Privacy
Libel case winner calls for suspension of sanctioned judge from community chair role
Simon Myerson
The President of Leeds Jewish Representative Council, Judge Laurence Saffer, is facing calls to suspend and investigate its hard-line Zionist Chair, Simon Myerson KC for crude and abusive social media posts.
The call for Myerson’s suspension comes from James Wilson, who published his letter to the President of Leeds Jewish Representative Council on Twitter/X on this week. In April 2023 Myerson re-posted a tweet by Twitter/X user Tom Doran which accused Wilson of being ‘the scum of the earth’ and in some way responsible for the death of Pete Newbon, a director of anti-left pressure group ‘Labour against Antisemitism’ (LAAS).
I am calling on Leeds Jewish Representative Council to immediately suspend and investigate their Chair Simon Myerson KC.
I am calling on them to do this because Mr Myerson has repeated crude dehumanising abuse of the kind used of Jewish people by the Nazis in the 1930s.… pic.twitter.com/1eKWSCPouV— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) May 7, 2024
James Wilson’s post containing his letter to Saffer
Wilson was the claimant in Wilson v Mendelsohn, Newbon and Cantor. He was recently awarded £30,000 in damages by a judge for defamation and misuse of private information. Newbon died by suicide in January 2022.
Doran’s tweet and Myerson’s re-tweet led to the High Court judge awarding Wilson increased damages. The judge said Doran’s tweet was crude abuse of the same dehumanising kind used against Jewish people by the Nazis in the 1930s. Despite the judge’s findings, it appears Myerson has not apologised to Wilson.
Myerson is also the part-time judge who was recently reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor and Lady Chief Justice for engaging in political in political controversy and posting offensive tweets. It is not known whether Mr Myerson KC continues to hold judicial office in light of his very public intervention in relation to a Green Party councillor. Skwawkbox has contacted the Judicial Press Office for comment.
Myerson recently called for the Green Party to suspend one of its elected councillors over his social media posts on the issue of Gaza. Myerson was also interviewed by LBC radio demanding the councillor’s immediate suspension. The hypocrisy of calling for another person to be suspended for their social media posts despite a judicial finding that he has engaged in crude abuse seems not to have been raised.
It is not known what, if any, action Leeds Jewish Representative Council will take about Myerson. The Council represents over 8,000 Jewish people who live in Leeds.
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Israeli AI ‘using WhatsApp data’ to target Gaza families for bomb strikes
‘Lavender’ AI set to prioritise hitting targets at home with their families and is said to be using WhatsApp data for its process – but how is Israel getting hold of it?
Israel’s AI system for targeting people for murder in Gaza uses WhatsApp data among its targeting criteria, according to a report in the Israeli 972 magazine and analysis by Paul Biggar of Tech for Palestine.
The platform is marketed as encrypted ‘end to end’, supposedly offering complete security, and WhatsApp told Middle East Monitor that:
WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested. Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
However, a 2021 Freedom of Information Request to the FBI revealed that WhatsApp’s owner provides ‘near real-time’ information to US authorities – not the content of messages in most cases, but of who is sending and receiving messages:
WhatsApp will produce certain user metadata, though not actual message content, every 15 minutes in response to a pen register [a special type of federal request], the FBI says. The FBI guide explains that most messaging services do not or cannot do this and instead provide data with a lag and not in anything close to real time: “Return data provided by the companies listed below, with the exception of WhatsApp, are actually logs of latent data that are provided to law enforcement in a non-real-time manner and may impact investigations due to delivery delays.”
This potentially fits with reports in Israeli media that Israel is using an artificial intelligence platform named ‘Lavender’ to identify thousands of human targets in Gaza and flag them for an airstrike, with WhatsApp data forming a key part of the AI’s decision process, based on the WhatsApp connections of supposed ‘militants’ – and that the system is designed to kill large numbers of civilians. One source told 972 that when Lavender identifies a target, Israeli forces:
bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.
But of course, people are in WhatsApp groups of all kinds of topics and for all kind of reasons – and merely being in a group which has a ‘militant’ member is no guarantee of any kind of ‘guilt’ – even if the right to resist occupation is disregarded, as Israel, the US and UK do.
