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Article

2 May 2023

Author:
Ameera Kawash, +972 Magazine

‘The system learns to recognize you’: Amnesty calls out automated apartheid

... We worked together with both local organizations and our team to do field interviews with Palestinian families, activists, students, and experts who were documenting, being exposed to, and coming face-to-face with the usage of surveillance systems, in particular facial recognition. This as well as Israeli civil society organizations like Breaking the Silence, who extended access to key testimonies from former and current soldiers, who spoke to some of the technologies that we were hearing about through our witness testimonies...

We could not interrogate the software up close for access reasons or security reasons. We were able to speak to Palestinians across checkpoints at which this [new] facial recognition software called Red Wolf is being deployed. We became aware of it because of how [Palestinians] were speaking to being identified by soldiers they didn’t know, pre-emptively and without producing any identification...

What we have seen is that, in tandem with those illegal settler activities, surveillance equipment has also increased by Israeli authorities. A number of surveillance cameras that we’ve identified [have] some out-of-the-box facial recognition capabilities, a lot of which we believe are at high risk of plugging into the “Mabat 2000” facial recognition system that is active in East Jerusalem...

What that does is it creates this coercive environment in which, if Palestinians attempt to even think about resisting those [settler] developments, they have to calculate an even higher risk of potentially being arrested, removed, etc. So surveillance around this illegal settler activity begets surveillance, which then begets more settler activity...

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