U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It's Coming Home.

Illustration The Intercept In partnership with Rita Murad a -year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and attendee at the Technion Israel Institute of Machinery was arrested by Israeli agents in November after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October The images included a picture of a bulldozer latest through the dividing line fence in Gaza and a quote Do you help decolonization as an abstract academic theory Or as a tangible event She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison In contemporary years Israeli safeguard representatives have boasted of a ChatGPT-like arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism It was issued in full force after Hamas s bloody attack on October Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses Various had engaged in relatively low-level political speech like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories When the New York Times covered Murad s saga last year the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that in the U S There is certainly no way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack In Israel the situation is fully different Soon that may no longer be the scenario Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U S this year Up-to-date high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military s policies in Gaza There is Mahmoud Khalil a green card holder married to a U S citizen taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana There is R meysa zt rk a Turkish doctoral attendee at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville Massachusetts by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed trainee protesters demands And there is Mohsen Mahdawi a Columbia philosophy learner arrested by ICE agents outside the U S Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview In particular instances the State Department has relied on informants blacklists and device as simple as a screenshot But the U S is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli executives have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech In March Secretary of State Marco Rubio broadcasted the State Department was launching an AI-powered Catch and Revoke initiative to accelerate the cancellation of apprentice visas Algorithms would collect figures from social media profiles news outlets and doxing sites to enforce the January executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to overthrow or replace the lifestyle on which our constitutional Republic stands The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed in part within the U S immigration system Rubio s Catch and Revoke initiative emerges from long-standing collaborations between tech companies and increasingly right-wing governments eager for their wares The AI industry s business model hinges on unfettered access to troves of input which makes less-then-democratic contexts where state surveillance is unconstrained by judicial legislative or population oversight particularly lucrative proving grounds for new products The effects of these technologies have been greater part punitive on the borders of the U S or the European Union like migrant detention centers in Texas or Greece But now the inevitable is happening They are becoming popular domestic policing tools Israel was one early test site As Israeli executives expanded their surveillance powers to clamp down on rising rates of Palestinian terrorism in the early s U S hardware firms flocked to the region In exchange for first digital and then automated surveillance systems Israel s protection apparatus offered CEOs troves of the information financial system s largest part prized commodity content IBM and Microsoft provided system used to monitor West Bank confines crossings Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli defense forces Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems The development was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible safeguard threats Increasingly right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint With time and in partnership with plenty of of the same companies the U S safety state built its own surveillance capacities to scale Not long ago Silicon Valley preached a mantra of globalization and integration It was antithetical to the far-right s nationalistic agenda but it was good for business in an market that hinged on the skilled and unskilled labor of foreigners So when Trump signed an executive order banning immigration from five Muslim countries and subjecting those approved for visas to extra screening in January tech executives and their employees dissented Google co-founder Sergey Brin an immigrant from the Soviet Union joined demonstrations at the San Francisco airport to protest Trump s movement ban Mark Zuckerberg cited his grandparents Jewish refugees from Poland as grounds for his opposition to the approach Sam Altman also called on industry leaders to take a stand The precedent of invalidating already-issued visas and green cards should be extremely troubling for immigrants of any country he wrote on his personal blog We must object or our inaction will send a message that the administration can continue to take away our rights Multiple tech workers spent the first Trump presidency protesting these more sinister entailments of a data-driven financial system Over the following year Microsoft Google and Amazon employees would stage walkouts and circulate petitions demanding an end to contracts with the national shield state The pressure yielded image restoration campaigns Google dropped a bid for a million Defense Department contract Microsoft promised their system and services would not be used to separate families at the edge Related Trump s Referendum Is Also a Win for Tech s Right-Wing Warrior Class But the so-called tech