The history of control and censorship in the world is far and wide, and it neither begins nor ends with the examples cited in this essay. Privacy, control, and surveillance have long been explored in popular culture, as a reflection of the societies they were created in. Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the year 8 CE documented many stories along these topics, such as The House of Rumour, which concluded: “Rumour herself sees everything that happens in the heavens, throughout the ocean, and on land, and inquires about everything on earth.”⁵⁴ This short story touched on privacy and surveillance, framed in a haunting gossip trap. Skip ahead 1,500 years and these topics recur in Shakespeare’s plays, such as the spying on Hamlet by his boyhood friends⁵⁵. “A lot of the literature [during Shakespeare’s time] is about how awful informers were and how you might not be able to talk in public without somebody overhearing you.”⁵⁶ George Orwell’s novel 1984 follows Winston Smith, who lives in a controlling society led by ‘Big Brother’ and works at the ‘Ministry of the Truth.’ Smith eventually gets in trouble when an informant turns him in. From the classics, to Elizabethan England, to the 20th-century to today, storytelling arts such as theater and writing have caught hold of imaginations by capturing the concerns of the people with these timeless troubles.

Surveillance, monitoring, and control have been used historically and currently under the guise of protection and security, but as professor Hannah Zeavin explained: “[c]are is a mode that accommodates and justifies surveillance as a practice, framing it as an ethical “good” or security necessity instead of a political choice.”⁵⁷

Tactical Tech is based in Berlin, the former capital city of international espionage.⁵⁸ Residents and visitors are regularly faced with remnants of Germany’s destructive past. Without a doubt, a significant amount of abuse was inflicted by Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. From 1933 until 1945 the Gestapo (the Secret State Police) “was a key element in the Nazi terror system.”⁵⁹ But after World War II ended, the control didn’t go away – it manifested and evolved. The Ministry for State Security (also referred to as the Stasi) was the state security and secret police of the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic or GDR) from 1950 until 1990. They are known as one of the most repressive police organizations to have existed in the world. Upon the dissolution of the Stasi, thousands of protestors occupied their Berlin headquarters and prevented them from destroying their records.⁶⁰ What survives includes nearly two million photos⁶¹ and so many files that if they were laid out flat, they would be more than 111 kilometers long⁶².

The Stasi also conducted international operations that had lasting effects abroad. They extensively trained the Syrian Mukhabarat (secret police) under Hafez al-Assad “[in] methods of interrogation, infiltration, disinformation and brutal extraction of confessions were meticulously hammered into the minds of Syrian intelligence officials by senior Stasi agents.”⁶³ With the fall of the GDR and Berlin Wall, the Stasi was dissolved and East and West Germany reunified.

While Germany has taken some steps to reckon with its past, surveillance is still ever-present. In 2021, Human Rights Watch raised concerns over two laws that were amended that granted more surveillance powers to the federal police and intelligence services.⁶⁴ While Germans have experienced a long and persistent history of surveillance, and have gained a reputation for taking privacy issues very seriously, this perspective has changed over time. A 2017 study that surveyed over 5,000 Germans on various privacy-related topics found that “Germans consider privacy to be valuable, but at the same time, almost half of the population thinks that it is becoming less and less important in our society.”⁶⁵ This is exemplified through the Google Street View debacle, in which Google’s Street View cameras struggled to operate in Germany for years due to privacy concerns, but it finally gained traction in 2023.⁶⁶

Although the Stasi are world famous for their surveillance and data collection, today’s law enforcement landscape is a smorgasbord of data. The Stasi versus NSA visualization, developed in 2013, shows how data collected from the two entities compares – projecting that “the NSA can store almost 1 billion times more data than the Stasi”⁶⁷. Using modern technologies like algorithms and access to all of the digitized data from health conditions to search queries and private chats, it is easier than ever to get not just a glimpse but a full picture into the lives of nearly anyone. As Amnesty International reported, “[T]he Stasi archive is a timely warning of the potential consequences of unchecked surveillance. It shows how quickly a system for identifying threats evolves into a desire to know everything about everyone.”⁶⁸ Tactical Tech’s project The Glass Room has explored this topic through the years, describing: “There is a growing market for technologies that promise increased control, security, and protection from harm. At the same time, they can normalize surveillance at a macro and micro level – from the shape of a child’s ear to satellite images of acres of farmland. Often, those who need the most support may have the least control over how or when their data is being used.”⁶⁹ The Glass Room’s ‘Big Mother’ exhibit adapts the Big Brother imagery to a more nurturing figure, a mother, exemplifying how people can easily let their guards down when data tracking is framed as helpful and caring. This can be seen in the advertisements for tech products such as devices that help people monitor elderly relatives via an app,⁷⁰ fertility tracking apps,⁷¹ and refugee and asylum-seeker biometrics registries⁷². The US and Israel are among the world’s biggest suppliers of surveillance tech⁷³ – including the US-based Palantir⁷⁴ and Israel’s NSO group⁷⁵ and Elbit systems⁷⁶ – used by governments in places like the US-Mexico border,⁷⁷ Central America,⁷⁸ and Europe⁷⁹.

