Digital Rights Weekly Update: 10 - 16 July 2026

Policy Insight:

The pace of technological change continues to accelerate, bringing both encouraging signs of accountability and increasingly alarming examples of digital harm. While investigations into Big Tech’s role in conflict and growing scrutiny of surveillance infrastructures signal that accountability is possible, harmful technologies continue to spread with the speed and intensity of a wildfire, crossing borders and reshaping societies before meaningful safeguards can catch up. Recent investigations exposing Israeli-linked influence operations targeting public opinion in the United States demonstrate that digital manipulation is no longer confined to Palestine; coordinated inauthentic behaviour now seeks to influence democratic processes and public discourse far beyond the region. At the same time, the continued expansion of surveillance, biometric technologies, and data exploitation reminds us that these systems carry profound human consequences. Confronting digital power today requires stronger regulation, sustained transparency, independent oversight, and international solidarity before these harms become further entrenched.

News Digest

Microsoft Investigated Its Role in Gaza. Will Big Tech Follow?

WIRED

As the war on Gaza intensified in early 2024, Palantir CEO Alex Karp doubled down on his support for the Israeli government. In an interview with CNBC at the time, he acknowledged that employees had left his company due to its stance on Israel, stating: “We’ve lost employees. I’m sure we’ll lose employees,” while adding that a position that does not cost you employees is “not a position.” Long associated with defence and intelligence work, Palantir has become an increasingly visible player in modern warfare, supplying technology to support both Ukrainian and Israeli military efforts in their respective conflicts. A few months before the CNBC interview, Palantir and Israel’s Ministry of Defense entered into a strategic partnership to harness the company’s advanced technology “in support of war-related missions,” said the company’s executive vice president who was present at negotiations, likely referring to the supply of AI products and intelligence services. More recently, in March 2026, an Al Jazeera report quoted a spokesperson for Palantir UK who reaffirmed the company’s support of Israel, citing the 7 October 2023 attacks, and what they described as the company’s long-standing commitment to “the West and its allies.” As of publication, Palantir did not respond to WIRED Middle East’s request for comment. Over the course of Israel’s war on Gaza, several tech companies have been implicated in contracts or partnerships with the Israeli government – including supplying cloud technology and AI services that may have been used to survey Palestinians.

What the WFP cyber-attack has in common with visa scandals

The New Humanitarian

Lighthouse Reports documented how a company called VFS Global built a lucrative “visa empire” targeting applicants from countries with weaker passports – coercively upselling paid services, and mishandling biometric and personal data. A separate inquiry uncovered an exploitative website, UK Visa Portal, that exposed over 100,000 passport scans on an unsecured server, ensnaring applicants who believed they were navigating an official channel. Days later, The New Humanitarian revealed a cyber-attack on the World Food Programme that compromised names, phone numbers, and location data for 600,000 households in Gaza – the largest known breach of humanitarian beneficiary data to date. These incidents have sparked calls for stricter outsourcer accountability, clearer data-use policies, or improved cybersecurity practices. These measures may be needed, but they address the symptoms and not the imbalances at the heart of the system. Visa processing, refugee registration, and large-scale humanitarian assistance are all facilitated by digital infrastructures that outsource sensitive personal data to non-state entities that are not accountable to the individuals whose data they process. These infrastructures centralise data in systems designed for re-use, interoperability, and increasingly, algorithmic analysis and automation.

Sainsbury's facial recognition AI partially runs on Amazon cloud servers also used by Israel in Gaza

The New Arab

As UK retailers rapidly expand facial recognition technology across hundreds of UK supermarkets to tackle shoplifting, campaigners are warning that shoppers' biometric data could be entangled with the same Amazon cloud infrastructure used by the Israeli military in its war on Gaza as well as state surveillance actors. One of the retailers adopting the technology is Sainsbury's, the UK's second-largest supermarket chain, which is accelerating its rollout of facial recognition technology to tackle shoplifting, expanding from a handful of trial stores to as many as 200 locations by the end of 2026. But behind Sainsbury's shoplifting crackdown is Facewatch, a facial recognition company that processes its data through Amazon Web Services (AWS), the same cloud infrastructure Amazon supplies to the Israeli military under a controversial $1.2 billion contract dubbed Project Nimbus. On its website, Facewatch has claimed it uses AWS's facial recognition software as "a secondary check for accuracy alongside our own software".   This has raised alarm among pro-Palestine campaigners, who argue the same infrastructure powering some of the UK’s retail surveillance cannot be practically ringfenced from Amazon's broader relationship with Israel, with potential implications for privacy and human rights.

New report on the militarization of tech in the SWANA: Produced, tested, deployed

SMEX

Human testing. Those two words evoke mental images of inhumane experiments and feelings of disquiet, as they should. Yet human testing of militarized technology is happening in the Southwest Asia/North Africa (SWANA) region. The militarization of technology refers to the blurring of lines between civilian and military technology; this process is happening around the world but it has had an obvious and deadly impact in the SWANA region.  SMEX’s new report, “Produced, tested, deployed,” considers the cycle of production, testing, and consumption of such technology across the region,  emphasizing the human cost of the militarized technology industry and how this tech fits into existing structures of impunity for human rights violations in the region. The report examines six countries:  Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Egypt. For each country the report looks at legal frameworks in the country and whether the country produces militarized technology themselves, purchases it, or serves as human testing grounds.  Israel continues its dubious distinction as a consumer of militarized technology as well as host to military technology companies, who use Israel’s occupation of Palestine as a marketing tool to claim their products are “battle-tested.” Unfortunately, it appears that Gulf Countries are pushing their ways into the militarized technology industry, with significant investment in AI and militarized technology, including from Gulf sovereign wealth funds. 

Trump's Ex-Campaign Manager Is Running An Israeli Influence Operation Targeting the MAGA Base

Time

Donald Trump’s former 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is leading a $1.5 million-per-month digital influence operation on behalf of the Israeli government. Administered through his firm Clock Tower X and a network of interconnected companies, the campaign utilizes private group chats to coordinate paid conservative influencers, create AI-targeted websites, and leverage his position at Salem Media Network. While the initiative was publicly framed as an effort to combat online antisemitism, Israeli officials noted its strategic aim was to prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel.