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Next year, high schools in Lockport New York will use the “Aegis” CCTV and facial recognition system to track and record the interactions of students suspected of code of conduct violations, keeping a ledger of who speaks to whom, where, and for how long.

The record will be used to assemble evidence against students and identify possible accomplices to ascribe guilt to.

Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley justified the decision by noting, “We always have to be on our guard. We can’t let our guard down.”

Lockport will be the first school district in the world to subject its students to this kind of surveillance. The program will cost $1.4m in state money. The technology supplier is SN Technologies of Ganonoque, Ont., one of the companies in the vicinity of Kingston, Ontario, home to the majority of the province’s detention centers.

The Lockport district says that the system will make students safer by alerting officials if someone on a sex-offender registry or terrorist watchlist enters the property. None of America’s school shootings or high-profile serial sex abuse scandals were carried out by wanted terrorists or people on the sex-offender registry.

Deployed law-enforcement facial recognition systems have failure rates of 98%. The vendor responsible for Aegis would not disclose how they improved on the state of the art, but insisted that their product worked “99.97% of the time.” The spokesperson would not disclose any of the workings of the system, seemingly believing that doing so was antithetical to security.

The London Metropolitan Police use a facial recognition system whose alerts have a 98% false positive rate; people falsely identified by the system are stopped, questioned and treated with suspicion.

The UK has a biometrics commissioner, Professor Paul Wiles, who laments the lack of any regulation of this technology, calling it “urgently needed”; these regulations are long promised, incredibly overdue, and the Home Office admits that they’re likely to be delayed beyond their revised June publication date.

The Met say that they don’t “arrest” people who are erroneously identified by the system. Rather, they “detain” them by refusing to allow them to leave and subjecting them to searches, etc.

Incredibly, the Met’s system is even worse than the South Wales Police’s facial recognition system, which has a comparatively impressive 92% failure rate.

It’s not just the data you choose to share.

By now we all know the story: Facebook allowed apps on its social media platform which enabled a shady outfit called Cambridge Analytica to scrape the profiles of 87 million users, in order to serve up targeted ads to benefit the Trump election campaign in 2016.  More than 300,000 Australian users of Facebook were caught up in the data harvesting.

But serving up ads in a foreign election campaign is not the whole story.  Facebook, and other companies involved in data mining, are invading our privacy and harming us economically and socially, in ways that are only just starting to become clear.

And it’s not just the data you choose to share. The information you post is not the whole story.  It’s only the tip of the iceberg of data that Facebook has collected about you.

Every time you go online you leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs.  Facebook has been busily sweeping up those breadcrumbs, and using them to categorise and profile you.  Facebook obviously knows when you click on a Facebook ‘like’ button; but also, unless a web developer has gone out of their way to find tools to block them (as we have done for our Salinger Privacy blog), Facebook knows every time you simply look at a website that has a Facebook ‘like’ button somewhere on it.

So if you only post or ‘like’ stories about inspirational mountain climbers and funny cat videos, but also do things online that you don’t share with your family, friends or work colleagues (like looking at stories about abortion or dealing with infidelity, Googling how to manage anxiety or erectile dysfunction, whingeing about your employer in a chatroom, or spending hours reviewing dating profiles, gambling or shopping obsessively for shoes)  — Facebook has you pegged anyway.

Plus, Facebook obtains data from other sources which know about your offline purchases, to build an even richer picture of who you really are.  And of course, Facebook may have access to your address book, your location history, the contents of your private messages, and depending on your brand of phone, possibly even a history of your phone calls and text messages.

All that information is used to draw inferences and assumptions about your preferences, and predict your likely behaviour.  The results are then used to categorise, profile and ultimately target you, in a process usually described as ‘online behavioural advertising’.

It’s not ‘just ads’

The objective of online behavioural advertising is to predict your purchasing interests and drive a purchase decision.  So far, the same as any other advertising.  But online, the implications for us as individuals are much greater.

Facebook’s promise to advertisers is that it can show their ad to exactly who the advertiser wants, and exclude everybody else.

However, by allowing exclusion, the platform also allows discrimination.  Facebook has been caught allowing advertisers to target — and exclude — people on the basis of their ‘ethnic affinity’, amongst other social, demographic, racial and religious characteristics.  So a landlord with an ad for rental housing could prevent people profiled as ‘single mothers’ from ever seeing their ad.  An employer could prevent people identifying as Jewish from seeing a job ad.  A bank could prevent people categorised as African Americans from seeing an ad for a home loan.

Existing patterns of social exclusion, economic inequality and discrimination are further entrenched by micro-targeted advertising, which is hidden from public view and regulatory scrutiny.

Predictive analytics can narrow or alter your life choices

Once we move beyond straight-up advertising and into predictive analytics, the impact on individual autonomy becomes more acute.  Big Data feeds machine learning, which finds patterns in the data, from which new rules (algorithms) are designed.  Algorithms predict how a person will behave, and suggest how they should be treated.

Algorithms can lead to price discrimination, like surge pricing based on Uber knowing how much phone battery life you have left.  Or market exclusion, like Woolworths only offering car insurance to customers it has decided are low risk, based on an assessment of the groceries they buy.

Banks have been predicting the risk of a borrower defaulting on a loan for decades, but now algorithms are also used to determine who to hire, predict when a customer is pregnant, and deliver targeted search results to influence how you vote.

