DAILY TRIFECTA: Guilt By Algorithmic Association
Automatic for (killing or controlling) the people
TITLE: War Zone Surveillance Technology Is Hitting American Streets
https://www.notus.org/technology/war-zone-surveillance-border-us
EXCERPT: At least two Texas communities along the U.S.-Mexico border have purchased a product called “TraffiCatch,” which collects the unique wireless and Bluetooth signals emitted by nearly all modern electronics to identify devices and track their movements. The product is also listed in a federal supply catalog run by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration, which negotiates prices and contracts for federal agencies.
“TraffiCatch is unique for the following reasons: ability to detect in-vehicle wireless signals [and] merge such signals with the vehicle license plate,” wrote Jenoptik, the Germany-based manufacturer, in a contracting solicitation obtained by NOTUS under Texas public records law.
In another bid to win a contract from a public consortium that services Texas school districts, Jenoptik describes TraffiCatch as a “wireless device detection” system that “records wireless devices Wifi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy signal identifiers that come within range of the device to record gathered information coupled with plate recognition in the area. This can provide additional information to investigators trying to locate persons of interest related to recorded crimes in the area.”
Combining license plate information with data collected from wireless signals is the kind of surveillance the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long used, with devices mounted in vehicles, on drones or carried by hand to pinpoint the location of cell phones and other electronic devices. Their usage was once classified and deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today, similar devices are showing up in the streets of American cities near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Webb County, Texas — which includes the border city of Laredo — received funding under a Department of Homeland Security grant program called Operation Stonegarden to purchase TraffiCatch, contracting records show. County commissioners in another border county, Val Verde County, also voted to buy TraffiCatch, meeting minutes show. That purchase was funded through a Texas state grant program called Operation Lone Star. Neither county responded to requests for comment.
The Supreme Court has said that attaching a GPS tracking device to a car or getting historical location data from a cell carrier requires a search warrant, and, therefore, probable cause of a crime.
However, law enforcement has found ways around these prohibitions. They sometimes use a device called a “Stingray,” which mimics a cell tower and forces nearby mobile phones to connect to it instead of the legitimate cell network. Agencies also buy data on cell phones’ movements from brokers.
And increasingly, as people walk around with headphones, fitness wearables and other devices, emitting a cloud of radio frequency signals unique to them, their data can be linked to a car, even after they have ditched the car.
“If I worked as a small-county sheriff, I would’ve probably caught something like 200% more of our criminals with just two of these boxes,” said Aaron Brown, a former Central Intelligence Agency countersurveillance and digital tracking expert. Brown said he has built his own version of TraffiCatch from off-the-shelf components and drives around the Washington area with it to see what interesting information he can capture.
Collecting radio emissions, called signals intelligence, was once the purview of specialized classified military units or intelligence agencies. But with so much modern technology emitting information that can be collected by anyone with the right antenna, the practice is becoming more widespread by both commercial and governmental entities.
TITLE: How China’s citizens are coping with digital surveillance
https://www.fastcompany.com/91114971/china-citizens-coping-with-digital-surveillance
EXCERPT: Do you ever think about the digital footprint you leave when you are browsing the web, shopping online, commenting on social networks, or going by a facial recognition camera?
State surveillance of citizens is growing all over the world, but it is a fact of everyday life in China, where it has deep historical roots.
In China, almost nothing is paid for in cash anymore. Super apps make life easy: people use Alipay or WeChat Pay to pay for subway or bus tickets, rent a bike, hail a taxi, shop online, book trains and shows, split the bill at restaurants, and even pay their taxes and utility bills.
The Chinese also use these platforms to check the news, entertain themselves, and exchange countless text, audio, and video messages, both personal and professional. Everything is linked to the user’s mobile phone number, which is itself registered under their identity. The government may access the data collected by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, and other operators.
Much has been written about blacklists (listing authors of “trust-breaking” behaviors, such as not settling one’s debts), redlists (listing authors of commendable behaviors, such as volunteering), and commercial and public “social credit” systems. However, recent research has shown that these systems are still fragmented and scattered in terms of data collection and analysis. They also rely at least partly on manual rather than digitized or algorithmic processes, with little capacity to build integrated citizen profiles through compiling all the available data.