The so-called ed-tech industry has been gaining traction for years, from even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Ed-tech describes the numerous technological innovations that are marketed to schools that are purported to benefit students, teachers, and school administrators. Not all ed-tech is the same, and there are efforts to bring digitization to schools to reduce the digital divide, especially experienced in more rural and low-income areas⁸⁰. With that said, some of the digital tools used by school administrators have the potential to act equally as tools of surveillance. These include recording children at daycare⁸¹, using AI to analyze body and eye movements during exams⁸², and monitoring student social media⁸³. So much monitoring is not without consequence, especially for traditionally marginalized groups. One study reported that student surveillance technologies put at higher risk Black, Indigenous, Latine/x, LGBTQ+, undocumented, and low-income students, as well as students with disabilities.⁸⁴ In 2023, the ACLU interviewed teens aged 14-18 to capture the experiences of surveillance in schools. One participant reflected: “...we treat kids like monsters and like criminals, then ... it’s kinda like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”⁸⁵ In 2017 the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned: “Ed tech unchecked threatens to normalize the next generation to a digital world in which users hand over data without question in return for free services—a world that is less private not just by default, but by design.”⁸⁶ Some students and parents have pushed back, and in some cases successfully blocked certain technologies from being used in schools⁸⁷.

Workers are also feeling watched. From 2020-2022, the number of large employers who used employee monitoring tools doubled.⁸⁸ And it isn’t only the well-known control mechanisms Amazon uses on their warehouse workers⁸⁹ – the average office worker may also be affected. A 2023 study of 2,000 employers found over three-quarters of them were using some form of remote work surveillance on their workers⁹⁰. Employers are keeping track of their employees using methods such as internet monitoring⁹¹, fingerprint scanners⁹², eye movement tracking⁹³, social media scraping⁹⁴, and voice analysis⁹⁵, among others. “We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” according to the MIT Technology Review. “And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power.”⁹⁶

Even cars can be turned into tools of surveillance. Getting to work and dropping off the kids at school may be taking place in a data mining automobile. In 2023, 84% of car brands were found to sell or share personal data with data brokers and businesses.⁹⁷ That same year, news broke that Tesla employees had been sharing among them in chat rooms private camera recordings captured in customers’ cars. This didn’t happen only once or twice but many times from 2019-2022. The videos included nudity, crashes, and road-rage incidents – some were even “made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats.”⁹⁸ In 2024, Volkswagen was responsible for a data breach that left the precise location of hundreds of thousands of vehicles across Europe exposed online for months.⁹⁹ In the US, researchers found that some license plate reader cameras were found to be live-streaming video and car data online.¹⁰⁰

In early 2025, Tesla executives handed over dashcam footage to Las Vegas police to help find the person responsible (who used ChatGPT to plan the attack¹⁰¹) for the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside the Trump International Hotel.¹⁰² While this particular case and the actions of Tesla executives was generally applauded in the media, it does raise questions about the broader issue of surveillance, the application of the law, and the limits of privacy. Researchers noted about data tracking more broadly that “tactics and tools already used by law enforcement and immigration authorities could be adapted to track anyone seeking or even considering an abortion.”¹⁰³ Finding more ways to document and track people can also translate in ever more menacing ways under different political administrations and in contexts that have even fewer protections for marginalized groups.

