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Content type: Examples
Following a complaint from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the country's attorney general has said the Shin Bet security agency's use of mobile phone tracking technology to monitor and threaten Palestinian protesters at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque in May 2021 was a legitimate security tool, Josef Federman reports at ABC News. Shin Bet sent a text message to both Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel who were determined to be in the area of the…
Content type: Examples
Just as China uses technology system called "Integrated Joint Operations Platform" to control and surveil the persecuted population of Uighurs while restricting their movement and branding dissent as "terrorism", the Israeli military is using facial recognition and a massive database of personal information to control millions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. In November 2021, NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was found on the phones of six Palestinian human rights activists, three of whom…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli minister of public security has joined police in denying claims in an article in Calcalist that the country's police force have used NSO Group's Pegasus software to spy on the phones of people who led protests against former premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Calcalist reported that the surveillance was carried out without court supervision or oversight of how the data was used. The daily Haaretz newspaper also reported that it had seen a 2013 invoice in which NSO billed police @@2.7…
Content type: Examples
Facebook has taken down 65 accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts, which were ran by Archimedes Group, an Israeli political consulting and lobbying firm that aimed at disrupting elections in various countries.
Archimedes was mostly active in Sub-Saharan Africa but also some part of Southeast Asia and Latin America. According to Facebook, the accounts taken down were attempting to influence people in Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia. But the most…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International welcomes WhatsApp's immediate reaction after the revelation that Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO group had exploited a vulnerability in their software. We encourage all WhatsApp users to update their app as soon as possible. However, we believe WhatsApp needs to be much more transparent with their users. We haven't seen a notification on the app itself that would inform users about both, the bug, and the fix. The current version merely states that you can now see…
Content type: Examples
In Israel, the National Insurance Institutes sends out anti-fraud officers to spy on benefits claimants. Among the cases reported, a woman had her benefits allowances halved after a man entered her house pretending to be interested in buying the flat next door. The man, who was in fact a NII employee, discretely took picture of the woman to argue she was not actually severely disabled. The woman was eventually able to regain her full allowance.
The growing number of controversial cases of…
Content type: Examples
In Israel, the National Insurance Institute – in charge of granting benefits – eventually dropped a tender that had caused outrage in the country after being uncovered by Haaretz and Channel 13. The tender revealed the NII was trying to collect online data about benefits claimants – including from social media – to detect cases of frauds. The tender used wheelchair users as an example, suggesting that finding pictures of alleged wheelchair users using bikes on social media could contribute to…