Little wins for privacy
This week in digital censorship and surveillance
Hi folks, welcome to another issue of Control, Spy, Delete – a weekly digest of news about digital censorship and surveillance around the globe.
I’m Anna Baydakova, a journalist who can’t pass up a story about how governments and corporations try to watch and control us. This week feels a little different: we’ve got a handful of small wins for privacy, both in the U.S. and abroad. For starters, I think you’ll enjoy reading about digital vigilantes “unmasking” ICE officers – and ICE can’t do anything about it so far.
There’s also a global win for privacy: Microsoft has cut Azure subscriptions for an Israeli military unit that was intercepting and recording Palestinians’ phone calls.
Of course, these small victories don’t mean mass surveillance worldwide is slowing down, but it’s encouraging to see that sometimes ordinary people – activists, journalists, and even outraged Instagram users – can make a difference.
As always, we’ll start with the latest news on biometric tech marching across the globe, then dive into those big stories, and wrap up with something lighter – just bear with me through all the unsettling surveillance news, we’ll have a tiny bit of laugh, promise!
Let’s get into it.
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Biometrics briefing
UK police have started deploying vans with live facial recognition cameras in the city of Bedford. – BBC
Kuwait is rolling out police patrol cars equipped with facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, fingerprint readers and AI data analysis tools. – Times of India
Uganda’s government is investigating a breach of the national biometric ID database after the data allegedly ended up in the hands of human traffickers. – Biometric Update
Vietnam is planning to shut down around 86 million bank accounts after their owners failed to go through biometric verification. – Sri Lanka Guardian
Saudi Arabia launches a biometrics check-in system for school teachers based on voice, facial recognition, and fingerprint scanning. – Gulf News
Eye contact be intense
Have you guys been following the whole ICE-wants-all-the-spyware-in-the-world saga? The U.S. deportation agency has been massively boosting its surveillance capabilities lately with face-recognition, phone-hacking and other tools. So, some interesting stories surfaced this week.
First of all, Mother Jones found out some details on one of ICE contractors, Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies. In August, the company landed a no-bid contract to sell ICE its iris-scanning mobile app. The app, called MORIS, has been already used by sheriff departments, but now it’s also on ICE agents’ phones.
The secret of success? Being close to President Trump.
Right after Trump was elected, BI2 hired a lobbying firm Ballard Partners. Ballard’s founder, Brian Ballard, Trump’s close associate, Mother Jones writes. Plus, the Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and Attorney General Pam Bondi worked for the firm.
BI2 is not the only Ballard Partners’ success: Virginia-based SNA International earlier hired the firm to lobby DHS and the White House on “Government agencies DNA testing” – and secured a $25 million contract with ICE in May. SNA is providing DNA testing of immigrant families. Another Ballard’s client is Palantir, the powerful data analytics firm employed by multiple U.S. government agencies.
So much easier to build a surveillance capitalism dystopia of your dreams when you got your guy in the White House, right?
Rage against the ICE machine
And of course, the digital vigilantes aren’t sitting idle, either.
An anonymous Instagram profile @LBProtest posted data of an ICE agent, and the Department of Homeland Security filed a subpoena to get this user’s identity. Not so fast, the court said. A California federal judge ordered that Meta does not release the user’s information to DHS until the court rules on the subpoena.
“I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying that government agents are going to come pounding at my door simply for exercising my First Amendment rights,” @LBProtest told POLITICO.
But the wave of digital uprising against mass deportations is, of course, much bigger than just a single Insta account. Just look at Dominick Skinner, a Dutch immigration activist who is flipping the script by digitally “unmasking” ICE agents and publishing their names. Together with a group of volunteers, he has publicly identified at least 20 ICE officers who were recorded during arrests.
The group is using AI to reconstruct the faces of masked ICE agents, which is possible if at least 35 percent or more of the face is visible, Skinner told Politico. Then, they upload the results to image recognition services like PimEyes and get leads on agents’ social media profiles.
The technology is not perfect, and Skinner himself admits that 60% of resulting leads turn out to be false. In such cases, volunteers do additional verification work before publishing names.
Due to the lack of regulation in the U.S. when it comes to privacy and surveillance, Skinner’s work is currently legal, Politico says. However, there are efforts underway to ban deanonymisation of law enforcement agents, like the bill introduced by Tennessee’s Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn in June. The bill, titled Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act in June, would make it illegal to publish a federal officer’s name to obstruct a criminal investigation.
But so far, digital vigilantes remain on their prowl, and the masks keep coming off.
No more Azure for spying on Gaza
Some other good news: corporate reputation still means something these days!
Microsoft has canceled some of its contract with Israel’s defence ministry after figuring out its cloud service was used for mass surveillance on Palestinians, according to The Wall Street Journal. The decision comes as a culmination of a story that began with reports by the Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call about the IDF using Azure to store intercepted calls from Palestinians in Gaza.
In August, The Guardian reported that Israel army’s surveillance agency Unit 8200 was using Microsoft Azure infrastructure – a deal that Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Unit 8200 boss Yossi Sariel cut back in 2021. The storage system became operational in 2022 and has already helped Israel prepare its airstrikes, although Microsoft reportedly insisted that its product not be used to kill people.
The news rattled the software giant: employees began protesting the deal, and Microsoft even asked the FBI to help track down those who stirred trouble. However, the corporation also launched an internal investigation into the matter and, apparently, has reached some conclusions.
Until the next quiet deal, I guess?..
Here, I fixed it
AI is a really wondrous technology in keen hands: now, instead of banning a whole movie, or song, or book, you can just alter parts of it you don’t like and pretend it’s the same thing!
That’s exactly what happened in a tragi-comic story from China: an Australian horror movie Together was altered by AI, so that a gay couple “became” heterosexual.
Together features a scene from a wedding of two men, but viewers in mainland China saw a version where one of the male actors’ faces was altered so he “turned” into a woman, Guardian reports.
I mean, against the background of all the tech surveillance news, this one reads like a funny little anecdote, isn’t it?.. Even though there is nothing funny in digital censorship. But boy, don’t we need a bit of fun in these gloomy times!
And that’s all from me for this week, guys.
Stay vigilant, find joy in tiny victories, don’t let anyone crush your spirit!
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Happy Friday!
Anna