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Surveillance

No Tech For Apartheid Israel

In this episode of The Watchdog, former Google employee Ariel Koren joins Lowkey and articulates her experience at the big tech giant, claiming it has gradually developed an institutionalised pro-Israeli bias. She also reveals ways in which employees attempting to hold the company accountable for unethical contracts, such as that of Project Nimbus, are being targeted and intentionally silenced. Google, alongside Amazon, has signed a contract worth $1.2 billion, titled “Project Nimbus”, which will provide a cloud system service for both the Israeli military and the Israeli government. Disturbingly, the project was announced May in 2021, the same month Israel killed at least 260 Palestinians in Gaza. Adding insult to injury, it was during this period that Amnesty International found Israel guilty of practising Apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Durham Employees Call On Google And Amazon To Cut Ties With Israel

Google employees in Durham protested outside of their office Thursday afternoon, calling on Google and Amazon to stop working with the Israeli government and military. The protest, which included around 40 employees, was part of the national #NoTechforApartheid campaign, a movement based around a $1.22 billion project contract that Google and Amazon signed with the Israeli government in May 2021. Known as “Nimbus," the project intends to provide cloud support for Israel’s military and government. Google and Amazon signed the deal while Israel was conducting airstrikes in civilian areas of the Gaza Strip and forcibly evicting several Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

UPS Says No To Air Conditioning, But Here’s A Surveillance Camera

On June 25, 24-year-old UPS driver Esteban Chavez Jr. collapsed in the back of his truck while working, and died. Temperatures in the Los Angeles area that day were in the high 90s. Hundreds of other UPS workers around the country suffer from heatstroke every summer, as UPS refuses to install air conditioning in its trucks or warehouses. In our own Teamsters Local 804 in New York City, a supervisor even told a driver who was suffering heatstroke while working not to call an ambulance, and tried to keep him from filing a workers comp claim. Later that day the driver was hospitalized for heatstroke. And, though we have a contractual right to have at least fans in our trucks, in New York City UPS refused to install fans for months.

Pompeo Sued Over Surveillance Of Assange Visitors

Four U.S. citizens who were surveilled by the C.I.A. during visits to WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuador embassy in London have sued the C.I.A, former C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo, the Spanish security firm UC Global and its director David Morales Guillen for allegedly violating their constitutional rights protecting them from illegal searches and seizure. The lawsuit was filed at 8 a.m. Monday in the Southern District of New York federal court. Assange spent seven years in the embassy as a political asylee. He is being held on remand in London’s Belmarsh prison after the U.S. indicted him in 2019 under the Espionage Act for alleged possession and dissemination of defense information. Assange is awaiting a decision by the High Court of England and Wales on whether it will hear his appeal of the ruling by the High Court, signed by the home secretary in June, to extradite him to the United States.

Privacy Is The Entry Point For Our Civil And Basic Rights’

From the outset, the gutting of Roe by Dobbs is so devastating for, of course, the constitutional reasons, that at one time, Roe codified and really affirmed that abortion was a basic right. Dobbs, in overruling that, overturning that, has laid open states to pick and choose whether they will allow abortion providers and individuals that kind of right. But we’re in a very different moment now in 2022 than we were in the 1970s, and that’s really because of the rise of the digital age. With it, as you mentioned in your opening, is that the Internet is our primary pathway for almost everyone, I think, to information, to healthcare to, you know, telehealth appointments. And so there are these huge questions now about how people will access both just information, and then who is going to have access to that data that we are all of us engaging in and creating a footprint for.

Canada Steps Up Surveillance Of Indigenous Peoples To Push Pipelines

Canadian police and security forces have intensified their surveillance and harassment of Indigenous people in recent months in an effort to clear the way for the construction of two long-distance oil and gas pipelines in British Columbia, earning the condemnation of international human rights observers. “The Governments of Canada and of the Province of British Columbia have escalated their use of force, surveillance, and criminalization of land defenders and peaceful protesters to intimidate, remove and forcibly evict Secwepemc and Wet’suwet’en Nations from their traditional lands,” the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) wrote in an April 29 letter.

New Surveillance Transparency Report Documents An Urgent Need For Change

The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has released its Annual Statistical Transparency Report disclosing the use of national security surveillance laws for the year 2021—and to no one’s surprise it documents the wide-ranging overreach of intelligence agencies and the continued misuse of surveillance authorities to spy on millions of Americans. Specifically, the report chronicles how Section 702, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets’ communications, is still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant. Specifically, the report reveals that between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI queried the data of potentially more than 3,000,000 “U.S. persons” without a warrant.

The Surveillance And Policing Of Looted Land

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group rooted in the Skid Row community on Tongva/Gabrielino land, stolen territory known as Los Angeles. Over the past decade, we have been working to build power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationships of policing and surveillance to displacement, gentrification, and real estate development. We study those relationships with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization. We often hear that police are an occupying army in our communities. Throughout the history of imperialism and colonization, occupying forces have used surveillance to monitor and contain populations they deem threatening, all for the purpose of maintaining their violent rule.

Artists, Activists Demand Concert Venues Drop Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Tech

Concert operators may like Amazon's palm recognition system, but some performers and activists are less than thrilled. A group of 200 artists and 30 rights groups has penned an open letter demanding the Red Rocks amphitheater, its ticketing provider AXS and AEG (AXS' parent company) "immediately cancel" contracts to use Amazon One scanning at any venue. They also want the firms to ban all biometric surveillance at those events.

CIA And DoD-Connected Organizations Mapping WikiLeaks Supporters

For Julian Assange and those closest to him, the journey to the Royal Courts of Justice this week has been arduous and fraught with nail-biting intrigue and danger. Scheduled to appear on October 27 and 28, Assange will be subjected to a US appeal against an earlier judgement by a lower Court that found in his favor. While the US attempt to strike down the previous finding again places Assange in grave peril, this time the passing months have played in his favor, as growing support for the WikiLeaks publisher has invigorated and swelled the numbers of various grassroots campaigns demanding his freedom. Assange’s lawyers will arrive armed with statements in support by 25 leading press freedom and human rights organizations, calling in unison for an immediate end to the more than decade-long multi-jurisdictional lawfare waged against the Australian journalist.

Digital Vaccine Passports Pave Way For Surveillance Capitalism

The death by starvation of Etwariya Devi, a 67-year-old widow from the rural Indian state of Jharkhand, might have passed without notice had it not been part of a more widespread trend. Like 1.3 billion of her fellow Indians, Devi had been pushed to enroll in a biometric digital ID system called Aadhaar in order to access public services, including her monthly allotment of 25kg of rice. When her fingerprint failed to register with the shoddy system, Devi was denied her food ration. Throughout the course of the following three months in 2017, she was repeatedly refused food until she succumbed to hunger, alone in her home. Premani Kumar, a 64-year-old woman also from Jharkhand, met the same demise as Devi, dying of hunger and exhaustion the same year after the Aadhaar system transferred her pension payments to another person without her permission, while cutting off her monthly food rations.

Workers At Amazon And Google Condemn ‘Project Nimbus’

Google and Amazon workers have published a public letter calling on the two companies to cancel Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract for cloud computing services for the Israeli military and government. We know that the Israeli military apparatus will use these services to build weapons and surveillance technology to use against the Palestinian people. Such technology, once tested on Palestinians, is frequently exported back to the United States to be used against marginalized populations and protesters here. This public action by tech workers follows an increasing number of coordinated actions in the tech sector to pressure Big Tech companies to cancel government contracts for surveillance technology, censorship technology, and computing services for foreign states.

DEA Went Undercover To Infiltrate A Vigil For George Floyd

As students at the University of South Florida quietly sobbed during a moment of silence for George Floyd last summer, they had no idea their candlelight vigil, organized before a monument to an assassinated civil rights leader, had been infiltrated by federal agents. They were not aware that the campus police department charged with their protection had invited federal drug cops to dress in plain clothes and stand beside them as they took turns venting their anger and frustration—fear over the growing number of unarmed Black people being shot dead by police. The students weren’t the only ones being monitored. At least 51 times last summer, drug enforcement agents were asked to surveil Americans engaged in First Amendment activities stemming from the backlash over Floyd’s murder.

Solidarity With Longtime Anti-War Activist Joe Lombardo!

On the heels of its defeat in Afghanistan, the United States government has made it clear it is now once again setting its sights on anti-war activists in the United States. Their latest target is Joe Lombardo, a leader of the country's largest anti-imperialist coalition. Joe Lombardo is 73 years old and has been an organizer in the anti-war movement for decades. He is a cofounder and lead organizer for Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, a local anti-war group based near Albany, New York.

President Biden: End The War On Terror At Home!

While the Bush Administration launched these policies, the Obama and Trump Administrations cemented and expanded them. Under Obama, the US carried out drone strikes targeting US citizens, ratified bulk collection of US citizens’ metadata, initiated the Countering Violent Extremism program, and revived the World War I-era Espionage Act to punish War on Terror whistleblowers. Trump called for the surveillance of mosques, enacted a Muslim Ban, and continued to abuse the Espionage act, using it to indict a journalist for publishing truthful information about US war crimes. You made the decision to end the US ground war in Afghanistan. We applaud this decision. But after twenty years, it is time not just to end the war on terror abroad, but at home too. Doing so requires...

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