Get used to it
Tech surveillance and censorship hit close to home
We’ve made it through another week, people! Which means, it’s time for your weekly portion of news about the means of digital control. Welcome to Control, Spy, Delete.
This week got me thinking about how fast digital surveillance and censorship go from the imagined worlds of dystopian books and films to mundane, boring and barely noticed parts of everyday reality.
Take doorbell cameras – they seem so omnipresent in the U.S. that there is a whole genre of video memes with people falling on their porches, having funny (or awkward) conversations with their guests, catching neighbours stealing their packages… And the same cameras may soon be tracking people around town using facial recognition technology, human rights advocates warn.
Or – have you been thinking about buying a pair of smart glasses from Meta? They may soon have facial recognition features, too, potentially turning strangers into AI sleuths knowing a lot about each other before they’ve even spoken a word.
Does this sound exciting or disturbing? Depends on whom you ask, but if you ask me – I’d rather a random passerby not know my biography and latest thoughts on the global decline of democracy just by looking at me.
What kind of digital hygiene and self-censorship will that take when the world around us is full of “smart” devices – constantly awake and processing information on everything and everyone 24/7? And how far are we from that reality?
With these thoughts in mind, I brought you some fresh stories about the tools of digital control in the U.S., Iran, and Russia.
Let’s get into it!
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Biometrics briefing
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) signed a $225,000 deal with Clearview AI for a facial recognition tool that compares photos against a database of images scraped from the internet. – Wired
Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, allowing users to identify people and get information about them via Meta’s AI assistant. – The New York Times
Milwaukee residents voiced concerns about the use of facial recognition by police during a community meeting. – Spectrum News
The UK police have started a six-month pilot using live facial recognition on train stations in London. – BBC
Djibouti has launched a biometrics-based mobile ID. – Biometric Update
Not your ordinary subpoena
U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deployed a new tactic to track people who voice concerns and protest against the surge of deportation raids, The Washington Post reports. It has begun using administrative subpoenas to request citizens’ data from tech providers like Google.
This kind of subpoena does not have to be signed by a judge and can be issued by mid-level officials in minutes. It’s also subject to much less oversight than normal subpoenas.
Tech experts and former DHS staff told WaPo that the agency might have issued “thousands, if not tens of thousands” of such subpoenas. They have been used against institutions as well as individuals. For example, last spring, two administrative subpoenas were issued to Columbia University for information on a student who took part in pro-Palestinian protests.
Harvard University received one for employment records last spring. In September, Instagram got an administrative subpoena for data about users who posted about ICE raids in Los Angeles (it was later successfully contested in court and withdrawn). In January, DHS requested personal information of 7,000 healthcare workers in Minnesota after medics protested ICE entering hospitals.
Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say they are repeatedly hearing from people targeted by administrative subpoenas and have taken on three of such cases.
One of them is a Philadelphia resident named Jon (WaPo does not provide his full name). Last fall, he read about an Afghan immigrant who was investigated by the DHS and faced deportation to Afghanistan. Jon googled the email address of the case’s lead prosecutor and sent him a short note asking the official to “apply principles of common sense and decency.”
Five hours after this seemingly innocuous civil act, Google notified Jon that the company had received a subpoena seeking Jon’s account information. Since then, Jon was visited by the local police, and later, when he traveled to Puerto Rico, his and his wife’s suitcases were searched by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Apparently, he had come to the attention of law enforcement.
According to the police investigators who paid a visit to Jon, DHS could not obtain his emails, documents, photos or other content with an administrative subpoena, but they requested a broad range of metadata: day, time and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license and Social Security numbers.
This is just one instance of a growing trend: Americans who are protesting the current administration’s anti-immigration policies face increased surveillance and intimidation by law enforcement. In January, journalists reported that people who were filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were told that agents identified them using facial recognition on their body cameras and allegedly entered them into what one agent described as a “nice little database” for domestic terrorists.
The price of protest is rising in America, and this is a scary symptom, folks. Take it from someone who comes from a country where you can go to jail for laying flowers at a monument.
Tech workers vs. ICE
The outrage against ICE among tech workers continues as BigTech staff feels both unsafe amid surging immigration-focused surveillance and outraged by their role in building it.
