Surveillance Tech, Emotion Recognition, and Predictive AI against Palestinians: Interview with Mona Shtaya
The wall in Bethlehem, West Bank at sunset, with shadow of surveillance tower. Credit: Florian Schmitz
Israel is using state-of-the-art technology against Palestinians not only in the war in Gaza, but also against residents in the West Bank. Massive and intrusive collection of private data, predictive policing and thorough surveillance have become essential tools for the IDF, while private companies cash in. In this interview, 2024/25 MTM fellow and Palestinian researcher Mona Shtaya talks about life under highly technologized occupation.
Migration and Technology Monitor: You used to live in Ramallah and recently moved abroad because of the increasing military actions of Israel in the West Bank – in addition to the unstable situation in Gaza. Can you explain what the situation in the West Bank is like at the moment?
Mona Shtaya: With the short and shaky ceasefire in Gaza people stopped speaking about what's going on in Palestine. But what we are witnessing in the West Bank is scary. Israel is conducting raids in the different Palestinian cities and camps, and settlers increasingly attack Palestinians. We must not forget: The war in Gaza isn’t over. Things are messy. People lost their homes, family members and friends. People in Gaza say that they don’t even have the time to grieve. So this has been a quite challenging time. What we have witnessed in Gaza, the forceful displacement of people, is not limited to Gaza. Over 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced in Jenin and Tulkarem, particularly affecting refugee camps, where Palestinians have been living for decades. Now they are witnessing a new Nakba (editor’s note: Arabic for catastrophe) that is happening to the younger generation while our generational trauma continues. And the same tools and tactics that have been used in Gaza, such as the communication blackout and the Internet shutdown are also happening in the West Bank.
Mona Shtaya is a Palestinian activist and researcher. Credit: private
MTM: Can you give an example?
Mona Shtaya: We've seen that during the genocide in Gaza, when they were invading Jenin refugee camp or Nour Sham's refugee camp in Tulkarem they were also deliberately shutting down the Internet and cut all the telecommunication, so people wouldn't be able to document and to report what's going on. In the West Bank we have also seen heavily loaded military checkpoints that have been there for decades and that were actively kept closed. Palestinians have to stop at those military checkpoints for longer than usual and they have always been difficult to pass. Sometimes you wait for two or three hours going to work and then another two or three hours when you go back home.
MTM: When you say heavily loaded, what do you mean exactly?
Mona Shtaya: When I visit my family I have to pass through two heavily loaded military checkpoints. And when I say heavily loaded I also mean heavily loaded with surveillance technology - CCTV cameras and facial recognition technologies, for example. The Israeli soldiers also harass people when they stop them. They sometimes take pictures of your face or your ID and they profile you. You think twice before you go somewhere that involves a checkpoint. And apart from that, it's also very difficult for Palestinians to actually leave the country.
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MTM: Could you explain in how far this is a problem ? Do people want to leave because of the war?
Mona Shtaya: Because of our generational trauma, many people just want to stay on their land, in their homes, with their families. But it's not up to Palestinians to think about leaving the country anyway. Many people of our generation have travel bans. Some people for a lifetime, which means that they can never leave the country.
MTM: Who issues these travel bans?
Mona Shtaya: The Israelis decide who can travel and who can’t. But it’s complicated. We don’t have an airport, so Palestinians need to go through Jordan, which means that we have to pass through three security checks. The first one is with the Palestinian authorities, then the Israeli authorities and only then you reach the actual Jordanian border. The Israeli checkpoint is always the most difficult and humiliating one. Since a few years Palestinians have been required to use biometric passports. The Palestinian Authority (PA) never passed privacy or data protection laws, while Israel is systematically profiling Palestinians and take over our data. That basically means that we don't have the right to privacy. At the same time, Israel is controlling the entire ICT infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. So when you want to cross Allenby bridge (Editor’s note: the only border crossing between the occupied West Bank and Jordan) with all the CCTV cameras, with all your biometric data, everything is being collected and you have no idea how these systems are integrated or how your data are processed. It's a humiliating experience. They deliberately humiliate Palestinians. Sometimes people are interrogated for hours. And sometimes people only find out at the border that they are banned from traveling. On top of that, the bridge is not always open so you cannot travel whenever you like. It’s open on Saturdays or Fridays for a few hours or they don’t open at all. On weekdays it’s open for eight hours. But sometimes, in the middle of the day, they decide to close it.