Surveillance is a multi-tiered Panopticon experienced in daily life, especially by people who live in cities with a high density of CCTV cameras. A November 2020 report by Netherlands-based company Surfshark assessed the most surveilled cities in the world based on CCTV camera density per square kilometer. The top five cities listed were Chennai, India (657 CCTV cameras per 1km2), Hyderabad, India (480 CCTV cameras per 1km2), Harbin, China (411 CCTV cameras per 1km2), London, England (399 CCTV cameras per 1km2), and Xiamen, China (385 CCTV cameras per 1km2). However they note that Beijing has the most overall cameras with over 1 million CCTV cameras in the whole city.¹⁰⁴ A 2023 report by Amnesty International mapped the visible Israeli surveillance system and found one or two CCTV cameras every five meters in Jerusalem’s Old City and Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem¹⁰⁵. Notably, the Surfshark researchers mapped CCTV infrastructure in 150 countries but somehow did not manage to map the CCTV cameras in Israel, Jerusalem’s Old City or East Jerusalem, or in the other highly-surveilled Occupied Palestinian Territories, such as Hebron in their report. Israel’s surveillance industry is world famous^{106, 107}, raising questions about why Surfshark did not include it in their report.

Since 2020, Israel’s military-run ‘Wolf Pack’ has been in use – a vast and detailed database profiling virtually all Palestinians in the West Bank, including their photographs, family connections, education, and more¹⁰⁸. The ‘Wolf Pack’ includes ‘Red Wolf,’ ‘White Wolf,’ and ‘Blue Wolf’ tools:

• Red Wolf: The ‘Red Wolf’ system is part of the Israeli government’s official CCTV facial recognition infrastructure to identify and profile Palestinians as they pass through checkpoints and move through cities. It has been reported that Israel’s military uses ‘Red Wolf’ in the Palestinian city of Hebron.¹⁰⁹ According to a project by B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, the Israeli military has set up 86 checkpoints and barriers across 20% of Hebron, referred to as ‘H2’, that is under Israeli military control.¹¹⁰ The checkpoints are hard to avoid in Hebron’s ‘H2’ – Palestinians living there “go through a checkpoint in order to buy groceries and again to bring them home”¹¹¹ and 88% of children cross checkpoints on their way to and from school.¹¹²
• White Wolf: Another app, called White Wolf, is available to official Israeli military personnel¹¹³ who are guarding illegal settlements¹¹⁴ in the West Bank, which allows them to search the database of Palestinians¹¹⁵. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began after the October 7, 2023 attacks by the Islamic Resistance Movement (aka Hamas) on Israelis, Israel has rolled out a similar facial recognition system registry of Palestinians in Gaza¹¹⁶.
• Blue Wolf: Using the app called ‘Blue Wolf,’ the Israeli military has been carrying out a massive biometric registry of Palestinians, often at checkpoints and by gunpoint, sometimes at people's private homes in the middle of the night¹¹⁷. Israeli soldiers take pictures of Palestinians, including children, sometimes by force.¹¹⁸ Israeli soldiers also note within the app any “negative impressions [they] have of a Palestinian’s conduct when encountering them.”¹¹⁹ One source added “It’s not that the military has said, let’s make the Blue Wolf so [the Palestinians] can pass through more easily. The military wants to enter the people into its system for control.”¹²⁰

A 2025 article also revealed how the Israeli military was using a large language model (such as that used by tools like ChatGPT) to surveil Palestinians. One Israeli intelligence source stated: “I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing. When you hold so much data, you can direct it toward any purpose you choose.”¹²¹ While the Israeli military is not the only government-sanctioned example of training AI tools on civilian data, it offers an important insight into how the latest technologies can be adopted for widespread monitoring and control.

A key aspect of the aforementioned tools of monitoring and control such as CCTV rely on facial recognition technology, which automatically identifies unique facial data, including measurements such as the distance between the eyes, width of the nose, depth of eye sockets, shape of cheekbone, and length of jawline.¹²² Facial recognition is used by governments, police, and other agencies around the world, and with significant results. Several cases of this technology’s benefits and harms emerge from the US alone. One unprecedented operation by US law enforcement resulted in hundreds of children and their abusers getting identified in just a three-week period¹²³. This technology has also been used to find missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), helping 57 families find answers in just three years¹²⁴. While these results are indeed remarkable and reveal the ways in which the application of technologies can be used to help people, there have also been numerous cases of facial recognition being used by US law enforcement in ways that have harmed people. An app called CBP One which is required by asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border includes a requirement for people to register themselves in a facial recognition system. But that system “[fails] to register many people with darker skin tones, effectively barring them from their right to request entry into the US.”¹²⁵ The systems centralizing data of asylum-seekers and migrants make longitudinal tracking of children possible¹²⁶. Facial recognition technologies are also used by ICE (the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) to monitor and surveil people awaiting deportation hearings¹²⁷.