This pattern raises the possibility that Israel is obtaining WhatsApp data, whether directly or from the US government. Another possibility is that Israel is accessing the data through the notorious ‘Pegasus’ hacking programme that has been shown to target WhatsApp users, hijacking their phones through WhatsApp even, in the later Pegasus versions, if they don’t open any suspicious links. Journalists, politicians, human rights activists and others are known to have been hacked by governments using the software, including its use by the Saudis against dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
So serious was the issue that in 2021 tech firm Apple sued NSO, the maker of Pegasus, for targeting Apple users. NSO claimed that the software is used only against ‘terrorists’ – as which Israel, the UK, US and some others have designated Palestinian resistance groups – but there is clearly no guarantee that the definition of ‘terrorist’ is not extended in practice to anyone targeted by Israel. Biggar has accused WhatsApp’s owners of breaking international law and violating human rights.
Facebook, which belongs to the same Meta parent group as WhatsApp, has been accused of shutting down the circulation of pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist posts and treating the term ‘Zionist’ as hate speech. In 2020, the company admitted changing its algorithms to filter out left-wing news and analysis from users’ feeds while allowing right-wing propaganda to flow unchecked.
However Israel is accessing the WhatsApp data it is said to be using to target Palestinians and their families, undoubtedly a war crime, the news that it is doing so is a warning for those who dissent from Establishment narratives and use ‘private’ messaging services to do so.
Meta continued its statement to Middle East Monitor:
Our principles are firm – we carefully review, validate and respond to law enforcement requests based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights.
The US and UK governments, however, continue to insist that Israel is following international law and recognised human rights standards, even as it murders tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children.
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Being Human in Digital Cities – review
In Being Human in Digital Cities, Myria Georgiou explores how technology reshapes urban life, transforming how we relate to ourselves, each other and the space around us. Examining the digital order’s influence, including datafication, surveillance and mapping, Georgiou’s essential book advocates for centring humans through the paradigm of the “right to the city” based on social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability, writes Samira Allioui.
Being Human in Digital Cities. Myria Georgiou. Polity. 2023.
Technology, embodied through so-called smart cities (places where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of their inhabitants and business), has been implemented into all aspects of public and private urban life. Recently, the United Nations created the Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology as a way to encourage cities to strategise around their “right to have digital rights,” stating that: “Together, as we seek to recover from the pandemic, we must learn to better curtail harmful use of digital technology and better unleash its power as a democratising force and an enabler”.
Myria Georgiou’s Being Human in Digital Cities addresses the question, how do digital cities change what it means to be human in relation to digital urbanism and digital justice? It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives. The city is where so many hopes and fears emerge for the future of humanity, and therefore studying its changing nature in a digitalised world is crucial. Moreover, the relationship between the transformation of cities and the right to the city has not yet been seriously explored.
It has never been more urgent to understand how the digital order functions and its implications for controlled cities and lives.
Intrigued by the growing symbolic power of technology in regulating the city, Georgiou demonstrates how an unstable but tenacious urban order is planned, performed, and sometimes resisted on platforms and networks to sustain the social order in cities that experience perpetual crisis. Georgiou’s principal thesis is that the digital order reflects the revived and contradictory mobilisation of humanist values across different quarters of the city. Human-centric conceptions of technology are at the heart of an emerging digital urban order. According to Georgiou, these values are gaining renewed currency by imagining and planning relationships between humans and data.
The book identifies the rhetorics and performances of the digital order as core elements of processes of change in the relational constitution of cities, technologies, and power (42). The book’s generative force comes from Georgiou’s assertion that a dynamic comeback of humanist values in and for the digital city is underway. Her central argument is that humanism matters when it mobilises (populist humanism), normalises (demotic humanism) and contests (critical humanism) power (143-144). Considering the various implications of being human in digital cities is a critical topic at a time when declarations and manifestos have emerged worldwide claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. Digital rights are a range of protections regarding access to the internet, privacy, transparency regarding how data is used, control over how data is used and democratic participation in municipal technology decisions. They need to be protected because they represent the bridge that links our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
[Digital rights] link our traditional human rights with the complexities of the online world, ensuring that our digital identities, decisions, and interactions are treated with the same protection and respect as in the physical world.
The digital order has become a post-neoliberal response to neoliberal crises, and it breaks from the strategies of neoliberalism in different ways (31). It is a new order which “emerges because of widespread pressures to recognize the sacredness of life and the value of society” (30). Through “the promotion of unpredictability, openness and diversity, the digital order integrates instability into stability” (31). The author subtly explains why she privileges the category of the human and consequently rehumanisation-dehumanisation in understanding the digital order. Since technology is more and more infiltrating our consciousness, we become addicted to our devices that distract us and feed us information. But paradoxically, while these changes drive us to retreat to corners of comfort, we try to conquer divisiveness by cultivating communities. A research journey across eight cities of the global North and South – from London to Seoul, and from Los Angeles to Athens – over seven years has shaped Georgiou’s understanding of the digital order. From this grounding, she explains how she adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice. Georgiou’s methodological choice of a critical humanist approach promotes an open, creative, and participant-led approach that includes the perspectives of humans.
Georgiou adopts a decentred conception of the city which privileges a transnational and transurban vision and practice.
Her compelling research reveals two paradoxes. First, migrants’ experiences, gathered through interviews conducted with 60 teens in Athens and Los Angeles, present rehumanisation-dehumanisation as a continuum rather than a blunt proposition. Second, the Global South is ever present in cities of the Global North (113). Georgiou’s findings suggest that becoming urban reinforces autonomy. For example, migrants’ everyday experiences, mediated and linked through urban migration and technology, reveal their acute awareness that the development of autonomy protects them from certain kinds of dehumanisation such as exclusion Moreover, during this research conducted in the context of a European project on young people’s digital lives, Georgiou witnessed sentiments of enthusiasm and relief when participants were talking about a commonly used urban technology: Google Maps, including Google Earth and Street View (115). Participants were relieved because “becoming urban is not only about learning but also about being an autonomous subject in navigating city”.
Her work evidences the value of everyday technologies (namely, smartphones and apps) and the concept of “secret city” (117) for those excluded from so many other spaces of representation. A secret city only exists in a sociotechnical imagination. As a place of consumption, it is imaginary in the sense that it remains discovered and consumed through technical devices. In fact, as smart cities begin to become dehumanised realms and behavioural data is neglected, the place of humans risks being devalued. Georgiou’s research is an invaluable attempt to claim and interrogate human experiences in their entanglement with the digital in urban settings.
Georgiou describes predictive policing, the practice of using algorithms to analyse massive amounts of information to predict and help prevent potential crimes as a mundane form of symbolic violence regularly applied in the city (126). This is part of a wider trend of states’ increasing the surveillance of citizens, with surveillance understood as any personal data acquisition for management influence or entitlement. Predictive policing systems have been empirically shown to create feedback loops, where police are frequently sent back to the same neighbourhoods, regardless of the true crime rate. In the US, predictive policing tends to disproportionately target more African Americans, areas with higher concentrations of Latinos and Black, Asian and Minority ethnic (BAME) people.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability.
In response to these trends of profiling and surveillance, the right to the city emerges as a new paradigm that provides an alternative framework with which to rethink cities and human settlements based on the principles of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. According to Georgiou, it presents “a revamped moral vision which points to potentially democratising processes that recognize and address urban injustices” (97). It is worth noting that Georgiou, unlike other authors, prefers to address the concept of the right to the city rather than the “right to a smart city”, her research does not advocate an approach focused on “smart citizens”, “smart citizenship” and “smart cities”. She avoids a citizen-centred approach and instead privileges life, freedom, and wellbeing, expanding her framework to include all humans in urban settings, whether they are citizens or migrants.
Finally, the book, brimming with secondary research, opens new critical avenues into techno-political research on digital cities. More precisely, knowing that humans are less studies as agents involved in the creation of digital, the book sheds light on urban humanity which often remains an opaque category. It highlights humans as agents of change and the displacement of questions of power but also of rights to the city. She investigates essential questions about what it means to be human in digital cities, suggesting that “the most compelling claims to humanism come from those who experience dehumanisation”. Such offerings beg the question of readers, who is and isn’t seen as fully human within city spaces and how does the dawn of the digital city affect those boundaries?
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Goldilock Project on Shutterstock.
Government ordered Google to disclose names of users who watched videos
US attempts to trample privacy
US federal authorities ordered Google to provide names, addresses, phone numbers and details of other videos watched, of all users that viewed particular YouTube videos, according to Forbes magazine – and to provide the IP addresses of anyone who watched them without being logged in.
The government said it wanted the details to investigate a suspected crime committed by the publisher of the videos – but did not demonstrate any suspicion that those watching the videos had committed or colluded in any crime, telling the company only that the records would be ‘relevant and material’ to its investigation. Tens of thousands of accounts are believed to have been involved.
A US court granted the order but asked Google not to publicise it. In a separate incident, government agencies asked Google for a list of all accounts that watched eight livestreamed videos. It’s not known whether Google acceded to the orders.
Google told Forbes that it has ‘rigorous’ processes to protect user privacy, but the discovery of the government moves raised concerns about governments being able to access private information just because it claims ‘relevance’ and does not demonstrate any reasonable grounds to suspect that an individual has committed any crime. It is not known whether the UK or other governments have made similar attempts to access Google user records.
In 2021, Google admitted running ‘experiments’ that hid some websites from search results, raising questions about the risk of political or commercial interference in search results. In January of this year, the company paid five billion US dollars to settle a lawsuit over its collection of user data through its Chrome browser even when users activated its ‘incognito’ mode.
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Prince Harry Demands Piers Morgan Police Probe as ‘Shockingly Dishonest’ Mirror Pays Out Again Over Hacking
Prince Harry has won another big pay out to settle his phone-hacking case with the publisher of the Daily Mirror – and repeated calls for former Editor Piers Morgan to face criminal investigation.
It came as High Court judge Mr Justice said that Morgan’s former employers, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), has been “shockingly dishonest” for concealing endemic wrongdoing at its Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and Sunday People tabloids between 1996 and 2011.
It follows a comprehensive courtroom victory for the Duke of Sussex in December in which Justice Fancourt found that there could be “no doubt” Mr Morgan – the Daily Mirror’s Editor from 1995 to 2004 – knew about his newspaper’s hacking and habitual unlawful use of private investigators.
On Friday, MGN agreed to pay the prince an undisclosed sum in respect of 115 articles over and above the £140,000 he received last year for distress and invasion of privacy relating to 15 other illegally-obtained stories.
During the trial, it was heard that MGN was spending up to £925,000 a year on illegal snooping, targeting thousands of people of interest to the editors of MGN’s three titles.
Lawyers for the prince read a statement outside court in which he claimed a famous win and – focusing on Morgan, who did not defend himself at trial but attacked the judgment from his doorstep – called for the “rule of law” to be upheld.
The prince said: “After our victory in December, Mirror Group have finally conceded the rest of my claim, which would have consisted of another two trials, additional evidence and 115 more articles.
"Everything we said was happening at Mirror Group was in fact happening, and indeed far worse as the court ruled in its extremely damning judgment.
“As the judge has said this morning, we have uncovered and proved the shockingly dishonest way the Mirror Group acted for many years and then sought to conceal the truth.
"In light of all this, we call again for the authorities to uphold the rule of law and to prove that no one is above it. That includes Mr Morgan, who as Editor, knew perfectly well what was going on, as the judge held.
“Even his own employer realised it simply could not call him as a witness of truth. His contempt for the court’s ruling and his continued attacks ever since demonstrate why it was so important to obtain a clear and detailed judgment.
“As I said back in December, our mission continues. I believe in the positive change it will bring for all of us. It is the very reason why I started this, and why I will continue to see it through to the end.”
In its most recent statement on the matter, given to Byline Times last week, the Metropolitan Police said it was continuing to consider the content of Justice Fancourt’s 386-page ruling before deciding whether to re-initiate criminal inquiries into Morgan.
Morgan was first interviewed in February 2014 over phone-hacking by Scotland Yard’s Operation Golding. Despite Golding’s discovery of significant evidence – and the prospect of securing multiple former staff as witnesses against the company – and heavy expenditure of public resources on Golding, former Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders decided in 2015 that there was “insufficient” prospect of winning a conviction “in any” of 10 potential cases against MGN employees.
However, substantial evidence of criminal behaviour and cover up at MGN emerged last summer at trial during in which Justice Fancourt found endemic unlawful information gathering went on at MGN’s three national newspapers between 1996 and 2011.
At trial, former Mirror journalist Omid Scobie gave evidence that he heard Morgan being told a story about the singer and actress Kylie Minogue was sourced from a voicemail.
It also heard from former New Labour Downing Street Communications Director Alastair Campbell, who, according to the judge, gave “compelling evidence” that illegal techniques were used by the Mirror to obtain details of his mortgage.
In addition, Melanie Cantor, an agent and publicist for the presenter and columnist Ulrika Jonsson, said that Morgan “always seemed to be the first person to know about events that had recently happened” involving her clients, and that invoices and phone records demonstrated that she had been repeatedly hacked by Morgan’s Mirror reporters.
The judge concluded that “sensitive information… was passed to Mr Morgan, who must have known how it had been obtained”.
The judge ruled that other key MGN figures, some of whom now hold senior roles at other organisations, were aware or likely aware of illegal activity – including Richard Wallace, now Piers Morgan’s boss at Murdoch-owned TalkTV and Neil Wallis, former Editor of The People who in 2015 was acquitted of phone-hacking charges relating to his time as Deputy Editor at the News of the World.
Others include Morgan’s Mirror Deputy Editor Tina Weaver (for whom he advocated in 2001 to become Sunday Mirror editor), Morgan’s former Features Editor Mark Thomas, and Sunday Mirror and The People Senior Editors Nick Buckley and James Scott – the journalist who handed Morgan one of his biggest Mirror scoops hacked straight from the voicemails of former England football manager Sven Goran Eriksson and television presenter Ulrika Jonsson.
The Duke of Sussex's call for action from the authorities followed a bruising day for MGN in which it was ordered to meet the claimants’ costs of £1.9 million as they demonstrated that MGN had orchestrated a cover-up of illegality involving some former board members and the legal department, which the judge described as “shockingly dishonest”.
Justice Fancourt also rejected an application to appeal against his decision to apply limitation laws to some phone hacking cases – which give claimants a six-year countdown to bring legal action from the time at which they “reasonably” ought to have believed they had been wronged.
However, the matter, relating to the Duke’s co-claimants actress Nikki Sanderson and former wife of comedian Paul Whitehouse, Fiona Wightman, will now be referred to the Court of Appeal directly for a decision on whether the judge’s findings merit review.
Dan Evans is a former employee of MGN and a witness for the claimants in Sussex & Ors vs MGN Ltd
Exclusive: Streeting uses NHS privatisation announcement to tout IDF-linked health firm
Health privatisation enthusiast ‘Labour’ health spokesman namechecks Israeli military-linked firm as glowing example of private involvement in NHS – and visited firm in Israel on LFI-paid junket
Image by ‘The Agitator‘
As the death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza climbed above 30,000 this week according to observers EuroMed Monitor, Wes Streeting used an Israeli private health data company as his shining example of successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ – ie privatisation – in the NHS as ‘a source close to Mr Streeting’ briefed the media about his plans to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private corporate provision if Labour gets into government.
The ‘source’ told the i:
Labour will encourage the spread of new technologies so private sector “innovators” have a clearer route to get their product into the NHS…
The best example on the tech side of ‘opening the door to entrepreneurs’ is where you’ve got a company or innovator of a product which works really well on the NHS. There’s an example of some at home kidney tests made by Healthy.io which were first sold into the NHS in 2021
But the link – and the Labour trolling of those outraged by the Gaza slaughter – goes much further. Healthy.io is owned and run by Yonatan Adiri, former Chief Technology Officer for the whole of Israel and an adviser to then-Israeli PM Shimon Peres. Adiri’s interests are not limited to private healthcare tech. His published works include Terror in the Court: Counter-Terrorism and Judicial Power in the Israeli Case Study and Counter Terror Warfare: The Judicial Front (2008), written for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (2005).