Algorithms are also being used to predict the students at risk of failure, the prisoners at risk of re-offending, and who is at risk of suicide and then launching interventions accordingly.  However, even leaving aside the accuracy of those predictions, interventions are not necessarily well-intentioned.  It was revealed last year that Australian Facebook executives were touting to advertisers their ability to target psychologically vulnerable teenagers. 

Automated decision-making diminishes our autonomy, by narrowing or altering our market and life choices, in ways that are not clear to us.  People already in a position of economic or social disadvantage face the additional challenge of trying to disprove or beat an invisible algorithm.

In a predictive and pre-emptive world, empathy, forgiveness, rehabilitation, redemption, individual dignity, autonomy and free will are programmed out of our society.

Fiddling with users’ privacy settings on Facebook won’t fix anything.  If we want our lives to be ruled by human values and individual dignity, instead of by machines fed on questionable data, we need robust, enforced and globally effective privacy laws.

A new European privacy law commences later this month.  The obligations include that businesses and governments must offer understandable explanations of how their algorithms work, and allow people to seek human review of automated decision-making.  This is a step in the right direction, which Australia, the US and the rest of the world should follow.

If you’re a Gmail user, your messages and emails likely aren’t as private as you’d think. Google reads each and every one (even if you definitely don’t), scanning your painfully long email chains and vacation responders in order to collect more data on you. Google uses the data gleaned from your messages in order to inform a whole host of other products and services, NBC News reported Thursday.

Though Google announced that it would stop using consumer Gmail content for ad personalization last July, the language permitting it to do so is still included in its current privacy policy, and it without a doubt still scans users emails for other purposes. Aaron Stein, a Google spokesperson, told NBC that Google also automatically extracts keyword data from users’ Gmail accounts, which is then fed into machine learning programs and other products within the Google family. Stein told NBC that Google also “may analyze [email] content to customize search results, better detect spam and malware,” a practice the company first announced back in 2012.

“We collect information about the services that you use and how you use them…” says Google’s privacy policy. “This includes information like your usage data and preferences, Gmail messages, G+ profile, photos, videos, browsing history, map searches, docs, or other Google-hosted content. Our automated systems analyze this information as it is sent and received and when it is stored.”

While Google doesn’t sell this information to third parties, has used it to power its own advertising network and inform search results, among other things. And this is far from a closely guarded secret. The company has included disclosures relating to these practices in its privacy policy since at least 2012: “When you share information with us, for example by creating a Google Account, we can make those services even better – to show you more relevant search results and ads…,” says Google’s March 2012 privacy policy.

There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently.

If the tech industry likes to assume the trappings of a religion, complete with a quasi-messianic story of progress, the Church of Tech is now giving rise to a new sect of apostates, feverishly confessing their own sins. And the internet’s original sin, as these programmers and investors and CEOs make clear, was its business model.

The advertising model of the internet was different from anything that came before. Whatever you might say about broadcast advertising, it drew you into a kind of community, even if it was a community of consumers. The culture of the social-media era, by contrast, doesn’t draw you anywhere. It meets you exactly where you are, with your preferences and prejudices — at least as best as an algorithm can intuit them. “Microtargeting” is nothing more than a fancy term for social atomization — a business logic that promises community while promoting its opposite.

Stratumseind in Eindhoven is one of the busiest nightlife streets in the Netherlands. On a Saturday night, bars are packed, music blares through the street, laughter and drunken shouting bounces off the walls. As the night progresses, the ground becomes littered with empty shot bottles, energy drink cans, cigarette butts and broken glass.

It’s no surprise that the place is also known for its frequent fights. To change that image, Stratumseind has become one of the “smartest” streets in the Netherlands. Lamp-posts have been fitted with wifi-trackers, cameras and 64 microphones that can detect aggressive behaviour and alert police officers to altercations. There has been a failed experiment to change light intensity to alter the mood. The next plan, starting this spring, is to diffuse the smell of oranges to calm people down. The aim? To make Stratumseind a safer place.

We get that comment a lot – ‘Big brother is watching you’. I prefer to say, ‘Big brother is helping you’

All the while, data is being collected and stored. “Visitors do not realise they are entering a living laboratory,” says Maša Galic, a researcher on privacy in the public space for the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society. Since the data on Stratumseind is used to profile, nudge or actively target people, this “smart city” experiment is subject to privacy law. According to the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act, people should be notified in advance of data collection and the purpose should be specified – but in Stratumseind, as in many other “smart cities”, this is not the case.

Peter van de Crommert is involved at Stratumseind as project manager with the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security. He says visitors do not have to worry about their privacy: the data is about crowds, not individuals. “We often get that comment – ‘Big brother is watching you’ – but I prefer to say, ‘Big brother is helping you’. We want safe nightlife, but not a soldier on every street corner.”

When we think of smart cities, we usually think of big projects: Songdo in South Korea, the IBM control centre in Rio de Janeiro or the hundreds of new smart cities in India. More recent developments include Toronto, where Google will build an entirely new smart neighbourhood, and Arizona, where Bill Gates plans to build his own smart city. But the reality of the smart city is that it has stretched into the everyday fabric of urban life – particularly so in the Netherlands.

