Report: Facial recognition powers ‘automated apartheid’ in Israel

Israel is increasingly relying on facial recognition in the occupied West Bank to track Palestinians and restrict their passage through key checkpoints, according to a new report, a sign of how artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance can be used against an ethnic group. At high-fenced checkpoints in Hebron, Palestinians stand in front of facial recognition cameras before being allowed to cross. As their faces are scanned, the software – known as Red Wolf – uses a colour-coded system of green, yellow and red to guide soldiers on whether to let the person go, stop them for questioning or arrest them, according to the report by Amnesty International. When the technology fails to identify someone, soldiers train the system by adding their personal information to the database.
Israel has restricted the freedom of movement of Palestinians, but technological advances are giving the authorities powerful new tools. It is the latest example of global spread of mass surveillance systems, which rely on AI to learn to identify the faces of people based on large stores of images.
In Hebron and East Jerusalem, the technology focuses almost entirely on Palestinians, according to Amnesty’s report, marking a new way to automate the control of interior boundaries that separate the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. Amnesty called the process “automated apartheid.” Israel has strongly denied that it operates an apartheid regime. The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it carries out “necessary security and intelligence operations, while making significant efforts to minimize harm to the Palestinian population’s routine activity.”
In China, companies have made algorithms that sought to identify minorities as they passed by the country’s ubiquitous cameras. Israel’s use of facial recognition at checkpoints builds on other surveillance systems deployed in recent years.