Adiri’s interest in ‘counter-terror’ did not end in 2008. Just two months ago, shortly after the Hamas kibbutz raid, Adiri spoke to Bloomberg Technology ‘The importance of Intelligence in Israel-Hamas war’, comparing Hamas to ISIS and talking of the use of technology by intelligence services to defeat the Palestinian resistance organisation:
Skwawkbox did not find details of any involvement with Israeli spytech unit ‘Unite 8200’ – the cyberspy unit whose members reportedly paint an ‘X’ on their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill – in Adiri’s IDF service, but according to his bio page as a speaker for hire on allamericanspeakers.com, he remains a reserve captain in the ‘international operational negotiations unit’ and has acted as moderator at discussions held by the Israeli-government-sponsored Institute for National Security Studies on the use of drones and other technology for ‘national security’:
According to one article, Adiri acted for the IDF in negotiating a prisoner swap with Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.
Adiri also acted as senior national security ‘policy consultant’ for the Reut Institute, a right-wing Israeli think tank that now plays a key role in Israel’s attempts to counter the peaceful pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement.
And while Adiri may not have been a member of Unit 8200, he is – since at least March 2023 – an ‘industry mentor’ for the ‘LEAP’ initiative:
The LEAP website says that:
Leap was created in partnership with 8200bio, an organization of 8200 alumni working to promote the Israeli healthtech ecosystem. The program does strive to bring exceptional 8200 alumni into the healthtech domain, but the program is open to entrepreneurs of any background, according to the criteria described above.
Like its partner 8200 Impact, 8200bio is run by former members of what 8200 Impact calls the ‘elite IDF Signal Intelligence and Cybersecurity unit’. Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in 2020 that:
Nor did Wes Streeting simply pull the name Healthy.io out of a hat without knowing the company’s links. In May 2022, according to right-wing pressure group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Streeting visited Israel on LFI’s dime – and LFI said ahead of the trip that:
Streeting will also visit Healthy.io, a tech provider for the NHS and Boots.
Right-wing libel-merchant and ‘dauphin of phone hacking‘ Lee Harpin, writing for Jewish News rather than the Jewish Chronicle that he cost so much money in damages for smearing left-wingers, confirmed that the visit went ahead. Streeting told the NHS Confederation last spring that he had been ‘blown away’ by his trip.
Keir Starmer employs a Unit 8200 alumnus, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor members’ social media.
Wes Streeting has come out as an avid NHS privatiser – which will surprise no one who has been watching. That he chose to garnish his promise to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private profit-taking by touting an Israeli – and Israeli military-linked – firm during Israel’s war crimes, mass slaughter of women, children, medics and teachers and the bombing of hospitals and schools, in Gaza makes the betrayal even worse.
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Exclusive: police try to gag Greenstein, invade privacy through bail conditions
Human rights activist arrested by anti-terror police for a single tweet faces censorship and snooping for speaking out against genocide
Image: S Walker
Brighton-based Jewish left-winger and human rights activist Tony Greenstein faces censorship and an assault on his privacy after he was arrested last week for a single tweet supporting Palestinian resistance in Gaza against Israeli genocide.
Greenstein was bailed until spring after a nine-hour detention and the confiscation of his electronics, but Skwawkbox understands that the bail conditions imposed upon him represent a severe invasion of his privacy and an assault on his freedom of speech:
- Greenstein must reside at his flat and sleep there every night – a significant issue when he has a son with special emotional needs living at a separate address
- He is banned from commenting on Twitter/X about Gaza and Palestine
- If he buys a new phone – his previous one remains with police – he must notify police of the phone number and also of the IMEI number of his handset
Phone manufacturer Blackview strongly recommends that anyone with a mobile phone keep their IMEI number – the unique 15-digit identifier of the physical handset – private and do not share it with anyone untrustworthy(!), because of the grave security risks, because possession of the IMEI allows a third party to:
- Track your phone. If your phone is stolen, the person who stole it can use your IMEI number to track your phone’s location [even if it is switched off or the SIM card is swapped]
- Block your phone from being used on a network. If you report your phone as stolen, your phone carrier can block your IMEI number from being used on their network. This will prevent the phone from being used to make calls, send text messages, or use the internet.