This week, Salesforce employees sent an open letter to the CEO Marc Benioff demanding that the firm stop working with ICE.
“We are deeply troubled by leaked documentation revealing that Salesforce has pitched AI technology to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help the agency ‘expeditiously’ hire 10,000 new agents and vet tip-line reports,” says the letter, cited by Wired. Helping ICE scale its mass deportations “represents a fundamental betrayal of our commitment to the ethical use of technology,” the text reads.
This week in Las Vegas, during Salesforce’s annual event, Benioff went on stage, where he first thanked the firm’s international employees for attending and then joked that ICE agents were in the building monitoring them, employees told Wired. Apparently, the audience did not appreciate the humour.
Google employees are also upset about working with ICE. Last week, more than 800 employees signed a petition to Google’s leadership demanding the company stop working with CBP and ICE, the New York Times wrote. Employees also asked the company to protect them after ICE agents reportedly tried to enter Google’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the meantime, employees of Palantir, which provides ICE with data analysis software, received an update of sorts: a 40-minute video emailed to staff in which Palantir CEO Alex Karp mused about the firm’s role in upholding Western power. Questions about Palantir’s work for ICE, previously raised by staff in internal Slack messages, went unanswered, Wired reports. Instead, employees were offered one-on-one briefings for more details, but only if they sign NDAs.
In January, dozens of tech workers signed an open letter asking their CEOs to “call the White House and demand that ICE leave our cities,” “cancel all company contracts with ICE” and “speak out publicly against ICE’s violence.”
In the meantime, The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General is investigating potential privacy abuses in ICE’s surveillance and biometric data programs, 404 Media reports. Last week, Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine received a response from the DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari confirming his office had initiated the audit.
The all-seeing Ring
A different kind of surveillance caught public attention last week after millions saw Amazon Ring’s new ad during the Super Bowl football game. In it, the doorbell camera maker promoted its “Search Party” feature, which allows users to tap into a network of cameras to look for runaway dogs.
But privacy advocates, as well as ordinary users, quickly noticed that, cute as it may sound, the function can be used to track people, too. This effectively turns the vast network of Ring’s doorbell cameras into a powerful surveillance tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says. The feature uses AI to analyse footage across multiple cameras for pictures matching search parameters.
“Creepy... In no way will this ever be abused by corporations or the government said no rational person ever,” one user commented under the video on YouTube.
Together with Amazon’s recently added facial recognition feature, “Search Party” can become an omnipresent biometric surveillance tool. The EFF notes that “Search Party” is turned on by default for all cameras, and it takes more than five steps to disable it.
Because who doesn’t want to join the biometric surveillance dragnet, right?..
The good news is that Ring has finally cancelled its integration with Flock, maker of AI-powered license plate readers, The Verge reports. The partnership would connect Flock’s nation-wide license plate surveillance network and Amazon’s porch monitoring, making both available to law enforcement via a single interface of Ring’s “Community Requests.” News of the integration sparked outrage among Ring users, forcing the company to backtrack – at least for now.
Find them all
In the meantime, police departments across the U.S. are buying automatic geolocation tools, 404 Media reports. According to documents obtained by the reporters, in 2025, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) bought access to GeoSpy. It’s an AI tool created by Boston-based Graylark Technologies, which helps geolocate photos. The use of GeoSpy hasn’t led to any arrests so far, the police departments told 404 Media.
The Ministry of Erasure
A new level of censorship was unlocked by the U.S. Department of State last week when it started deleting its Twitter/X posts made before Donald Trump came into office last year. NPR journalists reviewed an internal guidance about this, which applies not only to the Department of State main account but also to accounts for U.S. embassies and missions, ambassadors and department bureaus and programs.
The posts will be internally archived but no longer accessible to the public, NPR learned. To see older posts, one will have to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. FOIA requests are notoriously slow and often fruitless, especially for someone who doesn’t deal with them regularly and is not prepared to sue the government for information.
Answering NPR’s questions, an unnamed State Department spokesperson said the tweets were being deleted “to limit confusion on U.S government policy and to speak with one voice to advance the President, Secretary, and Administration’s goals and messaging.”