In the eastern city of Enschede, city traffic sensors pick up your phone’s wifi signal even if you are not connected to the wifi network. The trackers register your MAC address, the unique network card number in a smartphone. The city council wants to know how often people visit Enschede, and what their routes and preferred spots are. Dave Borghuis, an Enschede resident, was not impressed and filed an official complaint. “I don’t think it’s okay for the municipality to track its citizens in this way,” he said. “If you walk around the city, you have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched.”

Enschede is enthusiastic about the advantages of the smart city. The municipality says it is saving €36m in infrastructure investments by launching a smart traffic app that rewards people for good behaviour like cycling, walking and using public transport. (Ironically, one of the rewards is a free day of private parking.) Only those who mine the small print will discover that the app creates “personal mobility profiles”, and that the collected personal data belongs to the company Mobidot.
‘Targeted supervision’ in Utrecht

Companies are getting away with it in part because it involves new applications of data. In Silicon Valley, they call it “permissionless innovation”, they believe technological progress should not be stifled by public regulations. For the same reason, they can be secretive about what data is collected in a public space and what it is used for. Often the cities themselves don’t know.

Utrecht keeps track of the number of boys and girls hanging in the streets, their age and whether they are acquaintances

Utrecht has become a tangle of individual pilots and projects, with no central overview of how many cameras and sensors exist, nor what they do. In 2014, the city invested €80m in data-driven management that launched in 80 projects. Utrecht now has a burglary predictor, a social media monitoring room, and smart bins and smart streetlights with sensors (although the city couldn’t say where these are located). It has scanner cars that dispense parking tickets, with an added bonus of detecting residents with a municipal tax debt according to the privacy regulation of the scanner cars. But when I asked the city to respond to a series of questions on just 22 of the smart projects, it could only answer for five of them, referring me to private companies for the rest of the answers.

The city also keeps track of the number of young people hanging out in the streets, their age group, whether they know each other, the atmosphere and whether or not they cause a nuisance. Special enforcement officers keep track of this information through mobile devices. It calls this process “targeted and innovative supervision”. Other council documents mention the prediction of school drop-outs, the prediction of poverty and the monitoring of “the health of certain groups” with the aim of “intervening faster”.

Like many cities, Utrecht argues that it acts in accordance with privacy laws because it anonymises or pseudonymises data (assigning it a number instead of a name or address). But pseudonymised personal data is still personal data. “The process is not irreversible if the source file is stored,” says Mireille Hildebrandt, professor of ICT and Law at Radboud University. “Moreover, if you build personal profiles and act on them, it is still a violation of privacy and such profiling can – unintentionally – lead to discrimination.” She points to Utrecht’s plan to register the race and health data of prostitutes, which came in for heavy criticism from the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

Another unanswered question regards who owns data that is collected in a public space. Arjen Hof is director of Civity, a company that builds data platforms for governments. “Public authorities are increasingly outsourcing tasks to private companies. Think of waste removal or street lighting,” he says. “But they do not realise that at the same time a lot of data is collected, and do not always make agreements about the ownership of data.”
‘A smart city is a privatised city’

Hof gives the example of CityTec, a company that manages 2,000 car parks, 30,000 traffic lights and 500,000 lamp-posts across the Netherlands. It refused to share with municipalities the data it was collecting through its lamp-post sensors. “Their argument was that, although the municipality is legally owner of the lamp-posts, CityTec is the economic owner and, for competitive reasons, did not want to make the data available,” Hof says. This was three years ago, but for a lot of companies it remains standard practice. Companies dictate the terms, and cities say they can’t share the contracts because it contains “competition-sensitive information”.

When I interviewed the technology writer Evgeny Morozov in October, he warned of cities becoming too dependent on private companies. “The culmination of the smart city is a privatised city,” he said. “A city in which you have to pay for previously free services.”

Morozov’s fear about public subsidies being used for private innovation is well illustrated in Assen, a city of 70,000 people in the north of the country. Assen built a fibre-optic network for super-fast internet in 2011, to which it connected 200 sensors that measure, among other things, the flow of cars. There was an experiment to steer people around traffic jams, even though traffic in the city is relatively light. The city also connected its traffic lights, parking garages and parking signs to this grid. The cost of €46m was split between Brussels, the national government, the province and the municipality. Companies such as the car navigation firm TomTom have used the sensor network to test new services.

The project, called Sensor City, filed for bankruptcy a year ago. Now the publicly funded fibre-optic network, sensors and all, will be sold to a still-unidentified private company. The municipality will have to strike a deal with the new owner about the use of its public traffic lights and parking signs.

Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11 . That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.

The Israeli firm, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sun Corporation, hasn’t made any major public announcement about its new iOS capabilities. But Forbes was told by sources (who asked to remain anonymous as they weren’t authorized to talk on the matter) that in the last few months the company has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics folk across the globe. Indeed, the company’s literature for its Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services offering now notes the company can break the security of “Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11.” Separately, a source in the police forensics community told Forbes he’d been told by Cellebrite it could unlock the iPhone 8. He believed the same was most probably true for the iPhone X, as security across both of Apple’s newest devices worked in much the same way.

You may know that hidden trackers lurk on most websites you visit, soaking up your personal information. What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent. It is likely that Google or Facebook are watching you on many sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products. As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. They then make your sensitive data profile available for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.