- Use your phone to commit fraud. Some criminals use stolen phones to commit fraud, such as making unauthorized calls or sending spam messages. They can also use your phone to access your personal information, such as your bank account details.
- Clone your phone. It is possible to clone a phone’s IMEI number. This means that the criminal can create a duplicate of your phone that has the same IMEI number. This can be used to commit fraud or to track your movements.
Of perhaps even greater concern is the ban on posts about Gaza and Palestine. As one of the UK’s most outspoken Jewish advocates of Palestinian rights and Israel advocates’ war on freedom of speech in the UK and elsewhere – and a fearless critic of Israel’s fake news and invented evidence used to justify its genocide in Gaza – Greenstein’s importance to the political debate is considerable – which may well be a contributing factor to his targeting by police, presumably acting on complaints from pro-Israel right-wingers.
Greenstein was given a suspended sentence in September after a farcical trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court in which he and fellow Palestine Action activists were convicted of criminal damage against Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit despite no damage being done, and so faces the imposition of that sentence if convicted of the latest accusation. The pro-Israel lobby, however, has no qualms about seeing troublesome opponents jailed for speaking out against mass murder and apartheid.
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Pirate Party Australia Sounds Alarm on Privacy Risks of New Identity Verification Laws
Pirate Party Australia has sounded the alarm over the potential risks to personal privacy posed by the newly introduced Identity Verification Services (IVS) Bill 2023. This bill claims to bolster identity verification processes but instead introduces new risks to Australians. “While it’s good that there’s finally going to be a legislative framework here, we’re concerned […]
Cartoon: Selfie surveillance
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Revealed: Met Police Scans Almost Quarter of a Million Faces Using Facial Recognition Technology in 2023
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The Metropolitan Police has scanned almost a quarter of a million faces using live facial recognition software in 2023, Byline Times can reveal.
Freedom of Information requests filed to every police force in the UK showed that law enforcement officers in London have been zealous users of the system, which automatically scans the faces of passers-by and matches them against a watchlist.
Civil liberties groups and MPs have said such practices are incompatible with human rights. They have also criticised plans recently announced by the Policing Minister to open up the passport database for use by law enforcement.
The figures come as the EU is in the process of banning police use of live facial recognition (LFR) – while officers in London are pressing ahead with its use.
The Met took several months to respond to the FOI request, which revealed it had scanned an estimated 247,764 faces in 2023 in 13 deployments across London. These efforts resulted in just 12 arrests.
Among the events targeted were the King’s Coronation and his birthday celebrations, raising the question of whether protestors have been targeted by LFR cameras.
Campaigners said that LFR will have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Conservative MP Charles Walker – one of 65 parliamentarians who have called for an immediate stop to its use – said: “The difference between us and China is that the state is our servant, we are not the servants of the state. The presumption in an open and free society is that most people are going about their business and conducting their lives in a lawful fashion.”
Anna Bacciarelli, associate tech director at Human Rights Watch, said that the police scanning faces in this way is a “disproportionate use of such powerful and invasive technology” which can have "a chilling effect and deter people from exercising their expression and assembly rights in public spaces”.
When contacted for comment, the Met sent Byline Times a previously released statement which said that the technology “enables us to be more focussed in our approach to tackle crime, including robbery and violence against women and girls”.
It continued: “We understand the concerns raised by some groups and individuals about emerging technology and the potential for bias. We have listened to these voices.”
How Does Facial Recognition Work?
The Met currently uses facial recognition in two ways: live and retrospective. The former is the type that has campaigners concerned.