In one study on facial recognition systems, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini found that “darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%.”¹²⁸ Harvard researcher, Alex Najibi, described that “Black Americans are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for minor crimes than White Americans. Consequently, Black people are overrepresented in mugshot data, which face recognition uses to make predictions,” explaining how Black Americans are more likely than White Americans to become trapped in cycles and systems of racist policing and surveillance.¹²⁹ This sentiment is echoed in a report by the project S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project¹³⁰. The UK¹³¹ and China are also among the countries who practice ‘predictive policing.’ One researcher focusing on China describes it as “a more refined tool for the selective suppression of already targeted groups by the police and does not substantially reduce crime or increase overall security.”¹³² So the issue here is not simply about flawed datasets – it is discrimination that already exists in society, where people who hold positions of power or have police or military force are able to use technology to enhance their oppression of certain groups of people. Larger datasets will not remedy or negate the problem of people acting upon discrimination, racism, or other types of bias and hatred.

Algorithms are made by people (who inherently have their own biases¹³³) and are made using our data¹³⁴... and the tools that are trained from our data can be used to harm other people. Algorithms are also used by governments, police, and other agencies around the world. Tools and services from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all been used by Israel in their war on Gaza¹³⁵. In the United States, algorithms have been used to score risk levels for people who have committed crimes about their likelihood to commit future crimes. But these algorithms have been found by researchers to be “remarkably unreliable” and include a significant amount of bias in their design and implementation¹³⁶. In Spain, an algorithm was used to predict how likely a domestic abuse survivor would be to be abused again, with the intention to distribute support and resources to people who need it most urgently, in an overburdened system. But the algorithm isn’t perfect and over-reliance on such flawed tools in high-stakes situations has had dire consequences. In some cases, survivors mislabelled as “low risk” have been murdered by their abusers despite their best efforts to seek help and report the abuse to authorities¹³⁷. In the Netherlands, tax authorities used an algorithm to help them identify child care benefits fraud, with tens of thousands of lower-income families being penalized, resulting in many falling into poverty and even more than a thousand children wrongfully put into foster care. “Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator, as was a low income [...] having Turkish or Moroccan nationality was a particular focus.”¹³⁸ Algorithmic bias has been covered in depth by researchers such as Cathy O’Neil¹³⁹.

Amid all the obscurity, there are some who are trying to shed light. WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange¹⁴⁰, publishes leaked classified documents online¹⁴¹. The largest of those leaks and in US history happened over WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands military and diplomatic documents shared by Chelsea Manning that exposed serious abuses perpetrated by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan¹⁴². Frances Haugen exposed thousands of problematic internal Facebook files¹⁴³ to The Wall Street Journal and the US Securities and Commission Exchange agency¹⁴⁴. The Facebook files included internal discussions and reports about how the algorithm used by Facebook was negatively affecting societies around the world¹⁴⁵. Edward Snowden shared over 1.7 million highly classified files¹⁴⁶ to journalists at The Washington Post and The Guardian that illustrated the extent of which the US NSA spies on their citizens as well as foreign leaders, including US allies such as Germany¹⁴⁷. Whistleblowers who expose details about the technological companies, agencies, and systems are giving more information to the public about the consequences of these mechanics in our everyday lives and as they impact wider society – but are also met with controversy and debate.