So how do we move forward from here? Don’t be fooled by claims of self-regulation, as any useful long-term reforms of Google and Facebook’s data privacy practices fundamentally oppose their core business models: hyper-targeted advertising based on more and more intrusive personal surveillance. Change must come from the outside. Unfortunately, we’ve seen relatively little from Washington. Congress and federal agencies need to take a fresh look at what can be done to curb these data monopolies. They first need to demand more algorithmic and privacy policy transparency, so people can truly understand the extent of how their personal information is being collected, processed and used by these companies. Only then can informed consent be possible. They also need to legislate that people own their own data, enabling real opt-outs. Finally, they need to restrict how data can be combined including being more aggressive at blocking acquisitions that further consolidate data power, which will pave the way for more competition in digital advertising. Until we see such meaningful changes, consumers should vote with their feet.

Urumqi, China – This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth.

Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera.

China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang, of which Urumqi is the capital, into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country.

It is nearly impossible to move about the region without feeling the unrelenting gaze of the government. Citizens and visitors alike must run a daily gantlet of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras and machines scanning their ID cards, faces, eyeballs and sometimes entire bodies.

When fruit vendor Parhat Imin swiped his card at a telecommunications office this summer to pay an overdue phone bill, his photo popped up with an “X.” Since then, he says, every scan of his ID card sets off an alarm. He isn’t sure what it signifies, but figures he is on some kind of government watch list because he is a Uighur and has had intermittent run-ins with the police.

He says he is reluctant to travel for fear of being detained. “They blacklisted me,” he says. “I can’t go anywhere.”

All across China, authorities are rolling out new technology to keep watch over people and shape their behavior. Controls on expression have tightened under President Xi Jinping, and the state’s vast security web now includes high-tech equipment to monitor online activity and even snoop in smartphone messaging apps.

China’s government has been on high alert since a surge in deadly terrorist attacks around the country in 2014 that authorities blamed on Xinjiang-based militants inspired by extremist Islamic messages from abroad. Now officials are putting the world’s most state-of-the-art tools in the hands of a ramped-up security force to create a system of social control in Xinjiang—one that falls heaviest on Uighurs.

At a security exposition in October, an executive of Guangzhou-based CloudWalk Technology Co., which has sold facial-recognition algorithms to police and identity-verification systems to gas stations in Xinjiang, called the region the world’s most heavily guarded place. According to the executive, Jiang Jun, for every 100,000 people the police in Xinjiang want to monitor, they use the same amount of surveillance equipment that police in other parts of China would use to monitor millions.

Authorities in Xinjiang declined to respond to questions about surveillance. Top party officials from Xinjiang said at a Communist Party gathering in Beijing in October that “social stability and long-term security” were the local government’s bottom-line goals.

Chinese and foreign civil-liberty activists say the surveillance in this northwestern corner of China offers a preview of what is to come nationwide.

“They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east,” says Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases. “What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people.”

During an October road trip into Xinjiang along a modern highway, two Wall Street Journal reporters encountered a succession of checkpoints that turned the ride into a strange and tense journey.

At Xingxing Gorge, a windswept pass used centuries ago by merchants plying the Silk Road, police inspected incoming traffic and verified travelers’ identities. The Journal reporters were stopped, ordered out of their car and asked to explain the purpose of their visit. Drivers, mostly those who weren’t Han Chinese, were guided through electronic gateways that scanned their ID cards and faces.

Farther along, at the entrance to Hami, a city of a half-million, police had the Journal reporters wait in front of a bank of TV screens showing feeds from nearby surveillance cameras while recording their passport numbers.

Surveillance cameras loomed every few hundred feet along the road into town, blanketed street corners and kept watch on patrons of a small noodle shop near the main mosque. The proprietress, a member of the Muslim Hui minority, said the government ordered all restaurants in the area to install the devices earlier this year “to prevent terrorist attacks.”

Days later, as the Journal reporters were driving on a dirt road in Shanshan county after being ordered by officials to leave a nearby town, a police cruiser materialized seemingly from nowhere. It raced past, then skidded to a diagonal stop, kicking up a cloud of dust and blocking the reporters’ car. An SUV pulled up behind. A half-dozen police ordered the reporters out of the car and demanded their passports.

An officer explained that surveillance cameras had read the out-of-town license plates and sent out an alert. “We check every car that’s not from Xinjiang,” he said. The police then escorted the reporters to the highway.

At checkpoints further west, iris and body scanners are added to the security arsenal.

Darren Byler, an anthropology researcher at the University of Washington who spent two years in Xinjiang studying migration, says the closest contemporary parallel can be found in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the Israeli government has created a system of checkpoints and biometric surveillance to keep tabs on Palestinians.

In Erdaoqiao, the neighborhood where the fruit vendor Mr. Imin lives, small booths known as “convenience police stations,” marked by flashing lights atop a pole, appear every couple of hundred yards. The police stationed there offer water, cellphone charging and other services, while also taking in feeds from nearby surveillance cameras.

Young Uighur men are routinely pulled into the stations for phone checks, leading some to keep two devices—one for home use and another, with no sensitive content or apps, for going out, according to Uighur exiles.