MTM: You are not just a Palestinian who suffers from these measures on a daily basis. You are also researcher dealing with the technological sides of occupation. Can you explain in how far technology impacts the everyday life of Palestinians?
Mona Shtaya: First of all, it’s not technology that makes life difficult, it's the Israelis making Palestinian lives hard by using technology for security and military purposes. We have been seeing for many years how Israel shaped up to become a pioneer in surveillance technology – technology that they test on Palestinians. Palestine is a kind of lab they use before selling their products globally, actually profiting from the occupation. For the past two years it became even more complicated. As soon as the genocide began, they started developing and integrating certain artificial intelligence technologies to massively target Palestinians. They developed systems like ‘Lavender’ , ‘Where is Daddy’ , or ‘Gospel.’ Gospel, for example, is an AI that identifies infrastructure and buildings used by what they believe are people with Hamas affiliation. Other AIs are targeting people directly, which is terrifying, because even before the genocide we knew about the risks of predictive policing and how technology can misidentify people. There are many well documented cases all around the world that prove this.
Credits: @emad_el_bayed. About 90% of all structures in Gaza were destroyed or heavily damaged.
MTM: Can you give an example?
Mona Shtaya: A New York Times investigation documented the case of Palestinian human rights defender and journalist called Mosab Abu Toha, who was misidentified by the Israeli forces in Gaza Strip while he was displaced from the north of Gaza to the south. They wrongly identified him as an affiliate of Hamas. And this is only one case where facial recognition misidentified someone.
MTM: What kind of issues does this cause in Gaza?
Mona Shtaya: If you look at the death toll in the Gaza strip, you can see that over 70% of the targeted people were women and children, which means that not all targets were affiliated to Hamas or Fatah. The big majority of these people were civilians. And if you go to the other 30% - they are names on lists designed by AI technologies and the Israelis rely on this without double checking, without confirming that a target is actually a Hamas fighter. They only said that they checked if the target was a man or not, as if any Palestinian man is a legitimate target for them. But these were just 30%. The other 70% were collateral damage, as they call it.
MTM: To design these technologies, you need large sets of data. But, as a researcher, can you give us an assessment of how reliable the data are that Israel is collecting?
Mona Shtaya: Israel is collecting massive amounts of data from Palestinians, but I think the death toll in Gaza shows us that their technology is not reliable. However, collecting data from people makes it easier for the colonializing authorities to control them. Having said that, Palestine is under full military occupation, so, our data don’t belong to us. It’s controlled and monitored. But not only for the sake of targeting people, but I think that Israel really develops these technologies to profit from both, occupation and genocide.
MTM: How about data storage?
Mona Shtaya: There are some systems that we understand more than others, such as Blue Wolf, White Wolf and Red Wolf. These are systems for which the Israelis collect data and profile Palestinians, and later on they use these data to rank people into security risks. This is the case for Blue Wolf, a system used by Israeli soldiers. White Wolf, on the other hand, is used by Israeli settlers to check on Palestinians who sometimes work in Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank, also to assess the alleged security risk of that person. And there is something called Wolf Pack, a server on which all data is stored and it connects the three systems. You are profiled with your facial picture and your ID and they also make connections to your family and relatives. It becomes part of a collective punishment scheme, because, even if you are not considered a risk in general, if one your family members is, then you become one. For the Israeli army, every Palestinian is a security threat. We have friends and journalists who are non-Palestinians and who were deported when they were entering Palestine, because according to Israel, they were a security threat. Other systems, however, we still don’t understand in-depth, in terms of where data is stored, how they are integrated, in how far they are interoperable with other systems and how data is being used exactly.
MTM: How about internet traffic?
