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"The main rationale for increasing state surveillance was to tackle the pandemic effectively to save people's lives. Yet, states are not enthusiastic about abandoning these digital tools, even though the pandemic is winding down. Instead, they are determined to preserve their surveillance capacities under the pretext of national security or preparation for future pandemics. In the face of increasing state surveillance, however, we should thoroughly discuss the risk of digital authoritarianism and the possible use of surveillance technologies to violate privacy, silence political opposition, and oppress minorities. For example, South Korea's sophisticated contact tracing technology that involves surveillance camera footage, cell-phone location data, and credit card purchases has disclosed patients' personal information, such as nationality. It raised privacy concerns, particularly for ethnic minorities, and underlined the risk of technology-enabled ethnic mapping and discrimination."

"The problem extends beyond the Pegasus project. Installed in Mexico City is one of the largest urban surveillance systems in the Americas: El Centro de Comando, Control, Cómputo, Comunicaciones y Contacto Ciudadano, better known as El C5. The network, connected to panic buttons and command centers, is spread over 1,485 kilometers with software designed to automatically detect license plates. On top of that, the number of installed cameras grew from 18 million to 65 million between 2018 and 2022, with stated plans to add at least an additional 16 million more. Despite its apparent pre-eminence, issues have arisen with the C5, from false identifications to mishandling of personal data. Technological malfunctions have also been shown to impact the outcomes of criminal cases because of the assumption of objectivity that video surveillance supposedly construes. The sprawling C5 system is dwarfed only by the Titan, an expansive intelligence and security database, both in terms of scale and threat to civil liberties. The software is used by several Mexican state governments to combine location data with other private information, including financial, government, and telecom data, to geolocate individuals across the country in real time. Governmental officials have been criticized for the controversial use of the database to target public figures, but, more problematically, access to Titan-enabled intel can be gained through an underground market, making it a further liability. The extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the C5 and Titan is still not clear, but the specter of surveillance remains large and is set to cause more worries with the addition of new smart technologies."

"The campaign is spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch and is also backed by 31 groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation. Police have deployed live facial recognition at large-scale public events, including King Charles's coronation. The statement said: "We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate. "We call on UK police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance.""

"First, lucrative state contracts are given to private corporations to build and deploy policing technologies that surveil and manage target groups. Then, using the vast amounts of biometric and social media data extracted from those groups, the private companies improve their technologies and sell retail versions of them to other states and institutions, such as schools. Finally, all this turns the target groups into a ready source of cheap labor - either through direct coercion or indirectly through stigma."

""The concern is, are the Chinese extra-territorialising their surveillance state? You could make a case that they are when other countries are using technologies like Hikvision that they use on their own citizens. They can now do globally," said James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Hikvision has rebutted those concerns and said there is no evidence that surveillance collected in other countries using its cameras has ever been sent to Beijing."

"ARGUS stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance. Its alternative designation is Wide Area Persistent Stare (WAPS). The project integrates many sophisticated technologies into a formidable surveillance system, combining images from 368 independent into a single mosaic image. The result is a video with a combined resolution of reportedly 1.8 gigapixels."

"It would be a bit glib-and more than a little clichéd-to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn't be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward "ambient intelligence," which Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are "always there," collecting information and taking action against it. This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new-see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket-but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It's surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to."

"That is, when you are continuously surveilled, when your every word - even your private conversations, even your personal journals - are subject to continuous monitoring, you never have the space in which to think things through. If you doubt a piece of popular wisdom and want to hash it out, your ability to carry on that discussion is limited the knowledge that your testing of the day's received ideas is on the record forever and may be held against you."

""While surveillance technology may threaten the privacy of us all, surveillance efforts have historically been used to intimidate and oppress certain communities and groups more than others, including those that are defined by a common race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, income level, sexual orientation, or political perspective.""

"Fighting the creep of government use of face surveillance and the related risks can seem overwhelming. Police agencies, and the spy tech vendors that profit from the growth of a surveillance state, have much to gain by deploying this invasive spying technology. "

"Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in "undesirable social behaviour", adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns."

"A surveillance startup in Silicon Valley is being accused of sexism and discrimination after a sales director used the company's facial recognition system to harass female workers. Verkada, which was valued in January at $1.6 billion, equips its office with its own security cameras. "

""Often the problem is that the topic itself is unethical," said Gemma Galdon Clavell, an independent tech ethicist who has evaluated many Horizon 2020 security research projects and worked as a partner on more than a dozen. "Some topics encourage partners to develop biometric tech that can work from afar, and so consent is not possible - this is what concerns me." One project aiming to develop such technology refers to it as "unobtrusive person identification" that can be used on people as they cross borders. ¨If we're talking about developing technology that people don't know is being used," said Galdon Clavell, "how can you make that ethical?" "

"Zoom is not encrypting calls for free accounts with end to end encryption so they can provide law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with content from those calls. As protesters demonstrate in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, law enforcement has deployed a wide range of surveillance tools to monitor and track protesters－including facial recognition software and contact tracing technology. They are working to get information from every source possible to disrupt and even arrest people involved with the protests."

""Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,""

"Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as "tattleware" or "bossware", represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google queries for "remote monitoring" were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they'd continued to surge by another 243%."

"This led to claims that the software is woefully inaccurate; in fact, police had set the threshold for a match at 60%, meaning that faces do not have to be rated as that similar to be flagged up. This minimises the chance of a person of interest slipping through the net, but also makes a lot of false positives inevitable."

"The UK is not Russia. For all that the many civil liberty campaigners will complain, as is their role, the independence of the judiciary remains strong. The laws relating to freedom of association, expression and right to privacy are well defended in parliament and outside. But the technology, the means by which the state might insert itself into our lives, is developing apace. The checks and balances are not. The Guardian has revealed that the government is legislating, without fanfare, to allow the police and the National Crime Agency to run facial recognition searches across the UK's driving licence records. When the police have an image, they will be able to identify the person, it is hoped, through the photographic images the state holds for the purposes of ensuring that the roads are safe. Searching those digital images would have taken more man-hours than could have been justified in the old analogue world. It is now a matter of pushing a button, thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence systems that are able to match biometric measurements in a flash."

"Countries around the world are deploying technologies-like digital IDs, facial recognition systems, GPS devices, and spyware-that are meant to improve governance and reduce crime. But there has been little evidence to back these claims, all while introducing a high risk of exclusion, bias, misidentification, and privacy violations. It's important to note that these impacts are not equal. They fall disproportionately on religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities, migrants and refugees, as well as human rights activists and political dissidents."

"Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they build. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere."