Facial recognition technology: The criminal among us

Al Jazeera English

When I was a child, I used to dream of growing up to live in a magical world where my every move would be monitored by cameras tracking my identity, behaviour, and emotions.

Just kidding. But that reality is exactly where we are headed.

Welcome to the age of total surveillance and the extinction of the concept of privacy - the latest efforts by the global politico-corporate elite to render existence as oppressive as possible before the planet combusts in a climate catastrophe.

One pillar of the surveillance industry is facial recognition technology, which has been making waves as of late with headlineslike The FBI Has Access to Over 640 Million Photos of Us Through Its Facial Recognition Database and Facial recognition smart glasses could make public surveillance discreet and ubiquitous.

Of course, there are plenty of dedicated cheerleaders as well. In June, the New York Times ran an op-edtitled How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer, in which New York police commissioner James O'Neill swears on behalf of the technology's "worth as a crime-fighting resource".

But how can anyone be made safer by something that is so often frighteningly inaccurate?

Last year, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conducted a test of Rekognition, Amazon's facial recognition software, which compared images of all the members of the US Congress with a database of mugshots.

The results, according to Rekognition: 28 US Congresspeople were identified as criminals. And what do you know: the false matches pertained disproportionately to people of colour.

Now imagine the complications that might arise when you have such technology in the hands of US law enforcement officials who have already proven themselves predisposed to shooting black people for no reason.

In addition to marketing its product to officials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other notoriously abusive entities, Amazon has also pushed for Rekognition's use in police body cameras - which would presumably only increase the chances of pre-emptive misidentification by trigger-happy forces of law and order.

Despite pushback from Amazon employees and others alarmed by the implications of surveillance collaboration with the state, the company remains committed. A recent Vox article quotes Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy as arguing that "just because tech could be misused doesn't mean we should ban it and condemn it" since other things like email and knives can also be misused: "You could use a knife in a surreptitious way."

Fair enough, but knives at least serve a wide variety of useful purposes for the average human, as opposed to simply sustaining a dystopian landscape built for the enrichment of a tyrannical elite minority. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Peace to Prosperity: Will Jared Kushner have his knafeh and eat it too?

Middle East Eye

Back in 2010, New York Times columnist and faithful Zionist Thomas Friedman complained: “Destructive critics dismiss Gaza as an Israeli prison, without ever mentioning that had Hamas decided - after Israel unilaterally left Gaza - to turn it into Dubai rather than Tehran, Israel would have behaved differently, too”.

The dubious merits of Dubai aside, Friedman himself never managed to mention that the purpose of Israel’s not-really-withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was, as then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s own senior adviser put it, the “freezing of the peace process” and “prevent[ing] the establishment of a Palestinian state”.

Nor did the columnist care to devote much thought to the fact that Israel’s “behaviour” has often consisted of bombing Palestinians to smithereens, or that it’s not quite possible to build Dubai while under brutal military occupation and siege.

Now, nine years after the Friedmanian prescription for Gaza, we’ve got another, higher profile non-solution to the Palestinian question - this one courtesy of the nepotistic administration of Donald Trump and specifically his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Kushner’s recently unveiled economic plan, titled "Peace to Prosperity", purports to offer “a vision to empower the Palestinian people to build a prosperous and vibrant Palestinian society” and to “realise an opportunity to pursue their dreams”.

Never mind that the Palestinians themselves are not on board; after all, Arabs cannot possibly understand their own best interests without some guidance. Luckily, thanks to a Western habit called Orientalism, Kushner & Co can totally read their minds. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The war next time: Militant theatrics on the Israel-Lebanon border

Middle East Eye

A recent Times of Israel headline announced: “Israeli army cadets train for takeover of Hezbollah-held Lebanese village.”

Lest the innocent reader deduce from this phrasing that there is in fact a specific Lebanese village held by Hezbollah facing imminent assault by Israeli cadets, the article goes on to explain that the training is merely in preparation for “a future war”.

Indeed, Israel has been talking about the next war with Lebanon since, well, the last one, which took place in 2006 and resulted in the Israeli military slaughter of some 1,200 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Granted, the concept of civilians versus combatants can be tricky in the Lebanese context, since one can assume that many Hezbollah militants wouldn’t be militants at all if Israel had not brutally occupied the country for 22 years while perpetrating periodic massacres.

At the start of the 2006 war, former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Halutz threatened to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” - an objective that was dutifully pursued as Israel went about obliterating roads, bridges and entire neighbourhoods.

South Lebanon was particularly battered, as were Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh - also known as a “Hezbollah stronghold” in the mindless and carnage-abetting lingo of the Western media.

I visited the area a month after the conclusion of the war, and was able to witness the landscape of craters where apartment blocks had once stood. From this malevolent Israeli performance emerged the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine”, which the Times of Israel defines as a “military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against a militant entity by destroying civilian infrastructure”.

So much for the Geneva Conventions. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Fortress Europe Is Sociopathic

Jacobin

Imagine, for a moment, that you saved someone from drowning. Chances are you’d be seen as a hero.

Now imagine you saved thousands of people from drowning. In Europe these days, you might just be labeled a criminal.

Take the case of thirty-five-year old German boat captain Pia Klemp, who personally helped rescue more than one thousand migrants in the Mediterranean — that deadly body of water protecting Fortress Europe from hapless humans seeking a better life. For her efforts, Klemp is now facing twenty years in prison thanks to the sociopathic machinations of the Republic of Italy, which has been at the forefront of criminalizing sea rescues and other humanitarian activity.

In 2018, fascist groupie Matteo Salvini — who serves as both Italy’s interior minister and deputy prime minister — closed Italian ports to NGO rescue boats, while also vowing to deport half a million migrants and refugees as part of a “mass cleaning” of the country.

Of course, it has always been perfectly fine for Europe to plunder Africa and other migrant-producing territories in any way it sees fit. Never mind, too, that the legacy of colonialism has more than a little to do with current migration patterns. The casting of the migrant as an apocalyptic menace comes in handy in corrupt European locales — ciao, Italia — where public attention must be constantly redirected from all the ways the state is actively fucking over the citizenry.

According to the official unhinged rhetoric, Klemp and her ilk are guilty of collaborating with human traffickers and of aiding and abetting illegal migration to Europe — namely, by guaranteeing invading migrants that they’ll be promptly scooped up from the Mediterranean and deposited on dry land with VIP service. But this argument, you might say, hardly holds water.

A recent press release from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) quotes Frédéric Penard, director of operations of the NGO SOS Méditerranée: “The reality is, even with fewer and fewer humanitarian vessels at sea, people with little alternatives will continue to undertake this deadly sea crossing regardless of the risks.” Penard continues: “The only difference now is people are nearly four times more likely to die compared to last year, according to the International Organization for Migration.”

MSF notes that, since Italy’s decision one year ago to block humanitarian vessels from its ports, “at least 1,151 vulnerable men, women and children have died” at sea, and more than ten thousand have been forcibly returned to the point of embarkation in Libya, an infamous hotspot for migrant torture, rape, kidnapping, and slavery. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.