Interviewer: A new investigation by The Washington Post has revealed that the Israeli army is photographing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, adults, and children. Then using these images to build a massive facial recognition database. According to the report, the facial recognition technology is then deployed against these same civilians to limit movement and constrain the lives of the Palestinian population. Former soldiers told the Washington post that units were incentivized to compete with one another, to collect the most civilian photographs. Now, to better understand what's at stake in this practice, I spoke with Elizabeth Dwoskin, the Washington Post Silicon Valley correspondent.

Elizabeth Dwoskin: When I first started asking questions about, "Tell me what's the extent of digital surveillance in Israel's occupied territories," it was like nobody in Israel could give me an answer, and that is because the Israel army has huge claims around state secrets or their technology. What I learned through a bunch of luck and a bunch of reporting is that there's been this vastly expanded digital surveillance in the last two years, and that includes this network of smartphones. It's a program that is called Blue Wolf. One soldier described it to me as a secret Facebook for Palestinians that the Israeli army keeps.

The way it was described to me is that when the Israeli army was building this database, they would give smartphones to unit commanders and people on a patrol in the city of Hebron and other parts of the West Bank and they would be told to take as many photographs of Palestinians as possible, and that includes children and the elderly, and they would upload the photographs. If the photographs had a match with an existing photo in the Blue Wolf app, then a profile would come up and the profile would flash red, yellow, or green to say if the person should be arrested immediately, detained, or allow to pass. The other component that I learned about is when I went to Hebron, people would tell me in addition to having our photos taken all the time, this city is strung up with checkpoints everywhere. It's within a city, so it's not like a checkpoint to enter Israel.

It's just checkpoints that control people's movements. When they walk to the checkpoints, which are part of daily life there, they would tell me that in the last six, seven months, when they walked to the checkpoint, the soldiers manning the checkpoint recognize them before they give their ID, which is what you need to pass through. Later I spoke with a soldier who said that, in fact, there has been this broader expansion of facial recognition there. It can also recognize vehicles. It can tie a vehicle to a person. Then the third component is you have to imagine this very dystopian reality that people live in in the West Bank, which is in certain parts where I was there's cameras just everywhere put up by the army.

Interviewer: My iPhone has pictures of my friends, my family, and it will guess who a new picture is. I have a nephew and my nephew McKinley, my iPhone typically thinks McKinley is everything from a six-month-old infant to my elderly grandparents. Seriously at any point, it will say, "Oh, is this McKinley?" It'll think that McKinley is a baby, or it'll think McKinley is a white woman, just all the things that McKinley might be. It's clearly doing a very bad job at recognizing McKinley's face. I'm wondering if-- We'll get to the question of even if the visual recognition is right, but I want to first start with from a algorithmic standpoint, how much should we even trust that this facial recognition is seeing, in an AI way, that it's seeing who it thinks it's seeing?

Elizabeth Dwoskin: That is exactly the problem. What you're talking about is Apple's custom facial recognition. One thing we know is that there's wide degrees of accuracy around facial recognition technologies. Despite the fact that there is a huge match. In the last few years, even in the United States, there's been a major expansion of the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement agencies, TSA, the FBI, it was used during the January 6th insurrection investigations as well, these face-matching software. They're all over the place.

Lots of companies build these kinds of tools and there's varying degrees of accuracy. One thing we know is researchers have done studies, which say that the accuracy for faces with darker skin, so if your nephew is Black, it's going to have a lower accuracy. We know that there's lower accuracy with darker-skinned faces. We know there's some lower accuracy with women. Then you could think about in the Palestinian territories, these are women. A lot of them are also wearing head coverings if they're religious, so maybe there's fabric that conceals some of the face and so there's huge questions of whether that matching is correct.

Interviewer: Is there any sense of a legal or ethical requirement to gain consent before taking someone's photograph?

Elizabeth Dwoskin: I think that there's a huge sense of that in a democracy and the West Bank and the Palestinian. Israel is a democracy but its occupied territories are not run like a democracy. It's a military-controlled area and you see this also in parts of China as well. This is why many activists and experts have said to me that places where people have limited freedom, that is the testing ground for surveillance technologies.

Just as a case in point, in Israel 45 minutes away from the West Bank or in some cases, five minutes because of the way the borders are drawn, there is a huge debate right now going on about the ability for police to use facial recognition cameras in public places. That's not just taking a photo on the street. That's using facial recognition. The Israeli Government's privacy authority has advised against doing the very thing that they're doing to the Palestinian population.

To your question about taking photos of people, how would you feel if somebody stopped you on the street and said, "I'm going to need to take your picture?" You would say, "Back off. Why are you taking my picture?" You would have all these questions and rights and you wouldn't allow it. People in an occupied territory, people under military rule they don't have those rights. They don't have the legal recourse.

