5-5-2019
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Facebook’s new initiative to move content moderation to the edge, running their algorithms directly on users’ phones, is that it gives the world’s repressive regimes a blueprint for the ultimate global surveillance network. By pushing governments to see surveillance not as an active process that requires identifying targets, intercepting their communications and centrally analyzing unimaginably large haystacks for the proverbial needle, but rather as a distributed process running directly on users’ own ever-present smartphones, Facebook has demonstrated that the future lies in the surveillance state.
Governments have long adapted to technological change by harnessing the latest communications modalities to surveil their citizens and gather intelligence on foreign nations. Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013 opened the public’s eyes to just how prevalent this surveillance really is and how deeply it reaches into our lives. Yet the Snowden disclosures also revealed how limited current global scale surveillance is, even with the NSA’s resources. The internet is simply too big to attempt to hoover up the totality of all global communications and the processing resources required to make sense of everything said and seen worldwide in realtime is beyond the ability of even the US Government.
Facebook’s new initiative to move its content matching and AI content moderation algorithms to the edge offers governments across the world a powerful new template for surveilling both their own citizens and Facebook’s two billion other users spanning the globe.
Suddenly instead of having to compromise users’ devices or intercept their communications in transit and decrypt and process them, Facebook reminds us that users will be perfectly happy to allow companies to download filtering algorithms directly to their phones to process all of their communications on-device. This not only sidesteps the encryption debate by granting access to communications before they are encrypted for transmission and after they have been decrypted for display, but also avoids scalability concerns by offloading processing of each user’s communications to their own device….
While Facebook’s efforts are still at the research stage, the company’s presentation demonstrates that it has made considerable progress in proving out the feasibility of performing large scale production content moderation entirely on-device. For governments Facebook’s model offers a blueprint of the ultimate surveillance machine.
Rather than relying on Facebook, governments could require all cellphones used on their soil to install a monitoring application that authenticates them to the local cellular providers while also performing realtime monitoring of all communications that transit the device or which occur in its presence, turning their microphone and camera into a 24/7 mobile surveillance station.
Alternatively, governments could require device manufacturers to embed such surveillance filtering directly into dedicated firmware on the device that prevents the phone from being used on local networks without it….
Couple this with Facebook’s ability to map the realtime physical location of its users and create richly detailed maps of the movement habits of any given demographic or interest group. The result is perhaps the most powerful surveillance network ever conceived….
For a company that refuses to deny tracking the realtime movements of journalists and politicians, …Facebook went to great lengths earlier this year to remind the public that it reserves the right to utilize their GPS, camera and photo galleries for any purpose it deems fit….The company did not respond to requests for comment. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/05/05/facebook-just-gave-repressive-regimes-the-ultimate-surveillance-blueprint/#bf0df324721d
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6-14-2017 BAE, Britain’s biggest arms company, secretly sold mass surveillance technology to six Middle Eastern governments that have been criticised for repressing their citizens, the BBC has reported.
The sophisticated technology can be used to spy on a huge number of people’s emails and mobile phones, triggering accusations from human rights campaigners that it is being used to silence or jail dissidents.
According to documents obtained by the BBC, the equipment has been sold in recent years to the governments of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Algeria and Morocco
The documents also reveal official concerns that the export of the technology could backfire and imperil the security of Britain and its allies, the BBC said.
BAE said it was unable to comment on specific contracts “due to the strict national security and confidentiality regulations we operate under”. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/15/bae-mass-surveillance-technology-repressive-regimes
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Among the businesses accompanying the prime minister on his trip is the defence, security and aerospace company BAE Systems. BAE has faced dozens of accusations of corruption and bribery over the past two decades and has been dogged by controversy over its dealings with repressive governments in Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Chile and Indonesia. The company was also involved in the manufacture of cluster bombs, weapons that kill indiscriminately and can present a serious danger to civilians for decades after a conflict. In 2008 the UK and more than 90 other countries signed the convention on cluster munitions banning their use, development, production, stockpiling, retention and transfer. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/11/selling-arms-cameron
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6-13-2018 Beijing began began building a nationwide surveillance network in 2005 called Skynet to better control public order in urban areas. In 2015, authorities launched a dramatic expansion and update of Skynet called Sharp Eyes, intended to cover the entire country with facial-recognition systems and other technology….“Foreigners Can’t Get Enough” of Hikvision’s stock thanks to the firm’s high profit margins, without expanding on exactly how such margins were attained. A wide array of institutional funds representing millions of clients from firms like Vanguard, JPMorgan, and Fidelity have also invested in the firms. Since the trade link opened in 2016, Hikvision and Dahua’s stock prices are up 55 percent and almost 70 percent respectively. And the firms’ exposure to global investors is only increasing. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/13/in-chinas-far-west-companies-cash-in-on-surveillance-program-that-targets-muslims/
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