Highlights
· Military Use of Digital Tools in Gaza
· ICE & Social media Surveillance
· What is Zignal?
· United Auto workers vs. the US Government
Editor/Author: Hessie Jones
Netanyahu’s UNGA Speech Escalated Digital Warfare in Gaza
Netanyahu delivered a speech at the UN General assembly last month, confirming continued military operations against Hamas…
The most interesting part of his remarks came when he said, “special efforts by Israeli intelligence,” his speech would be broadcast into Gaza, both through “massive loudspeakers” but also streaming directly to the cellphones of the civilians.
Notable quotes:
“Threatening to broadcast directly into civilian devices as a striking act of messaging… aims not just to inform but coerce, intimidate and demoralize an opposition population.”
“..the broadcasting of his speech would appear to constitute overt propaganda… and if these tactics are legitimized could be used in genocidal messaging campaigns that could fuel offline violence.”
Questions and Answers: Israeli Military’s Use of Digital Tools in Gaza
This article from Human Rights Watch provides a view into the extent Israel has used digital tools — surveillance technologies, and AI to determine “who or what to attack in Gaza” and when. Fantastic Q&A article that includes interviews with media, Israeli officials, journalists on details of these tools, the actual technology behind them and to the extent they are being used.
Microsoft storing Israeli Intelligence Trave used to Attack Palestinians
Recently, +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication along with Guardian, reported that Satya Nadella met with the commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, known as Unit 8200 – to discuss moving vast amounts of data into MS Cloud.
This allowed Unit 8200 to build their mass surveillance tool – which collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West bank.
Ice Just Spent Millions on a Social media Surveillance AI Program
Katya Schwek of the Lever, wrote about this last week:
“There is a new digital surveillance software by Zignal Labs and also used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon – and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a $5.7 million contract for it.”
Delivering OSINT to the Edge from Zignal
This document talks about leveraging AI/ML using NLP, computer vision and OCR to analyze data.
“It can ingest and enrich 8 billion posts per day in 100+ languages and claims a data pipeline of 50M sources – publicly available information they point out.”
Last week the UAW filed a complaint against the United States – state department, Homeland Security, US Citizen and Immigration and Service - over the growing use of Social media surveillance to target immigrants for their political speech.
Josh Ginsberg: The innovation 50
What is Zignal?
“Founded by Josh Ginsberg, a career political and public affairs veteran of three presidential campaigns developed a platform to retrieve real-time information to be used for quick informed insights and respond to narrative trends online.”