Resources have been developed that document surveillance apparatuses, such as EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance¹⁴⁸ and Decode Surveillance NYC¹⁴⁹. Guides like EFF’s Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests¹⁵⁰ provides university students with practical tips and an understanding of their legal rights, giving them information as a means of resistance. “Facial recognition for identification is mass surveillance and is incompatible with the rights to privacy, equality, and freedom of assembly [...] Banning facial recognition is a first step toward dismantling racist policing.”¹⁵¹

The terms that are used to describe technology can shape how we think about them. The word “smart” has a positive connotation, in most cases – but when it comes to technology, “smart” is usually interchangeably used with “efficient”. Imagine if instead of calling systems of surveillance “smart”, we called them “machiavellian” – how might that change our discourse, acceptance, and adoption of them? As researcher Carlos Delclós said: “Privacy is not merely invaded; it is obliterated, as human lives are fragmented into datasets optimised for corporate gain,”¹⁵² and the same message can be extended to political gain. Regardless of whether we call technology by positive or negative terms, at the end of the day, the technology itself cannot be separated from the operators (i.e. the humans) who deploy it. If the people who use these technologies are also inhabiting societies and working within systems that have documented concerns of discrimination and/or of control, it seems quite possible that the tech will be used to cause harm. We don’t even need to imagine it. We can simply look around with both eyes open.

⁵⁴ Ovid (transl. by Kline). “Metamorphoses: Bk XII:39-63 The House of Rumour.” Published on The University of Virginia E-Text Center.

⁵⁵ Shakespeare. “Hamlet: Act 2, Scene 2.” Folger Shakespeare Library.

⁵⁶ Massey News. “Surveillance in Shakespeare - the plot thickens.” Massey University, University of New Zealand, 2017.

⁵⁷ Zeavin, Hannah. “How Parenting Tech Opens the Door to State Surveillance.” WIRED, 2023.

⁵⁸ German Spy Museum Berlin. “The capital of Spies in Cold War Berlin.” Accessed January 18, 2025.

⁵⁹ McDonough, Frank. “Careless whispers: how the German public used and abused the Gestapo.” The Irish Times, 2015.

⁶⁰ The Berliner. “Storming of the Stasi Headquarters on January 15, 1990.” 2024.

⁶¹ The Federal Archives. “Stasi Records Archive: Tasks and Structure.” Accessed: January 2025.

⁶² Marsh, Sarah. “Stasi files still case shadow for Germans.” Reuters, 2009.

⁶³ Iskandar, Marwan. “Rafiq Hariri and the fate of Lebanon.” (page 201). Saqi Books, 2006.

⁶⁴ Fischer, David. “Germany’s New Surveillance Laws Raise Privacy Concerns.” Human Rights Watch, 2021.

⁶⁵ Masur, Philipp K.; et al. “Privacy attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of the German population.” Hohenheim University, 2017.

⁶⁶ Gray, Jeremy. “Germany vs Google: How Street View Won the Privacy Battle in Europe’s Most Private Country.” PetaPixel, 2024.

⁶⁷ “Stasi versus NSA.” Accessed January 2025.

⁶⁸ Amnesty International. “Lessons from the Stasi – A cautionary tale on mass surveillance.” 2015.

⁶⁹ Tactical Tech. “Exhibits at The Glass Room San Francisco.”

⁷⁰ The Glass Room. “Silver Mother™ & Kepler Vision Technologies.”

⁷¹ The Glass Room. “Ovia.”

⁷² The Glass Room. “UNHCR & CSIR.”

⁷³ “Surveillance Watch”

⁷⁴ Amnesty International. “USA: Failing to do right: The urgent need for Palantir to respect human rights.” 2020.

⁷⁵ Lyngaas, Sean. “Judge rules Israeli firm NSO Group liable for damages in WhatsApp hacking case.” CNN Business, 2024.

⁷⁶ Del Valle, Gaby. “DHS wants $101 million to upgrade its border surveillance towers.” The Verge, 2024.

⁷⁷ Elbit America. “Next-Gen Border.”

⁷⁸ García, Sussan. “Central American and Palestinian Liberation Struggles are Intertwined.” Contra Corriente, 2024.

⁷⁹ Roussi, Antoaneta. “Pegasus used by at least 5 EU countries, NSO Group tells lawmakers.” Politico, 2022.

⁸⁰ Faul, Moira V.“Critical Issues of Education Technology in and with Low- and Middle-income Countries.” NORRAG, 2024.

⁸¹ The Glass Room: San Francisco. “Live School.” Tactical Tech, 2019.

⁸² Swauger, Shea. “Software that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates their privacy.” MIT Technology Review, 2020.

⁸³ Fussell, Sidney. “Schools Are Using AI to Check Students' Social Media for Warning Signs of Violence.” Gizmodo, 2018.