Rewriting or erasing things said the past has long been seen as a powerful way of control worldwide – deleting social media posts by one of the most powerful government agencies in the world is just one peculiar event of this kind. In the context of the current U.S. administration’s earlier deletion of thousands of official web pages and datasets – from vaccination guidelines to climate and census data – it looks small.
Last week, the CIA also took down its World Factbook, a popular source of information about countries used by educators, journalists and researchers. The Factbook had been published since 1962, initially for military and intelligence personnel, then for the broad public as well. According to the CIA website, it “served the Intelligence Community and the general public as a longstanding, one-stop basic reference about countries and communities around the globe.” However, the publication has been “sunset” with no explanation.
But in the Internet era, it’s not that easy to remove something from global electronic memory – someone might make an archive copy and preserve the information. Activists have done this a few times: check The End of Term Project and Data Rescue Project if you want to learn more or help save something.
But apparently, we need to reconsider the notion that if something is on the internet, it’s forever. It is – but only if you care enough to make a copy.
Starlinks for Iran
New information on Iran’s cutoff from the global internet came up this week: turns out, the U.S. secretly smuggled Starlink terminals into the country during the month-long internet shutdown in January, WSJ reports.
The State Department had purchased nearly 7,000 Starlink terminals in the late 2025 and covertly sent about 6,000 of them to Iran in January, when nationwide protests in the country were brutally suppressed under a complete internet shutdown. The funds came from other initiatives by the State Department supporting free internet in Iran, like subsidizing free VPN subscriptions, according to WSJ.
The publication says that the initiative was pushed forward by Mora Namdar, who led State’s Middle East bureau until December and last summer asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to get Starlinks to Iran.
The January internet shutdown in Iran was so severe that even the country’s own isolated network called the National Information Network (NIN) was down, Wired wrote. NIN is a whole ecosystem of websites, apps, online services and digital platforms that allows to control and monitor communications inside the country, as well as prevent Iranians from reaching the outside world. According to The Guardian, Iran’s internet censorship heavily relies on Chinese technology.
Internet connectivity in Iran still remains patchy as Iranian expats are struggling to connect with their families and the full scale of the crackdown on the protests is hard to gauge. Thousands were killed on the streets in January as people protested economic hardship and the brutality of the ayatollahs’ regime.
One bitter detail: as researchers told the WSJ, people were further encouraged to keep protesting by the U.S. president Trump’s social media posts saying that “help is on its way.” Many expected the “help” to mean American airstrikes on government and military targets, but that did not happen. Turns out, the help was Starlinks. Which is… better than nothing, for sure.
Russia’s fighting Telegram again
Russia might have taken some inspiration from Iran and is raping up its internet censorship.
First of all, a new chapter in the old saga of Russia’s relationship with Telegram, one of the most popular messengers in the country: this week, people not using VPNs reported significant delays in the app’s performance, Meduza writes.
According to the publication, Russian authorities might be deliberately slowing down the messenger, and the law enforcement agencies are lobbying for a full ban of the app after the national parliamentary elections in September.
Telegram and Russia’s internet censor, Roskomnadzor, go way back. In 2018, the agency sued the company for its refusal to provide encryption keys to the Federal Security Service (FSB). After that, it tried to block the app in Russia, but Telegram employed a tactic of masking its IP addresses, so Roskomnadzor ended up blocking a significant part of the Russian internet instead, while Telegram remained available. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest the attack on the app, which is also a popular blog platform in Russia.
In 2020, Roskomnadzor officially announced its war on Telegram was over as the app’s founder Pavel Durov “voiced readiness to fight terrorism and extremism.” There has never been a clear public explanation by either Roskomnadzor or Telegram about what exactly changed between the company and the Russian authorities.
However, since Russia started its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a wave of revenge scam calls has hit Russian users via WhatsApp and Telegram, so in late 2025, Russia blocked calls in both apps. At the same time, Russian authorities started aggressively promoting Max, a new messenger developed by the country’s social media giant VK (ironically, also launched by Telegram’s founder, who later sold the company).
In the meantime, other foreign social media apps are under attack, too: according to Meduza, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and some foreign news websites have been removed from the national DNS register, rendering them inaccessible for some users.
And this is all from me for this week, guys.
Stay vigilant!
Anna