Democracy

23 Mar 2021
Clashes between police and lockdown protesters have spawned reports of police brutality in Greece. Mobile phone footage of one such protest in March 2021 suggested that the police are using drones to surveil the protests, and some of those remanded have complained that they’ve been beaten and
12 Mar 2021
In December 2020 Myanmar authorities began rolling out its $1.2 million "Safe City" system of 335 Huawei AI-equipped surveillance cameras in eight townships in the capital, Naypyidaw. The system, whose purpose was originally presented by the Myanmar government as fighting crime, automatically scans
01 Mar 2021
Hundreds of pages of Myanmar government budgets for the last two fiscal years obtained by the New York Times show that the Myanmar military who staged a coup in February 2021 had new and sophisticated tools at their disposal: Israeli-made, military-grade surveillance drones, European iPhone cracking
18 Feb 2021
The internet, mobile, and social media shutdown in Myanmar left protesters vulnerable to rumours and at a disadvantage in organising opposition to the 2021 military coup. Coordination was done via phone, word of mouth, and the Bluetooth-based messaging app Bridgefy, which was downloaded more than 1
11 Aug 2020
In August 2020, controversial Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko cut off most of the nation's access to the internet in hopes of disrupting the protests against the vote-rigging that saw him installed as president. Online news sites were left largely offline from election day onward, and
06 Oct 2020
Despite its indications of support for the pro-democracy protesters, in October 2020 the EU bought the Belarusian authorities 15 surveillance drones, raising concerns that the video equipment they carry would be used to identify and arrest individual pro-democracy protesters. The EU foreign service
30 Aug 2019
In 2019 Hong Kong protesters cut down 20 of the city's smart lampposts, which are streetlights equipped with sensors and cameras, in order to counter the threat that they were vectors for surveillance technologies such as facial and licence plate recognition. TickTack Technology, which provided the
26 Jul 2020
Both protesters and police during the 2019 Hong Kong protests used technical tools including facial recognition to counter each other's tactics. Police tracked protest leaders online and sought to gain access to their phones on a set of Telegram channels. When police stopped wearing identification
26 Apr 2021
A surveillance plane flown by the Florida Highway Patrol circled repeatedly over a news conference in which two civil rights lawyers announced a lawsuit against local police and demanded a federal investigation into the killing of two unarmed black teenagers. Publicly available flight data confirmed
01 Jun 2020
During the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, US police took advantage of a lack of regulation and new technologies to expand the scope of people and platforms they monitor; details typically emerge through lawsuits, public records disclosures, and stories released by police department PR
Article extract: "An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores..." "...We know the name of the Conservative Campaigner app’s supplier because this
Article extract: "A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the
Article extract: ""People with center-right views feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,” said Thomas Peters, the chief executive of uCampaign, a start-up in Washington that developed the N.R.A., Great America and Trump campaign apps. “It’s
Article extract: "Ireland's two largest anti-abortion campaigns are facing questions over privacy after a BuzzFeed News analysis found that personal user data gathered by both of their apps can be shared with an international network of conservative and religious groups that includes the US National
Article extract: "French laws designed to prohibit individual-level targeting are circumvented by services like those provided by Paris-based firm Liegey Muller Pons, which aggregates personal data. Such services are no less data-intensive than those unconstrained by such legal requirements." "•
Article extract: "On Aug. 2, the Liberal party sent an email to Liberal campaigns across the country, promoting services offered by Data Sciences Inc., a company owned by Tom Pitfield, an old friend of Justin Trudeau and the 2019 campaign’s digital director. The party urged local campaigns to hire