⁸⁴ American Civil Liberties Union. “Digital Dystopia: The Danger in Buying What the EdTech Surveillance Industry is Selling.” 2023.

⁸⁵ Marlow, Chad. “New ACLU Report Shines Light on Shadowy EdTech Surveillance Industry and the Dangerous Consequences of Surveillance in Schools.” American Civil Liberties Union, 2023.

⁸⁶ Gebhart, Gennie; et al. “Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2017.

⁸⁷ Kidd, Daisy; et al. Predictive Futures: The Normalisation of Monitoring and Surveillance in Education.” Tactical Tech, 2020.

⁸⁸ Turner, Jordan. “The Right Way to Monitor Your Employee Productivity.” Gartner, 2022.

⁸⁹ Oxfam. “Is Amazon a good place to work?” 2024.

⁹⁰ Hendry Parsons, Lauren. “78% of employers engage in remote work surveillance, ExpressVPN survey finds.” ExpressVPN, 2023.

⁹¹ Haan, Katherine; et al. “Internet Surveillance in the Workplace: 43% report having their online activity monitored.” Forbes, 2024.

⁹² Blum, Sam. “Biometric monitoring is booming in the workplace, raising ethical and legal questions for HR.” HR Brew, 2022.

⁹³ West, Darrell M. “How employers use technology to surveil employees.” Brookings, 2021.

⁹⁴ McGregor, Jena. “This software start-up can tell your boss if you’re looking for a job.” The Washington Post. 2021.

⁹⁵ Heath, Thomas. “This employee ID badge monitors and listens to you at work — except in the bathroom.” The Washington Post, 2016.

⁹⁶ Ackermann, Rebecca. “Your boss is watching.” MIT Technology Review, 2025.

⁹⁷ Caltrider, Jen; et al. “It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy.” Mozilla Foundation, 2023.

⁹⁸ Stecklow, Steve; et al. “Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars.” Reuters, 2023.

⁹⁹ Whittaker, Zack. “Volkswagen leak exposed precise location data on thousands of vehicles across Europe for months.” TechCrunch, 2024.

¹⁰⁰ Koebler, Jason. “Researcher Turns Insecure License Plate Cameras Into Open Source Surveillance Tool.” 404 Media, 2025.

¹⁰¹ Catalani, Mike. “Man who exploded Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas used generative AI, police say.” The Associated Press, 2025.

¹⁰² Condon, Bernard. “Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion.” The Associated Press, 2025.

¹⁰³ Chowdhury, Rebecca. “America’s High-Tech Surveillance Could Track Abortion-Seekers, Too, Activists Warn.” Time, 2022.

¹⁰⁴ Surfshark. “Surveillance Cities: who has the most CCTV cameras in the world?” 2020.

¹⁰⁵ Amnesty International. “Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT.” 2023.

¹⁰⁶ Hempel, Jonathan. “The watchful eye of Israel’s surveillance empire.” 972+ Magazine, 2022.

¹⁰⁷ Al Shafei, Esra’a; et al. “Surveillance as a Service: The Global Impact of Israeli “Defense” Technologies on Privacy and Human Rights.” Tor Project, 2024.

¹⁰⁸ Amnesty International. “Israeli authorities are using facial recognition technology to entrench apartheid.” 2023.

¹⁰⁹ DW Shift. “Tracking Every Move: Facial Recognition in the Occupied West Bank.” 2024.

¹¹⁰ B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. “The settlement in Area H2, Hebron.” 2020.

¹¹¹ Gessen, Masha. “A Guided Tour of Hebron, from Two Sides of the Occupation.” The New Yorker, 2019.

¹¹² The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). “Hebron H2 - Background and Key Protection Issues.” 2022.

¹¹³ Interview with an Israeli lieutenant of The Civil Administration unit. “Testimony › They scan the face.” Breaking the Silence, 2021.

¹¹⁴ UN News. “Israel settlement expansion ‘tramples’ on human rights law, experts contend.” United Nations, 2021.

¹¹⁵ Seibt, Sébastian. “How Israel uses facial recognition to monitor West Bank Palestinians.” France 24, 2021.

¹¹⁶ Frenkel, Sheera. “Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza.” The New York Times, 2024.

¹¹⁷ Staff, Toi. “Video shows IDF soldiers waking Palestinian kids to photograph them in dead of night.” The Times of Israel, 2024.