resistance belied an inconvenient truth Silicon Valley firms supplied the program and computing infrastructure that enabled Trump s policies Companies like Babel and Palantir entered into contracts with ICE in becoming the bread and butter of ICE s surveillance capacities by mining personal input from thousands of sources for administration leadership converting it into searchable databases and mapping connections between individuals and organizations By conglomerates like Amazon Microsoft and Google were becoming essential too signing over the cloud services to host mounds of citizens and residents personal information Even as particular firms pledged to steer clear of contracts with the U S prevention state they continued working abroad and especially in Israel and Palestine Investigative reporting over the last year has brought more newest exchanges to light Deals between U S companies and the Israeli military ramped up after October according to leaked documents from Google and Microsoft Intelligence agencies relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to host surveillance information and used Google s Gemini and OpenAI s ChatGPT to cull through and operationalize much of it often playing direct roles in operations from arrest raids to airstrikes across the region These contracts gave U S system conglomerates the chance to refine military and homeland measure systems abroad until Trump s reelection signaled they could do so with little pushback at home OpenAI changed its terms of use last year to allow militaries and safety forces to deploy their systems for national safeguard purposes Google did the same this February removing language saying it wouldn t use its AI for weapons and surveillance from its community ethos program Meta also informed U S contractors could use its AI models for national shield purposes Device firms are committed to churning out high-risk products at a rapid pace Which is why privacy experts say their products can turbocharge the U S surveillance state at a time when constitutional protections are eroding It s going to give the establishment the impression that certain forms of surveillance are now worth deploying when before they would have been too stock intensive Ben Wizner director of the ACLU s Speech Privacy and Machinery Project offered over the phone last week Now that you have large language models you know the ruling body may say why not store thousands of hours of conversations just to run an AI tool through them and decide who you don t want in your country Related Google Is Helping the Trump Administration Deploy AI Along the Mexican Boundary The parts are all in place According to latest reports Palantir is building ICE an immigrationOS that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders including what they look like where they live and where they excursion and monitor their location in real time ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants social media accounts and to track down and detain antisemites and terrorists according to a newest announcement by the State Department We need to get better at treating this like a business Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons noted in a speech at the Edge Safety Expo in Phoenix earlier this month like Amazon Prime but with human beings It is significant to remember that countless of the propriety technologies private companies are offering the U S surveillance state are flawed Content moderation algorithms deployed by Meta often flag innocuous content as incendiary especially Arabic language posts OpenAI s large language model are notorious for generating hallucinatory statements and mistranslating phrases from foreign languages into English Stories of error abound in new raids and arrests from ICE bureaucrats mistaking Mahmoud Khalil for a trainee visa holder to citizens lawful residents and tourists with no criminal record being rounded up and deported Where AI falters technically it delivers ideologically But where AI falters technically it delivers ideologically We see this in Israel and Palestine as well as other contexts marked by relatively unchecked regime surveillance The algorithms embraced by Israel s protection forces remain rudimentary But bureaucrats have used them to justify increasingly draconian policies The Haifa-based human rights organization Adalah says there are hundreds of Palestinians with no criminal record or affiliation with militant groups held behind bars because right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to search their phones and social media pages and label what they noted shared or liked online as incitement to terrorism or patronage of terrorism Now we hear similar stories in American cities where First Amendment protections and due process are disintegrating The effects were nicely distilled by Ranjani Srinivasan an Indian Ph D pupil at Columbia who self-deported after ICE officers established up at her door and cancelled her legal status From refuge in Canada she reported the New York Times she was fearful of the U S expanded algorithmic arsenal I m fearful that even the greater part low-level political speech or just doing what we all do like shout into the abyss that is social media can turn into this dystopian nightmare Srinivasan disclosed where somebody is calling you a terrorist sympathizer and making you literally fear for your life and your safety It is frightening to think that all this happened in Trump s first days in office But corporate CEOs have been working with militaries and prevention agencies to sediment this status quo for years now The visible human cost of these exchanges may spawn the opposition needed to head off more repression But for now the groundwork is laid for the U S surveillance state to decisively operate at scale The post U S Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel Now It s Coming Home appeared first on The Intercept