Digital Rights Weekly Update: 28 Nov - 4 Dec

Microsoft Faces Reckoning for Assisting Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

Trouthout

Ahead of its annual shareholders meeting on December 5, Microsoft is coming under mounting pressure to reconsider its relationship with the Israeli military, which has used the tech giant’s products to carry out the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. In an open letter to the company released on Tuesday, December 2, an international coalition of legal aid groups said Microsoft and its executives potentially face legal liability for “aiding and abetting … atrocity crimes” committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians. “Over the last few months, it has become exceedingly clear that Microsoft’s services and technologies have been used to violate Palestinian human rights, and shareholders should be aware of just how much this opens up the company to legal liability,” said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer at 7amleh–The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a statement on December 2.

Watched, Tracked, and Targeted Life in Gaza under Israel’s all-encompassing surveillance regime.

Inteligencer

Israel’s military assault that began in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, has left Gaza unrecognizable. The campaign of mass killing, of severing communities, of making homes unlivable, was pursued with bombs and bullets and tanks. It operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls. Journalists, human-rights researchers, and legal scholars have mapped pieces of the surveillance apparatus in Gaza. What has largely been missing is how this technology landed on bodies, homes, and neighborhoods; how it reshaped daily life for people forced to live inside the matrix; how it reordered our minds.

How the pro-Palestine movement is outsmarting the algorithms

Waging Nonviolence

In response to systematic censorship by Meta and other platforms, Palestinians and their allies have built an innovative new playbook of tactics to beat the algorithm. For Nour Omar, a student in Cairo with 5,000 Instagram followers, reposting news about the genocide in Gaza is the smallest thing she can do that still feels like something. Usually, her posts draw hundreds of views an hour.  On a Tuesday night in November 2023, a few weeks after an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed at least 471 Palestinians, she posted three Instagram Stories in a row: a slide naming the dead from the hospital attack, a 12-second Reel of rooftops sheared open and a hospital donation link tagged #CeasefireNow. There was an uncanny hush on the feed — just 30 views. Then the Reel was removed for “violating community guidelines.” The link was unopenable, the hashtag unsearchable, the story unavailable to followers. At dawn, an “account status” notification delivered a velvet-gloved threat without explanation: “Some features may be limited.” 

AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils

+972 Magazine

According to a seating chart seen by +972 Magazine, a “Maven Field Service Representative” has been present at the CMCC. Built by the U.S. tech company Palantir, whose logo was visible in presentations given inside the Center, Maven collects and analyses surveillance data taken from warzones to speed-up U.S. military operations, including lethal airstrikes. The platform sucks information from satellites, spy planes, drones, intercepted telecommunications, and the internet, and “packages it into a common, searchable app for commanders and support groups,” according to U.S. defense outlets.  The U.S. military calls Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide U.S. airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.” Over the summer, Palantir scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine the Maven platform for U.S. armed forces.