¹¹⁸ Dwoskin, Elizabeth. “Israel escalates surveillance of Palestinians with facial recognition program in West Bank.” The Washington Post, 2021.

¹¹⁹ Shezaf, Hagar. “Israeli Army Installs Remote-control Crowd Dispersal System at Hebron Flashpoint.” Haaretz, 2022.

¹²⁰ Interview with an Israeli first sergeant of the Nahal unit, 50th Battalion. “Testimony › The military wants to enter the people into its system for control.” Breaking the Silence, 2020.

¹²¹ Abraham, Yuval. “Israel developing ChatGPT-like tool that weaponizes surveillance of Palestinians.” +972 Magazine, 2025.

¹²² What the Future Wants. “The Real Life of Your Selfie.” Tactical Tech, 2022.

¹²³ Brewster, Thomas. “Exclusive: DHS Used Clearview AI Facial Recognition In Thousands Of Child Exploitation Cold Cases.” Forbes, 2023.

¹²⁴ Thompson, Darren. “Retired Police Officer Launches Nonprofit to Search for Missing Indigenous People.” Native News Online, 2023.

¹²⁵ del Bosque, Melissa. “Facial recognition bias frustrates Black asylum applicants to US, advocates say.” The Guardian, 2023.

¹²⁶ Guo, Eileen. “The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age.” MIT Technology Review, 2024.

¹²⁷ Haskins, Caroline. “ICE Started Ramping Up Its Surveillance Arsenal Immediately After Donald Trump Won.” Wired, 2024.

¹²⁸ Buolamwini, Joy; et al. “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” MIT, 2018.

¹²⁹ Najibi Alex. “Racial Discrimination in Face Recognition Technology.” Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Science in the News, 2020.

¹³⁰ Manis, Eleni; et al. “Seeing is Misbelieving.” S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, 2024.

¹³¹ Liberty “Predictive policing.”

¹³² Sprick, Daniel. “Predictive Policing in China: An Authoritarian Dream of Public Security.” NAVEIÑ REET: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research, 2019.

¹³³ Turner Lee, Nichol; et al. “Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation: best practices and policies to reduce consumer harms.” Brookings Institution, 2019.

¹³⁴ Morrison, Sara. “The tricky truth about how generative AI uses your data.” Vox, 2023.

¹³⁵ Abraham, Yuval. “Leaked documents expose deep ties between Israeli army and Microsoft.” +972 Magazine, 2025.

¹³⁶ Angwin, Julia; et al. “Machine Bias.” ProPublica, 2016.

¹³⁷ Satariano, Adam; et al. An Algorithm Told Police She Was Safe. Then Her Husband Killed Her.” The New York Times, 2024.

¹³⁸ Heikkilä, Melissa. “Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms.” Politico, 2022.

¹³⁹ O’Neil, Cathy. “Do algorithms perpetuate human bias?” NPR, 2018.

¹⁴⁰ BBC. “Who is Wikileaks' Julian Assange and what did he do?” 2024.

¹⁴¹ “WikiLeaks.”

¹⁴² Martínez, Alonso. “Chelsea Manning 10 years after her sentence: what happened to the whistleblower?” EL PAÍS, 2023.

¹⁴³ Facebook Papers.

¹⁴⁴ Allyn, Bobby. “Here are 4 key points from the Facebook whistleblower's testimony on Capitol Hill.” NPR, 2021.

¹⁴⁵ Hao, Karen. “The Facebook whistleblower says its algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why.” MIT Technology Review, 2021.

¹⁴⁶ Zakaria, Tabassum. “Exclusive: After 'cataclysmic' Snowden affair, NSA faces winds of change.” Reuters, 2013.

¹⁴⁷ Reuters. “U.S. spy agency tapped German chancellery for decades: WikiLeaks.” 2015.

¹⁴⁸ Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Atlas of Surveillance.” Accessed March 1, 2025.

¹⁴⁹ Amnesty International. “Digital volunteers to expose scale of facial recognition technology in New York City.” 2021.

¹⁵⁰ Mir, Rory; et al. “Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests.” Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2024.

¹⁵¹ Amnesty International. “Inside the NYPD’s Surveillance Machine.” Accessed March 1, 2025.

¹⁵² Delclós, Carlos. “Countering Digital Colonialism.” CCCB LAB, 2025.