Erdaoqiao, the heart of Uighur culture and commerce in Urumqi, is where ethnic riots started in 2009 that resulted in numerous deaths. The front entrance to Erdaoqiao Mosque is now closed, as are most entries to the International Grand Bazaar. Visitors funnel through a heavily guarded main gate. The faces and ID cards of Xinjiang residents are scanned. An array of cameras keeps watch.

After the riots, authorities showed up to shut down the shop Mr. Imin was running at the time, which sold clothing and religious items. When he protested, he says, they clubbed him on the back of the head, which has left him walking with a limp. They jailed him for six months for obstructing official business, he says. Other jail stints followed, including eight months for buying hashish.

The police in Urumqi didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Imin now sells fruit and freshly squeezed pomegranate juice from a cart. He worries that his flagged ID card will bring the police again. Recently remarried, he hasn’t dared visit his new wife’s family in southern Xinjiang.

Chinese rulers have struggled for two millennia to control Xinjiang, whose 23 million people are scattered over an expanse twice the size of Texas. Beijing sees it as a vital piece of President Xi’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road” initiative to build infrastructure along the old Silk Road trade routes to Europe.

Last year, Mr. Xi installed a new Xinjiang party chief, Chen Quanguo, who previously handled ethnic strife in Tibet, another hot spot. Mr. Chen pioneered the convenience police stations in that region, partly in response to a string of self-immolations by monks protesting Chinese rule.

Under Mr. Chen, the police presence in Xinjiang has skyrocketed, based on data showing exponential increases in police-recruitment advertising. Local police departments last year began ordering cameras capable of creating three-dimensional face images as well as DNA sequencers and voice-pattern analysis systems, according to government procurement documents uncovered by Human Rights Watch and reviewed by the Journal.

During the first quarter of 2017, the government announced the equivalent of more than $1 billion in security-related investment projects in Xinjiang, up from $27 million in all of 2015, according to research in April by Chinese brokerage firm Industrial Securities .

Government procurement orders show millions spent on “unified combat platforms”—computer systems to analyze surveillance data from police and other government agencies.

Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and filmmaker, says Uighurs who had passports were called in to local police stations in May. He worried he would draw extra scrutiny for having been accused of carrying sensitive documents, including newspaper articles about Uighur separatist attacks, while trying to travel to Turkey to study in the mid-1990s. The aborted trip landed him in a labor camp for three years, he says.

He and his wife lined up at a police station with other Uighurs to have their fingerprints and blood samples taken. He says he was asked to read a newspaper for two minutes while police recorded his voice, and to turn his head slowly in front of a camera.

Later, his family’s passports were confiscated. After a friend was detained by police, he says, he assumed he also would be taken away. He says he paid officials a bribe of more than $9,000 to get the passports back, making up a story that his daughter had epilepsy requiring treatment in the U.S. Xinjiang’s Public Security Bureau, which is in charge of the region’s police forces, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the bribery.

“The day we left, I was filled with anxiety,” he says. “I worried what would happen if we were stopped going through security at the Urumqi airport, or going through border control in Beijing.”

He and his family made it to Virginia, where they have applied for political asylum.

Chinese authorities use forms to collect personal information from Uighurs. One form reviewed by the Journal asks about respondents’ prayer habits and if they have contacts abroad. There are sections for officials to rate “persons of interest” on a six-point scale and check boxes on whether they are “safe,” “average” or “unsafe.”

China Communications Services Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of state telecom giant China Telecom , has signed contracts this year worth more than $38 million to provide mosque surveillance and install surveillance-data platforms in Xinjiang, according to government procurement documents. The company declined to discuss the contracts, saying they constituted sensitive business information.

Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Co. Ltd. worked with police in Urumqi to adapt a hand-held device it sells for investigating economic crimes so it can scan smartphones for terrorism-related content.

A description of the device that recently was removed from the company’s website said it can read the files on 90% of smartphones and check findings against a police antiterror database. “Mostly, you’re looking for audio and video,” said Zhang Xuefeng, Meiya Pico’s chief marketing officer, in an interview.

Near the Xinjiang University campus in Urumqi, police sat at a wooden table recently, ordering some people walking by to hand over their phones.

“You just plug it in and it shows you what’s on the phone,” said one officer, brandishing a device similar to the one on Meiya Pico’s website. He declined to say what content they were checking for.

One recent afternoon in Korla, one of Xinjiang’s largest cities, only a trickle of people passed through the security checkpoint at the local bazaar, where vendors stared at darkened hallways empty of shoppers.

Li Qiang, the Han Chinese owner of a wine shop, said the security checks, while necessary for safety, were getting in the way of commerce. “As soon as you go out, they check your ID,” he said.

Authorities have built a network of detention facilities, officially referred to as education centers, across Xinjiang. In April, the official Xinjiang Daily newspaper said more than 2,000 people had been sent to a “study and training center” in the southern city of Hotan.

One new compound sits a half-hour drive south of Kashgar, a Uighur-dominated city near the border with Kyrgyzstan. It is surrounded by imposing walls topped with razor wire, with watchtowers at two corners. A slogan painted on the wall reads: “All ethnic groups should be like the pods of a pomegranate, tightly wrapped together.”

Villagers describe it as a detention center. A man standing near the entrance one recent night said it was a school and advised reporters to leave.

Mr. Hamut, the poet, says a relative in Kashgar was taken to a detention center after she participated in an Islamic ceremony, and another went missing soon after the family tried to call him from the U.S.

