little surfer

TW for death, surveillance and a shit future.

Once upon a time I read a book about Tear Gas. It featured a discussion of states testing the tear gas for other states. So the IDF would Tear Gas protestors and then police in the USA would know what worked and what didn't.

Recently Mohammed R. Mhawish, a journalist, escaped from Gaza and wrote this about surveillance by the Israeli state.

It operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls. Journalists, human-rights researchers, and legal scholars have mapped pieces of the surveillance apparatus in Gaza. What has largely been missing is how this technology landed on bodies, homes, and neighborhoods; how it reshaped daily life for people forced to live inside the matrix; how it reordered our minds.

Emphasis mine because Quadcopters that entered houses? And what does this do for people and how they behave?

“Nobody doesn’t have political leanings,” one man named Mohammed told me. “But I’ve killed it. I’ve prohibited myself from speaking on this. I’ve locked it with a key.”

And then.

Khaled, who worked for nearly three decades as an ambulance driver for Al-Awda Hospital, said that during an interrogation, an officer showed him a private text message he’d sent his family. “Everything we say, they can see,” Khaled said.

“Everything we say, they can see.”

By this summer, the bombardment had cracked part of the roof open. At around 4:30 a.m. on July 27, while she slept in one of the remaining rooms, Mary woke to a faint buzz that seemed to come from just beside her. “I froze,” she told me. “I could not move. I could not scream.” A dark square hovered near the ceiling. She stared at it, motionless, until it drifted out of the room and exited through a window. If they could fly a drone to her bedside, they could see everything, she told me. Weeks later, her 35-year-old neighbor was shot dead by an armed drone while drying laundry on her balcony, standing beside her 4-year-old son, Mary said. “It is not death that we fear,” she told me. “It is the terror that comes before it.”

You really should read the whole thing.

This here is a video about the social media ban in Australia. Campbell Walker aka struthless goes into the why and hows of the ban and does so in a very compelling matter. One part of the ban that is absolutely critical is verification of age. A topic as old as time and always hotly contested, because it leads/can lead/must lead towards more surveillance. And I guess that is where those two lines meet. In Gaza we see a possible future for everyone else. Being tested and perfected. And well, I am not sure we are actually doing anything about that.