4/4 EDRi's blog on Belgium’s latest move on #CSAR is dedicated to our esteemed colleague Professor Ross Anderson, a bold and important voice in our collective work on the EU’s CSA Regulation and a part of EDRi since our inception in 2002. He will be deeply missed.

3/4🔴Another red flag in the new #CSAR proposal:

Proposed reliance on the EU Commission for risk criteria decisions DESPITE
➡️Serious allegations of non-impartiality around the Commissioner in charge of CSAR
➡️DG HOME’s alleged undue closeness with the surveillance tech industry

2/4 EDRi is concerned with the latest Council #CSAR proposal because it:

🔸allows #DetectionOrders to be issued very broadly
🔸bases suggestion for repeated flagging reporting on statistical misunderstandings
🔸encourages age verification & turn-off of encryption by default

1/4 🚨Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU 2024's new #CSAR proposal is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The new approach suggests a number of harmful & privacy-eroding ‘solutions’. Once again putting people's digital safety at risk.🤐

Read more from Ella Jakubowska & Jesper Lund - NOT HERE ANYMORE: edri.org/our-work/rearr…

'..since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily 'link” individuals to houses..track thousands simultaneously...send an alert to officer, who then marks the house for bombing.'

972mag.com/lavender-ai-is…

“even if an attack is averted, you don’t care – you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.” theguardian.com/world/2024/apr…

🚨Absolutely stunning new investigation by Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם of +972 Magazine. TLDR: In Oct, IDF expanded kill lists from 'top commanders' to 'everyone Hamas'—37k ppl.
Via a slap-up AI bot.
And it increased quota of permitted collateral damage from 'zero' to '20' civilians per target.

I spoke with Israeli intelligence officers about the AI-based target machine they used which marked 37,000 Gazans as suspects for assassination. These whistleblowers expose numerous machines & policies that killed thousands of civilians since October.
972mag.com/lavender-ai-is…

1/4 📣Breaking News homodigitalis.gr/en/posts/13219… The Hellenic Data Protection Authority fines the Ministry of Migration and Asylum for the 'Centaurus' and 'Hyperion' systems with the largest penalty ever imposed to a Greek public body

Over six months, Rest of World spoke to researchers, activists, and people targeted by facial recognition systems to track how the technology is being used by governments around the world to crack down on protests.

Read our new feature by @darrenloucaides restofworld.org/2024/facial-re…

Israel has a long history of testing new military and law enforcement weapons and technologies on Palestinians and then exporting them to other countries. Facial recognition technologies are flawed and should be banned especially in an occupied territory. nytimes.com/2024/03/27/tec…

Met policeman LOVES live facial recognition surveillance, reasoning that the UK is already a surveillance state & your face is more or less a number plate…

🤦‍♀️

“Game changer” indeed. It’s barcodes for the population.

#StopFacialRecognition

this is known as the chilling effect of surveillance powered by FRT

NO to facial recognition technology for cops. Please sign petition. 🙏

🧵”Insufficient evidence”. After 13 years under criminal investigation for my human rights work as head of @eipr, 8 years under a travel ban and a freeze on my assets and only bank account without trial, facing up to 25 years in prison, l and other colleagues are exonerated /1

Really strong piece from TCD adjunct assistant professor and AI advisor to Mozilla, Abeba Birhane on the misguided legislation the Govt are pushing to legislate for Garda use of Facial Recognition tech.

irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/0…

🚨Hard-hitting piece by Abeba Birhane in The Irish Times on:
- dangers of FRT
- bewildering points from An Garda Síochána about planned FRT use
- their citing a certain 'accuracy' figure is irrelevant to envisaged Irish use
- why accuracy debate is distraction from wider human rights issues