The local government in Kashgar didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Surveillance in and around Kashgar, where Han Chinese make up less than 7% of the population, is even tighter than in Urumqi. Drivers entering the city are screened intensively. A machine scans each driver’s face. Police officers inspect the engine and the trunk. Passengers must get out and run their bags through X-ray machines.

In Aksu, a dusty city a five-hour drive east of Kashgar, knife salesman Jiang Qiankun says his shop had to pay thousands of dollars for a machine that turns a customer’s ID card number, photo, ethnicity and address into a QR code that it lasers into the blade of any knife it sells. “If someone has a knife, it has to have their ID card information,” he says.

On the last day the Journal reporters were in Xinjiang, an unmarked car trailed them on a 5 a.m. drive to the Urumqi airport. During their China Southern Airlines flight to Beijing, a flight attendant appeared to train a police-style body camera attached to his belt on the reporters. Later, as passengers were disembarking, the attendant denied filming them, saying it was common for airline crew to wear the cameras as a security measure.

China Southern says the crew member was an air marshal, charged with safety on board.

Throughout 2016 and 2017, individuals in Canada, United States, Germany, Norway, United Kingdom, and numerous other countries began to receive suspicious emails. It wasn’t just common spam. These people were chosen.

The emails were specifically designed to entice each individual to click a malicious link. Had the targets done so, their internet connections would have been hijacked and surreptitiously directed to servers laden with malware designed by a surveillance company in Israel. The spies who contracted the Israeli company’s services would have been able to monitor everything those targets did on their devices, including remotely activating the camera and microphone.

Who was behind this global cyber espionage campaign? Was it the National Security Agency? Or one of its “five eyes” partners, like the GCHQ or Canada’s CSE? Given that it was done using Israeli-made technology, perhaps it was Israel’s elite signals intelligence agency, Unit 8200?

In fact, it was none of them. Behind this sophisticated international spying operation was one of the poorest countries in the world; a country where less than 5 percent of the population has access to the internet; a country run by an autocratic government routinely flagged for human rights abuses and corruption. Behind this operation was… Ethiopia.

The details of this remarkable clandestine activity are outlined in a new Citizen Lab report published today entitled “Champing at the Cyberbit.” In our report my co-authors and I detail how we monitored the command and control servers used in the campaign and in doing so discovered a public log file that the operators mistakenly left open. That log file provided us with a window, for roughly a year, into the attackers’ activities, infrastructure, and operations. Strong circumstantial evidence points to one or more government agencies in Ethiopia as the responsible party.

We were also able to identify the IP addresses of those who were targeted and successfully infected: a group that includes journalists, a lawyer, activists, and academics. Our access also allowed us enumerate the countries in which the targets were located. Many of the countries in which the targets live—the United States, Canada, and Germany, among others—have strict wiretapping laws that make it illegal to eavesdrop without a warrant. It seems individuals in Ethiopia broke those laws.

If a government wants to collect evidence on a person in another country, it is customary for it to make a formal legal request to other governments through a process like the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. Ethiopia appears to have sidestepped all of that. International norms would suggest a formal démarche to Ethiopia from the governments whose citizens it monitored without permission, but that may happen quietly if at all.

Our team reverse-engineered the malware used in this instance, and over time this allowed us to positively identify the company whose spyware was being employed by Ethiopia: Cyberbit Solutions, a subsidiary of the Israel-based homeland security company Elbit Systems. Notably, Cyberbit is the fourth company we have identified, alongside Hacking Team, Finfisher, and NSO Group, whose products and services have been abused by autocratic regimes to target dissidents, journalists, and others. Along with NSO Group, it’s the second Israel-based company whose technology has been used in this way.

Israel does regulate the export of commercial spyware abroad, although apparently not very well from a human-rights perspective. Cyberbit was able to sell its services to Ethiopia—a country with not only a well-documented history of governance and human rights problems, but also a track record of abusing spyware. When considered alongside the extensive reporting we have done about UAE and Mexican government misuse of NSO Group’s services, it’s safe to conclude Israel has a commercial spyware control problem.

How big of a problem? Remarkably, by analyzing the command and control servers of the cyber espionage campaign, we were also able to monitor Cyberbit employees as they traveled the world with infected laptops that checked in to those servers, apparently demonstrating Cyberbit’s products to prospective clients. Those clients include the Royal Thai Army, Uzbekistan’s National Security Service, Zambia’s Financial Intelligence Centre, and the Philippine president’s Malacañang Palace. Outlining the human rights abuses associated with those government entities would fill volumes.

Cyberbit, for its part, has responded to Citizen Lab’s findings: “Cyberbit Solutions offers its products only to sovereign governmental authorities and law enforcement agencies,” the company wrote me on November 29. “Such governmental authorities and law enforcement agencies are responsible to ensure that they are legally authorized to use the products in their jurisdictions.“ The company declined to confirm or deny that the government of Ethiopia is a client, but did note that “Cyberbit Solutions can confirm that any transaction made by it was approved by the competent authorities.”

