers who operate it is
wide, and you have a country where every citizen feels well that every
action outside his home is filmed, that every movement is controlled,
that there is an open eye that looks at him, a big brother who always
spies after him.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/22/burner-phones-fake-sources-evil-twin-attacks-journalism-surveillance