How do Chinese citizens experience this constant surveillance? In my book Living With Digital Surveillance in China: Citizens’ Narratives on Technology, Privacy, and Governance, I present research I conducted in China in 2019. Specifically, the book is based on 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Chinese participants recruited through colleagues at three universities in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu.
Like my colleagues Genia Kostka and Chuncheng Liu, I discovered that many participants in my research frame surveillance as indispensable for solving China’s problems.
Underpinning this support is a coherent system of anguishing narratives, to which redemptive narratives respond. The anguishing narratives emphasize the moral shortcomings that the research participants attribute to China: almost every participant brought up the “lack of moral quality” of their fellow citizens, whom they said behaved like children with little moral sense.
In the context of this shame-inducing narrative, surveillance is framed as a welcome solution to enforce the rules by punishing violators and getting people to behave better. According to the participants, moral shortcomings are responsible for the “century of humiliations” that China has experienced since the Opium Wars and the Japanese invasions; according to this discourse, “civilizing” the population will enable China to gain the international recognition it so ardently desires.
Finally, wanting to protect privacy was often seen by participants as a desire to hide shameful secrets in order to save face. Here too, surveillance is viewed positively, as a tool to unmask shady behaviors and promote morality.
TITLE: Is WhatsApp putting Palestinians at risk of being killed in Gaza?
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240430-is-whatsapp-putting-palestinians-at-risk-of-being-killed-in-gaza/
EXCERPT: For decades, humans have lived with the prospect of a future where wars would be fought with so-called killer robots driven by technology that always seemed otherworldly.
That is now a terrifying reality, given Israel’s use of artificial intelligence in its ongoing deadly assault on the Gaza Strip, documented in reports and investigations by various outlets, none more important than Israeli publications +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language, Local Call.
They revealed the use of AI programs such as “The Gospel”, “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?”, all of which were used to identify tens of thousands of Gazans as targets, track and strike people specifically in their homes, and essentially run a “mass assassination factory” with minimal human oversight.
A critical detail in their early April report about “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” related to how the software were purportedly gathering data from WhatsApp — the communication behemoth owned by tech giant, Meta.
That particular piece of information piqued the interest of Paul Biggar, a software engineer, innovator and founder of Tech For Palestine, a coalition of technology experts working to benefit Palestinians.
He put out a blog raising concerns over Meta’s possible involvement in Israel’s devastating AI-powered war on Gaza.
Speaking to Anadolu, Biggar said he views “Lavender” as one of the tools that Israel is using as a “way of automating the genocide (in Gaza)”.
“It allows them to target individuals and create a layer of plausible deniability, where they say that these individuals were identified by AI as being valid targets, which is not true,” he said.
He said there is no “real reason to believe that any of these targets are valid” and the Israeli military does “no due diligence in identifying or investigating the targets suggested by the AI system”.
Biggar said his blog was “specifically about Meta’s involvement” because the reporting on “Lavender” suggested that one of the ways the system identifies targets is “through what WhatsApp groups people are part of”.
What he was referring to was a part in the +972 and Local Call report about “a short guide to building a ‘target machine’, similar in description to “Lavender”, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms.”
That guide, according to the report, was in a book — titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” — released under a pen name, Brigadier General YS, in English in 2021.
The report said the +972 and Local Call investigation had confirmed the author “to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200.”
In that guide to create an AI system “were several examples of the ‘hundreds and thousands’ of features that can increase an individual’s rating (the likelihood to be identified as a target), such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months and changing addresses frequently.”
Biggar termed that a “ludicrous” suggestion.
“We know from other sources that Hamas does not coordinate attacks on any sort of mobile phone-based things, WhatsApp or anything like that,” he said.
“So, what they’re really suggesting is who do people know? Who are they friends with? … The membership of a WhatsApp group is in no way incriminating and it is ludicrous to suggest it.”