Governments like Ethiopia no longer depend on their own in-country advanced computer science, engineering, and mathematical capacity in order to build a globe-spanning cyber espionage operation. They can simply buy it off the shelf from a company like Cyberbit. Thanks to companies like these, an autocrat whose country has poor national infrastructure but whose regime has billions of dollars can order up their own NSA. To wit: Elbit Systems, the parent company of Cyberbit, says it has a backlog of orders valuing $7 billion. An investment firm recently sought to acquire a partial stake in NSO Group for a reported $400 million before eventually withdrawing its offer.

Of course, these companies insist that spyware they sell to governments is used exclusively to fight terrorists and investigate crime. Sounds reasonable, and no doubt many do just that. But the problem is when journalists, academics, or NGOs seek to expose corrupt dictators or hold them accountable, those truth tellers may then be labelled criminals or terrorists. And our research has shown that makes those individuals and groups vulnerable to this type of state surveillance, even if they live abroad.

Indeed, we discovered the second-largest concentration of successful infections of this Ethiopian operation are located in Canada. Among the targets whose identities we were able to verify and name in the report, what unites them all is their peaceful political opposition to the Ethiopian government. Except one. Astoundingly, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak, who led our technical investigation, was himself targeted at one point by the espionage operators.

Countries sliding into authoritarianism and corruption. A booming and largely unregulated market for sophisticated surveillance. Civilians not equipped to defend themselves. Add these ingredients together, and you have a serious crisis of democracy brewing. Companies like Cyberbit market themselves as part of a solution to cyber security. But it is evident that commercial spyware is actually contributing to a very deep insecurity instead.

Remedying this problem will not be easy. It will require legal and policy efforts across multiple jurisdictions and involving governments, civil society, and the private sector. A companion piece to the report outlines some measures that could hopefully begin that process, including application of relevant criminal laws. If the international community does not act swiftly, journalists, activists, lawyers, and human rights defenders will be increasingly infiltrated and neutralized. It’s time to address the commercial spyware industry for what it has become: one of the most dangerous cyber security problems of our day.

The idea of websites tracking users isn’t new, but research from Princeton University released last week indicates that online tracking is far more invasive than most users understand.

In the first installment of a series titled “No Boundaries,” three researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) explain how third-party scripts that run on many of the world’s most popular websites track your every keystroke and then send that information to a third-party server.

Some highly-trafficked sites run software that records every time you click and every word you type. If you go to a website, begin to fill out a form, and then abandon it, every letter you entered in is still recorded, according to the researchers’ findings. If you accidentally paste something into a form that was copied to your clipboard, it’s also recorded. These scripts, or bits of code that websites run, are called “session replay” scripts. Session replay scripts are used by companies to gain insight into how their customers are using their sites and to identify confusing webpages. But the scripts don’t just aggregate general statistics, they record and are capable of playing back individual browsing sessions.

The scripts don’t run on every page, but are often placed on pages where users input sensitive information, like passwords and medical conditions. Most troubling is that the information session replay scripts collect can’t “reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous,” according to the researchers.

Siobhan Lyons, Scholar in Media and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, writes in The Conversation:

We all seem worried about privacy. Though it’s not only privacy itself we should be concerned about: it’s also our attitudes towards privacy that are important.

When we stop caring about our digital privacy, we witness surveillance apathy.

And it’s something that may be particularly significant for marginalised communities, who feel they hold no power to navigate or negotiate fair use of digital technologies.

In the wake of the NSA leaks in 2013 led by Edward Snowden, we are more aware of the machinations of online companies such as Facebook and Google. Yet research shows some of us are apathetic when it comes to online surveillance.

Privacy and surveillance

Attitudes to privacy and surveillance in Australia are complex.

According to a major 2017 privacy survey, around 70% of us are more concerned about privacy than we were five years ago.

And yet we still increasingly embrace online activities. A 2017 report on social media conducted by search marketing firm Sensis showed that almost 80% of internet users in Australia now have a social media profile, an increase of around ten points from 2016. The data also showed that Australians are on their accounts more frequently than ever before.

Also, most Australians appear not to be concerned about recently proposed implementation of facial recognition technology. Only around one in three (32% of 1,486) respondents to a Roy Morgan study expressed worries about having their faces available on a mass database.

A recent ANU poll revealed a similar sentiment, with recent data retention laws supported by two thirds of Australians.

So while we’re aware of the issues with surveillance, we aren’t necessarily doing anything about it, or we’re prepared to make compromises when we perceive our safety is at stake.

Across the world, attitudes to surveillance vary. Around half of Americans polled in 2013 found mass surveillance acceptable. France, Britain and the Philippines appeared more tolerant of mass surveillance compared to Sweden, Spain, and Germany, according to 2015 Amnesty International data.

Apathy and marginalisation

In 2015, philosopher Slavoj Žižek proclaimed that he did not care about surveillance (admittedly though suggesting that “perhaps here I preach arrogance”).

This position cannot be assumed by all members of society. Australian academic Kate Crawford argues the impact of data mining and surveillance is more significant for marginalised communities, including people of different races, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds. American academics Shoshana Magnet and Kelley Gates agree, writing:

[…] new surveillance technologies are regularly tested on marginalised communities that are unable to resist their intrusion.

A 2015 White House report found that big data can be used to perpetuate price discrimination among people of different backgrounds. It showed how data surveillance “could be used to hide more explicit forms of discrimination”.