Mona Shtaya: We can't disconnect the online surveillance from the digital surveillance that Palestinians are also struggling with. We've seen a lot of pages on social media platforms such as Facebook, for example, where military personnel in certain areas ask people for information. We've seen them publishing pictures of people, saying that this person is wanted by the Israeli security forces. This is also a way to survey people and collect more data. So both the online spaces and the urban or offline spaces are securitized, are militarized. People feel that they are living in a panopticon and everything is being watched. And I haven’t yet talked about CCTV and facial recognition, or the smart shooter in Hebron or drones that follow you, even when you are just hiking in nature. It happened to friends of mine. A soldier or settler moved the drone from afar, telling them to leave the aria. They were only hiking in the outskirts of Ramallah.
MTM: A soldier or settler? The lines between military and settlers seem blurry.
Mona Shtaya: Yes. We are speaking about well integrated system where you don't only not understand the settlers’ role and the military’s role, but also the line between the government and the business sector. The surveillance systems are owned by companies. And many of these companies are operated by ex-military people. It all works hand in hand. Ex-militaries sell tailor-made tech to an oppressive government and settlers use this tech to attack and discriminate against Palestinians.
Qalandia Checkpoint in Ramallah, Westbank. Credits: Florian Schmitz
MTM: An English doctor, who worked in Gaza, was questioned regarding possible war crimes committed by the IDF. He said that drones were used to finish off people, even children. Is that possible? Are there armed drones?
Mona Shtaya: Yes. We heard about these incidents in Gaza during the genocide. But also we've heard about similar things in the West Bank a couple of years ago. The same technology was used to also kill Palestinians in the West Bank, in the town of Nablus. Also, there is the so-called smart-shooter in the H2 area in Hebron, which unfortunately is not smart. It is an automated killer that is up there directed toward you when you are walking on the street. It’s designed so that people are scared all the time.
MTM: What does this mean for people psychologically?
Mona Shtaya: It's hard to explain how it feels to be living in a constant status of fear. You can't even imagine it. If you go from Hebron to Jerusalem, a route heavily loaded with CCTV cameras and facial recognition technology, it's even worse. Palestinians are a rather conservative society. I know of women in East-Jerusalem, who wear their hijab inside their homes. For Muslim women, your home is your safe place where you don’t have to cover your head. But some women feel observed, they feel like surveillance cameras are invading their private space. One might say that she is only covering her head and that this is not dangerous. But on the other hand, if women started covering their head inside their homes, you could later claim that she is a religious extremists. Colonization instills structural fear.
MTM: The West Bank is officially under the administration of the Palestinian Authority. What is their role in all of this?
Mona Shtaya: Sometimes people think that, if you are living under a certain authority, then you elect this authority and that you live in a democratic system; and that you can hold them accountable for what they are doing. It's not exactly like that when it comes to the West Bank. Palestinians in the West Bank have been living under the same Palestinian Authority since 2006, and we have not even tried to go to elections eversince. There's a lack of transparency, a lack of integrity. You can't hold them accountable because you didn't elect them and they are in power and you don't know how things are operating. The authority is taking on a more administrative role, handling the education, the health care system and other things. I believe the PA spends roughly around 28% of its public budget on security. But at the end of the day, we as Palestinians don't feel safe in our homes.
MTM: What has to change in order for technology to work in favor of people and not against them?
Mona Shtaya: You need to change the way technology is regulated. Nowadays, we can see that people in global majority countries are lagging behind when it comes to the regulations that can protect them. We need to think collectively about these kinds of regulation. The regulations that exist, are mainly active in the Global North, but we need to protect people all over the world from the harmful use of technology and we need to be able to hold the right people accountable. If we look at the United States right now, the alignment between tech oligarchs and the US administration we observe are clearly going into the wrong direction. If the US install a system of digital authoritarianism, then we need to consider that the self-governance systems these companies are supposed to use in order to self-regulate, are not working anymore. We also need to join forces with other progressive policymakers and governments and let them take a leading role in enforcing regulations to make sure that these companies are held accountable.