The technology scans the faces of people as they walk by, immediately assessing them against a watchlist and telling officers if there is a match. It has been procured from a company called NEC.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary select committee in May, the Met’s director of intelligence Lindsey Chiswick said that if there is not a match the image is not only immediately deleted, but is also pixelated – a function called "privacy by design".
If there is a match then officers can approach the individual and, if necessary, make an arrest, although Chiswick told MPs that they are not obliged to do so. Positive images can be kept for 31 days or longer if there is a judicial reason.
Although there have been concerns in the past about false positives, the Met’s data suggests that there has not been a single example of a false positive match in 2023.
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She said the technology had led to “significant” arrests for offences including conspiracy to supply class A drugs, assaulting emergency workers, GBH, and having escaped from prison.
The watchlists themselves are “specific and bespoke” to the event at which they were used, Chiswick said. They are deleted after the deployment.
In the case of King Charles’ Coronation, she told MPs: “It was specific and bespoke to that event, and it contained some fixated individuals who we knew were going to go to the coronation and potentially do harm.”
In addition to arrests, Chiswick claimed that LFR can have a significant “deterrence” effect and cited the Coronation as an example.
When Byline Times asked the Met whether it had credible intelligence about a potential offence which was deterred by the deployment of LFR, a spokesman said: “The MPS recognise the fundamental right of people to lawfully protest and, to date, overt LFR has not been deployed for this purpose. Should the MPS have intelligence to indicate there are people attending these events who have previously been engaged in criminal activity then this is a tactic that is available.”
Emmanuelle Andrews, policy and campaigns manager at Liberty, said its use at the Coronation was “extremely worrying”.
She added: “In the context of a broad crackdown on the ways in which people can make their voices heard, increasing use of facial recognition to target protestors is likely to make it even harder for people to stand up for what they believe in.”
Some campaigners have criticised the opaque reporting of deployments. The record provided by the Met lists vague locations like Camden High Street or Wardour Street to refer to operations in which tens of thousands of faces were scanned.
In one case the location is simply given as “Islington” – an entire borough which is home to 240,000 people – making it hard for the public to assess whether use of the technology is proportionate.
Byline Times asked the Met about these deployments. A spokesman said: “The MPS has always been very transparent in its approach to the use of facial recognition technology and we have informed the public of where the technology is to be deployed in advance.”
Chiswick’s evidence to MPs shed some light as to its use. She said deployments in the first six months of the year in Camden had been related to gang activity and a shooting in January at a church in Euston.
The targets of other operations remain unclear.
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A 'Blunt Tool’
The majority of police forces have never used live facial recognition.
South Wales Police is among those which has used it in the past two years, most recently at a rugby match in Cardiff in November. Other events it has targeted have included a concert by the dance band Chemical Brothers in Cardiff Bay in August, at an air show in Swansea, and at Cardiff concerts by Harry Styles and Beyoncé.
The EU has unveiled plans to ban the use of live facial recognition by police as part of its AI Act, which is currently making its way through the European Parliament.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Policing Minister Chris Philp last month announced plans to open up the country’s database of 45 million passport holders to help catch shoplifters.
For Anna Bacciarelli, the plan is “extremely concerning” and akin to putting “anyone with a passport on a virtual police line-up”.
MP Charles Walker said: “The blunt tool of facial recognition places us all under suspicion, we are reduced to units of data to be harvested and cross-referenced. Autocracies like to keep an eye on their citizens because they don’t trust them, democracies should always aspire for a healthier, more trusting, relationship with those they serve.”
Madeleine Stone, advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, said the UK was taking a “reckless approach” because “facial recognition is a dangerously authoritarian technology that turns the public into walking ID cards in a constant police line up.” She believes it must be banned.
A Home Office spokesman said technology can “help the police quickly and accurately identify those wanted for serious crimes”.
They added: “It also frees up police time and resources, meaning more officers can be out on the beat, engaging with communities and carrying out complex investigations.”
One question asked by MPs in the May evidence session was whether the watchlists could eventually be linked to the network of cameras across the country to track down suspects. Chiswick answered that, while this was technically possible, its use in this way is currently restricted by the law.