According to Ira Rubinstein, a senior fellow at New York University’s Information Law Institute, ignorance and cynicism are often behind surveillance apathy. Users are either ignorant of the complex infrastructure of surveillance, or they believe they are simply unable to avoid it.

As the White House report stated, consumers “have very little knowledge” about how data is used in conjunction with differential pricing.

So in contrast to the oppressive panopticon (a circular prison with a central watchtower) as envisioned by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, we have what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls the “crytopticon”. The crytopticon is “not supposed to be intrusive or obvious. Its scale, its ubiquity, even its very existence, are supposed to go unnoticed”.

But Melanie Taylor, lead artist of the computer game Orwell (which puts players in the role of surveillance) noted that many simply remain indifferent despite heightened awareness:

That’s the really scary part: that Snowden revealed all this, and maybe nobody really cared.

The Facebook trap

Surveillance apathy can be linked to people’s dependence on “the system”. As one of my media students pointed out, no matter how much awareness users have regarding their social media surveillance, invariably people will continue using these platforms. This is because they are convenient, practical, and “we are creatures of habit”.

As University of Melbourne scholar Suelette Dreyfus noted in a Four Corners report on Facebook:

Facebook has very cleverly figured out how to wrap itself around our lives. It’s the family photo album. It’s your messaging to your friends. It’s your daily diary. It’s your contact list.

This, along with the complex algorithms Facebook and Google use to collect and use data to produce “filter bubbles” or “you loops” is another issue.

Protecting privacy

While some people are attempting to delete themselves from the network, others have come up with ways to avoid being tracked online.

Search engines such as DuckDuckGo or Tor Browser allow users to browse without being tracked. Lightbeam, meanwhile, allows users to see how their information is being tracked by third party companies. And MIT devised a system to show people the metadata of their emails, called Immersion.

Surveillance apathy is more disconcerting than surveillance itself. Our very attitudes about privacy will inform the structure of surveillance itself, so caring about it is paramount.

From Slashdot:

“I deleted Facebook after it recommended as People You May Know a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email,” an attorney told Gizmodo. Kashmir Hill, a reporter at the news outlet, who recently documented how Facebook figured out a connection between her and a family member she did not know existed, shares several more instances others have reported and explains how Facebook gathers information. She reports:

Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up. Facebook isn’t scanning the work email of the attorney above. But it likely has her work email address on file, even if she never gave it to Facebook herself. If anyone who has the lawyer’s address in their contacts has chosen to share it with Facebook, the company can link her to anyone else who has it, such as the defense counsel in one of her cases. Facebook will not confirm how it makes specific People You May Know connections, and a Facebook spokesperson suggested that there could be other plausible explanations for most of those examples — “mutual friendships,” or people being “in the same city/network.” The spokesperson did say that of the stories on the list, the lawyer was the likeliest case for a shadow-profile connection. Handing over address books is one of the first steps Facebook asks people to take when they initially sign up, so that they can “Find Friends.”

The problem with all this, Hill writes, is that Facebook doesn’t explicitly say the scale at which it would be using the contact information it gleans from a user’s address book. Furthermore, most people are not aware that Facebook is using contact information taken from their phones for these purposes.”

An excerpt from the book The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (2017):

“Data-driven policing means aggressive police presence, surveillance, and perceived harassment in those communities. Each data point translates to real human experience, and many times those experiences remain fraught with all-too-human bias, fear, distrust, and racial tension. For those communities, especially poor communities of color, these data-collection efforts cast a dark shadow on the future.”

privacytools.io provides knowledge and tools to protect your privacy against global mass surveillance.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Browser Privacy Tool checks if websites may be able to track you, even if you’ve limited or disabled cookies. Panopticlick tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits.

Encrypt your communications and end your reliance on proprietary services.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to defending yourself and your friends from mass surveillance by using secure technology and developing awareness practices.

“Facebook doesn’t only know what its 2 billion users “Like.” It now knows where millions of humans live, everywhere on Earth, to within 15 feet. The company has created a data map of the human population by combining government census numbers with information it’s obtained from space satellites, according to Janna Lewis, Facebook’s head of strategic innovation partnerships and sourcing. A Facebook representative later told CNBC that this map currently covers 23 countries, up from 20 countries mentioned in this blog post from February 2016.

The mapping technology, which Facebook says it developed itself, can pinpoint any man-made structures in any country on Earth to a resolution of five meters. Facebook is using the data to understand the precise distribution of humans around the planet. That will help the company determine what types of internet service — based either on land, in the air or in space — it can use to reach consumers who now have no (or very low quality) internet connections.”

“A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

TigerSwan spearheaded a multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and invasive surveillance of protesters.

Activists on the ground were tracked by a Dakota Access helicopter that provided live video coverage to their observers in police agencies, according to an October 12 email thread that included officers from the FBI, DHS, BIA, state, and local police. In one email, National Security Intelligence Specialist Terry Van Horn of the U.S. attorney’s office acknowledged his direct access to the helicopter video feed, which was tracking protesters’ movements during a demonstration. “Watching a live feed from DAPL Helicopter, pending arrival at site(s),” he wrote. Cecily Fong, a spokesperson for law enforcement throughout the protests, acknowledged that an operations center in Bismarck had access to the feed, stating in an email to The Intercept that “the video was provided as a courtesy so we had eyes on the situation.”