Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks, uses technology from Google Photos as well as a custom tool built by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight to identify people affiliated with Hamas.
Way easier than having them wear an armband.
So, hot take here: preface this with saying I absolutely condemn the surveillance by Israel here.
But I think it’s wrong to judge a nation by what they’ve gone through themselves, with an attitude of " they should know better". Just because the Holocaust happened, doesn’t mean that Israel has better morales or values, or that they would never do such things themselves. Humans are humans. With the wrong people in power, horrible things happen.
It’s perfectly reasonable and necessary to argue that Israel is currently violating human right laws. We should keep doing that.
It is not reasonable to keep pointing at the holocaust and nazi germany as a stick of " look, you became the thing you suffered under", unless in a context of learning from history. “You should know better” creates unreasonable expectations where some nations ought to have higher morales somehow.
Edit: I ment condemn, not condone. Apologies
I’m gonna play devils advocate here… it’s easy to say “don’t hate these people in that other country” when these two countries have decades, if not hundreds of years of violence, hatred and conflict between them. You cannot look at what’s happening while ignoring the past 600+ years.
In ww2, there was no actual reason to hate jews. In this situation, the two parties have had actual conflict with actual victims for hundreds of years.
It only takes the wrong people in power at the right time to have this timebomb explodes like it did.
Is it right? Hell No. But the morales at play here are grounded in a vastly different way than with the nazis.
So, hot take here: preface this with saying I absolutely condone the surveillance by Israel here.
I think you mean condemn.
It is not reasonable to keep pointing at the holocaust and nazi germany as a stick of " look, you became the thing you suffered under", unless in a context of learning from history.
I mean when a country does Nazi things usually other countries point out that that’s Nazism. It’s not something unique to Israel (see: Trump’s rhetoric being compared to Hitler’s); it’s just that Israel’s philosophy shares a lot with Nazism so the similarity is pointed out a lot.
Fair. I guess I saw something in the original post that wasn’t there. I see and hear a lot of the “they should know better” argument when that’s not an argument at all, and unfair to anyone on the receiving end of that argument. I might have concluded that too soon.
I believe we should be very careful to stick the label nazism to everything we find abhorrent. I’d like to judge situations on their own merit, not compare them to other atrocities in our history. The socio-political situation in Gaza is so different than 1930’s Germany. Even experts are having a hard time really putting the finger on all the mess that has been Israel-Palestine situations for the past 600 years. Calling everything Nazism has a sideeffect of devaluing and maybe even downplaying said words in the long run.
But maybe I’m just rambling on semantics. I think we all agree that what is going on now in Gaza is a mess and a violation of human rights. And something needs to be done about that.
We are not comparing their governing or how they structure theur legislative system we are comparing the open air camps, tight restrictions and indiscriminate murder. I think it is perfectly fair to compare them to nazis, for one there isnt many comparisons they have left themselves with - this is the company they are in now.
I can’t condone mass surveillance of a population that have been subjugated, harrassed, violently targetted, stolen from and currently going through a genocide and enforced famine. But that is just me.
I absolutely condone the surveillance by Israel here.
This seems… incongruent with the rest of your comment.
Israel is the type of control-heavy far-right state other dictators wish they could govern, and it’s made possible by Western money and technology (I was going to name just the US but my country of Canada, among others, is not blameless either). This news also sucks because there’s no way that tech is staying in Israel only. Citizens of the world better brace for convictions via AI facial recognition.
“Our computer model was able to reconstruct this image of the defendant nearly perfectly. It got the hands wrong and one eye is off-center, but otherwise that’s clearly them committing the crime.”
It’s true… far right dictators love this shit:
From what I remember, AI facial recognition tech was already being used by police and agencies worldwide, like the FBI, PRC police etc, or am I misinformed? I remember something about Chinese and American facial recognition software.
I had not read anything like that but a quick search pulled up this story from last September by Wired that supports your post: FBI Agents Are Using Face Recognition Without Proper Training. “Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals.” So it sounds like you’re right, and also that they are probably inadequately trained even if they complete the whole 3-day course on how to identify people with legal ramifications.
Facial tattoos of drop table commands. Embed computer worms into your iris. We can get insane to fuck all this shit up too. I bet theres a way to embed a computer virus on your own face.
I guess I’ll adjust my life goals to “hot cyberpunk partner in technological dystopia”, because that sounds like some Bladerunner/Cyberpunk 2077 stuff.
Its not that far off. We’ll see exactly what I said soon enough. You can put a virus or worm inside an image in an email. You can do the same thing with a tattoo. Its unfortunate it will be here so far before the superhuman cybernetics.
Which may even work with 0.001% probability of that recognized string not being screened.
There’s a difference between SQL injections on thematic web forums and the same in such a system.
That “we can … too” is lazy complacency. “They” will get even stronger while “we” talk like this.
Nothing is casual about this. Be pessimistic if you want. But we will not stop jabbing the eye that watches. This is an arms race.
It will be in Israel soon too. Netanyahu is using this genocide to cement a dictatorship by claiming it’s all necessary to fight the war, but it’s not really believed that he’ll take his special war powers away from himself once it’s over. He’s already tried to destroy the judiciary. Make no mistake, genocide is not the only way he’s taking pages out of Hitler’s playbook.
And thanks to the us in the states he is being well to do so. We need make it clear that we want all aid to Israel to stop. No more weapons or money.
Biden is in a real bind, because he needs the pro-Israel vote too. It’s a tightrope walk. I don’t think he’s handled it well at all, but I can see why they haven’t totally cut off Israel.
Can confirm. I don’t want to vote for the Orange Man but I will if Biden stops supporting Israel.
While the US and the USSR scrambled for Nazi scientists post WWII for their Air and Space programs, it seems that Israel was grabbing a different kind of Nazi for consorting work.
Photoprism on default settings merged like 5 people into one because it was all trained on a predominant NA population.
Google photos has had similar results even with tuning the algorithm.
So best case they throw innocent people in jail without trial and worst case they just continue to shoot innocent people anyway.