I should add, the soldiers themselves who are tasked to do this, at least the ones that I interviewed were super traumatized by it. They really saw how even taking people's pictures what a privacy violation people felt that that was. They were being asked to take pictures of elderly people and elderly women who may be religious. They may not want to take off the headscarf, children. What risks could little children pose? What is the rationale? A lot of them were wondering that themselves. Again, this was devised as a form of competition for soldiers as well. Whichever unit took the most pictures in a week would get a prize like a night off. It was actually gamified by the army.

Interviewer: All right. You get what's at stake here. Now that was Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post Silicon Valley correspondent. Now, here to talk to us on the implications of this targeted surveillance against Palestinians and what it could mean in other parts of the world is non-resident senior fellow at the Arab Center in DC, Yousef Munayyer. I started off by asking you stuff about how the surveillance program differs from surveillance that we've seen in the past.

Yousef Munayyer: This is just the latest technological step to enable what has been a longstanding practice of deep, deep surveillance of Palestinian society by the Israeli State and the Israeli military. As time marches on and technology advances, we're learning about new methods that are being used. This is just the most recent one, but of course, everything from cyber surveillance to phone tapping to spy networks have been used historically by the Israeli military and the Israeli State against the Palestinian people in occupied territory and beyond.

I think what, of course, makes this a little bit different is what makes all of these technological advances in surveillance technology so much more dangerous and that's the speed and the scale and the scope at which the state can collect information, readily access that information and then weaponize or operationalize it.

When you have at the touch of a button, the facial images being matched of potentially millions of people, there's a tremendous amount of power in that, and a tremendous opportunity for misuse and abuse as is the case with any form of vast surveillance network. This is just as I said the latest step in what's been a longstanding practice that's really born out of a situation of fundamental inequality. I think your previous guest made an important point in noting that there is in occupied Palestinian territory no citizenship rights for Palestinians, no civil liberties for Palestinians, no reasonable expectation to privacy and so on. There is military rule, and of course, the state has tremendous power over the population and is not really limited by any framework of civil rights and liberties because it doesn't exist there. What ends up happening in spaces like the occupied Palestinian territory is that these technologies are used to extents and in ways that are probably not possible anywhere else in the world. Certainly not in the advanced world where you would have much greater limitations on the power and the reach of government surveillance. Palestinians end up becoming something of a laboratory for technology which is being developed but importantly also then exported around the world. I think this is one of the important dimensions of this.

Interviewer: Can you talk to me a bit about what it means to live under that level of surveillance at all times?

Yousef Munayyer: It's absolutely terrifying. There's a constant sense that you are under watch, under control and that there is a panopticon all around you. The situation in different parts of Palestinian territory varies when it comes to this physical surveillance, and the shape of cameras, but when we talk about movement and access throughout the West Bank there are restrictions, checkpoints in many different places. Then you have, of course, a massive network of settlements and military bases throughout the territory all of which come with their own attached surveillance infrastructure, security agents, military soldiers, and so on operating the movement and access throughout this entire space.

You are constantly under the eye of the military, constantly. Especially when you try to move from one place to the other in some places like Hebron, for example, where Elizabeth was even moving across the street is something that cannot happen without deep, deep military surveillance of your activities.

Interviewer: In what ways are these experiences of Palestinians both as a matter of the technology and the lived experience you just talked with us about, why is that a miners canary for those of us in other parts of the world?

Yousef Munayyer: As I said, Palestinians are unfortunately this really unique testing ground because there are so little limitations on state power that you can get away with the kind of surveillance that you probably won't in a lot of other places. This has allowed the Israeli military to really hone and refine various different surveillance technologies that can then be marketed through its own military intelligence industry to other countries around the world.

We know for a fact that the NSO Group which is one of these Israeli corporations that is having its products authorized for sale by the Israeli defense ministry to other governments is selling surveillance technology to other regimes around the world which has been implicated in the surveillance and targeting of human rights activists, of journalists, for example, like Jamal Khashoggi and the people around him, and many others.

I think it's important for us to keep in mind that these techniques, these methods of surveillance, of repression which are being tested and perfected on Palestinians are not staying in Palestine. As important it is to understand what is happening in Palestine, it's also important to understand that they're coming to a state near you in the near future, and because of how integrated the state of Israel is into the global national security regime, and within the broader family of Western allies it's very possible that the types of surveillance technology, repressive methods that are perfected on Palestinians might be sold to our government, might be sold to other allied governments in Europe and, in fact, happened and used on people outside of Israel and Palestine as well.

Interviewer: Yousef Munayyer is a senior fellow at the Arab Center in DC. Yousef, thank you so much for joining The Takeaway.

Yousef Munayyer: Thanks for having me.

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