Page 11 - Issue-47

ELITE
Vol.1, Issue 47, September 2022 ELITE

The million dollar question here is: does BDS In 2021, the Washington Post reported on the
have real impact? Instead of going through all of existence of “Blue Wolf”, a secret military program
the movement’s achievements and successes, let’s aimed at monitoring Palestinians through a network
take a look at Israel’s actions toward them. Israel of facial recognition-enabled smartphones and
is providing financial aid to international cameras. As for Google, they briefed the Israeli
organizations working against the BDS movement government on using what’s known as sentiment
through the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, detection, an increasingly controversial and
amounting to NIS 5.7 million (as of 2019). They discredited form of machine learning. Google
also closed 30 bank accounts of organizations claims that its systems can discern inner feelings
affiliated with the BDS movement on the pretext from one’s face and statements, a technique
of close relations between them and armed commonly rejected for lack of scientific basis. One
Palestinian organizations such as Hamas. And to Nimbus presentation showed the “Faces, facial
top it all, the director of “Human Rights Watch” landmarks, emotions” detection capabilities of
was expelled from Israel by a court decision for Google’s Cloud Vision API, an image analysis
his support of the boycott movement. Allow me to toolset. The presentation then offered a
answer my question with another question: if BDS demonstration using the enormous grinning face
isn’t effective, why go to all this lengths to stop it? sculpture at the entrance of Sydney’s Luna Park.
Google was only able to assess that the famous
Nowadays, the Israeli restrictions aren’t the only amusement park is an amusement park with 64
thing making it harder to support BDS. In the past percent certainty. Google workers who reviewed
month, there was two main stories concerning the documents said they were concerned by their
companies supporting Israel. Firstly, BDS employer’s sale of these technologies to Israel,
expressed its opposition towards Google fearing both their inaccuracy and how they might
involvement with Israel. It all begin when an be used for surveillance or other militarized
article from “The Intercept” confirmed that purposes. In September, the Jewish Diaspora in
Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence Tech (a group launched by Jewish employees in
and machine-learning capabilities to the Israeli Google) released a series of testimonies from 15
government through its controversial “Project Google employees in opposition to what they see as
Nimbus” contract. This project was announced by anti-Palestinian bias within the company. Six
the Israeli Finance Ministry in April 2021 for a Google workers and several Palestinian rights
$1.2 billion cloud computing system jointly built activists and academics held a press conference at
by Google and Amazon. Many of the capabilities one of Google’s San Francisco offices, and the
outlined in the technologies offered by Google activists hosted a multi-city protest organized under
could easily augment Israel’s ability to survey #NoTechForApartheid.
people and process vast stores of data. The Israeli
state has for decades benefited from the country’s
Back thriving research and development sector, to
Back
police and control Palestinians.
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