Group items tagged

Israel’s approach toward the crisis, which has been marked by the redeployment of surveillance technology that had been previously dedicated to counterterrorism efforts toward tracking the pandemic

By mid-March, as the coronavirus spread through the country, the Israeli government invoked emergency powers to begin using cellphone tracking data to retrace the movements of those believed to be infected. The government used this data to order quarantines on individuals through contact tracing

the government turned to the Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet (better known these days in Israel by the acronym Shabak) —to use its vast database of cellphone tracking data to map the outbreak.

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

As governments around the world struggle to stave the spread of the disease they are understandably harnessing the power of technology. We must ensure this is done with respect for human rights and civil liberties and that we don’t weave a surveillance apparatus that can’t be undone.

These technologies are being deployed quickly and, it appears, without human rights impact assessments, sufficient privacy controls, or adequate restrictions on their use outside of the current context.

there’s an dearth of information about who has access to the data, how long it can be maintained, what sort of privacy rights people in the databases have, what types of restrictions are in place to ensure the data is only used as intended to combat the spread of the virus, and what could be done with the technology afterwards. If there is one thing we know from technological solutions, once a capacity is built it can be used for many purposes beyond that for which it was intended.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him.They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment.

Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by “network injection,” a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.

While Amnesty could not definitively state that the Moroccan authorities were behind the attack, the group was able to use forensic evidence to conclude this was very likely the case.

The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.

Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.

Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.

In spite of the fact that Tunisia’s political police were officially dissolved shortly after the revolution, several politicians, activists, and journalists have claimed that this secret body continues to operate in Tunisia. The Ministry of the Interior was not available to provide further clarification.

Egyptian lawmakers have called for stricter surveillance of women on video sharing apps after the arrests of a popular social media influencer and a well-known belly dancer on charges of debauchery and inciting immorality.

Instagram and TikTok influencer Haneen Hossam, 20, is under 15 days detention for a post encouraging women to broadcast videos in exchange for money, while dancer Sama el-Masry faces 15 days detention for posting “indecent” photos and videos.

“Because of a lack of surveillance some people are exploiting these apps in a manner that violates public morals and Egypt’s customs and traditions,”

a trend of former U.S. intelligence officers going to work for foreign governments with questionable human rights records

“Pickaxe,” which promised to capture “personal information and biometrics” of migrants working in Qatar. A project called “Falconeye” was described as a plan to use drones to provide surveillance of ports and borders operations, as well as “controlling migrant worker populations centers.”“By implementing background investigations and vetting program, Qatar will maintain dominance of migrant workers,” one GRA document said.

The private surveillance business has flourished in the last decade in the Persian Gulf as the region saw the rise of an information war using state-sponsored hacking operations that have coincided with the run-up to the World Cup.

In search of my story, I got in my car and drove east in mid-May 2015 from Cairo to Suez. Nine months earlier, Sisi had announced the revival of a decades-old “mega-project” to expand the 150-year-old Suez Canal. He pledged that the project would be finished in exactly twelve months, and that every Egyptian would see “immediate returns.” I was skeptical about the promised date of completion and drove through the desert to see for myself. Celebratory billboards lined the route leading out of the city, as if the project was already complete. At the site of construction, I was told that the army had been working round the clock.The new canal was in fact inaugurated on August 6, 2015, twelve months to the day from when the project was first announced, and thousands of Egyptians took to the streets in celebration. Downtown Cairo was awash in flags and fireworks, music, flashing strobe-light shows, and animal-themed blow-up dolls as tall as townhouses whose only visible relationship to the canal might have been symbolic, in their exaggerated size. It brought back memories of the day in February 2011 when President Hosni Mubarak stepped down

The financing of the project under Sisi was shrewd—a tax-free public bond with certificates in denominations as low as ten Egyptian pounds (marketed to students), and a 12 percent interest rate with the option of quarterly payouts. The necessary $8 billion was raised in a week. People everywhere spoke of having put their savings into Suez Canal bonds. Lives felt quantifiably changed—I heard references to “free money.”

the illusion of safety

The security logic seems to suggest that one cannot be sure that a researcher working on Islamic endowments in the 15th century isn’t really a spy — he might be looking for maps of Siwa, Halayib and Shalatin, the Yaghbub Oasis, or Tiran and Sanafir. Since we have border disputes with all our neighbors, not only can you not copy maps related to any border issue, you can’t conduct research on any topic vaguely connected to borders.

The security logic doesn’t stop at maps and borders. It casts suspicion on every topic. An Egyptian colleague working on Mamluk history was denied a research permit. An American colleague was denied a permit for a project on the history of private presses in the 19th century. A student of mine studies the history of the Labor Corps during World War I; his permit was also rejected

The official’s response (I paraphrase) was:Here’s someone studying the history of irrigation, and we have a dispute with Ethiopia over the Nile waters. We have no doubt that this student is honest and isn’t a spy, but how can we be sure that his thesis won’t fall into malicious hands, that it won’t contain information that could harm us — for example, info about Ethiopia’s right to the Nile waters? Such details could damage our negotiating position. Of course, we know employees at the National Archives are sincere patriots, and the same is true of most professors and students doing research there, but we have considerations that no one understands but us.

as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

tool in the hands of Arab states

a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran

Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states