How is militarisation shaping civic spaces?

[Gus] (0:07 - 0:20)
Welcome to The Tech Pill, a podcast that looks at how technology is reshaping our lives every day, and exploring the different ways that companies and governments use tech to increase their power. My name is Gus Hosein, and I'm the Executive Director of Privacy International.

[Caitlin] (0:21 - 0:23)
And I'm Caitlin, and I'm PI's Campaigns Coordinator. Hi.

[Gus] (0:25 - 1:14)
This week, we're talking to Sophie from Corporate Watch. We're really excited about this because Corporate Watch and Privacy International have been working together for over a year now, as we've been together exploring what we call this militarisation of tech. And that essentially is about how both the tech industry is shifting towards war, but also how the defence industry is shifting towards tech.

And they're both building tomorrow's repressive tech. Corporate Watch has been a key partner at identifying some of the top companies, whether it is a tech firm or a defence firm, and looking at the types of technologies they're developing and some of the contracts that they are deploying.

[Caitlin] (1:14 - 1:16)
Yeah. I'm really excited. I think we should just go talk to Sophie.

[Gus] (1:17 - 1:17)
Great.

[Sophie] (1:30 - 1:44)
I'm Sophie. I work at Corporate Watch. Corporate Watch is a workers' cooperative.

We're a research and training co-op, and we investigate companies that are basically exploiting people on the planet for profit.

[Caitlin] (1:44 - 2:03)
When it comes to exploiting people on the planet for profit, the military industry is an excellent kind of holistic example of those things. We're here today to talk about some research that you've been doing, Corporate Watch has been doing, on dual-use technology. And so what is dual-use technology?

[Sophie] (2:03 - 3:48)
Hmm. Yeah. So, I mean, the project that we've been doing has been coordinated by Privacy International.

And we're just one of a number of different partners that have been working with PI on this. And we've been looking at companies that have been promoting selling, as you say, dual-use products around the world. And dual-use tech is basically a technology that is promoted and sold for both military and civilian purposes or civilian users.

So more concretely, what we're talking about in this project are things like drones, satellites, and sort of sensors, cameras, radar. And when we talk about civilian users, we're primarily talking about government users that are not military. So say the police, border agencies, sort of environmental protection agencies, and so on.

And the reason this concept is important, dual-use technology, is because there's meant to be, or there are distinct legal frameworks that govern the sale of military technologies. You can't just sell arms to anyone or military tech to any kind of customers. It's meant to be regulated.

And dual-use products kind of falls between the gaps between sort of civilian and military. So it's a bit of a grey zone and a potential kind of loophole, if you like, even though there are kind of regulations that are meant to govern that kind of tech. Yeah.

So this is one of the reasons we've been looking at that area, sort of because we're seeing a kind of insidious creep of military tech in civilian spaces.

[Gus] (3:48 - 4:09)
Just so I can understand the history of corporate watching this, because I've known of you for ages, and you've been associated with investigations into countless companies. Was this new to you to look at this dual-use question and around the new forms of defence tech, or was this something you were doing all along?

[Sophie] (4:09 - 5:21)
Yeah, definitely new area. I mean, we've been going since 1996, I should say, we're a UK-based cooperative, and we look into a huge range of companies. We basically exist to support campaigners and sort of community groups that they're up against maybe like a specific company, they're organising against them, and they'd like to see if they can get leverage in their campaign against the company.
So we look at sort of exploitative landlords, exploitative employers, we look at companies that are wrecking the planet, and we have looked a fair bit in the past at the surveillance industry, and particularly, I'd say the arms company more so, as well as border profiteers, which is something that has a huge crossover in this project. But we hadn't come across this kind of technical term, dual-use technologies before, partly because we don't have any lawyers on our team, and it's quite a legal term, I would say. It was quite an eye-opener, certainly a very fascinating topic.
And even though, unfortunately, some aspects of it didn't surprise us in any way, because we've been looking at corporate involvement in border regimes and in war, and in promoting war for many years.

[Gus] (5:22 - 6:05)
As you put it, it's not surprising, but it still kind of is. You know, like even for me, I spend every day looking through the news to look at the latest in the defence industry and the tech industry, and when the two come together. And I'm still kind of surprised when I see things that even we knew was going to happen.
So like the news today is that Iran did target Amazon in Bahrain during the latest round of the conflict, whatever you want to call that thing that's going on in that part of the world. And it was interesting to see a company like Amazon become a legitimate target in Iran's eyes. But it's not a surprise.
But it's still interesting, isn't it?

[Sophie] (6:05 - 6:23)
Yeah, there were a number of aspects, maybe we'll go into in a bit, that were quite surprising that were an education for us. And I think important for people to know about. I was certainly struck by the role of sort of publicly funded research in this phenomena.
And yeah, that was quite fascinating.

[Caitlin] (6:24 - 6:42)
So before we kind of dive in, you mentioned that, you know, it's a fairly legal term. Do you know much about what regulation currently exists, like whether there are any safeguards, like what is the kind of environment in which dual use technology kind of sits or lives, I guess?

[Sophie] (6:43 - 8:17)
Yeah, I mean, I suspect you guys at Privacy International might know a little more than I do on the legal side of things. But what I can say is that dual use technologies are meant to be regulated. So for example, regulated products should have records kept of exports that are made.
And theoretically, they shouldn't be, quote, sold to what are termed authoritarian regimes. And I think it's the Wassenaar Agreement that kind of governs all of this. In practise, we can see what a grey area is.
We've seen companies being very explicit in marketing their technologies as dual use and maybe listing a range of potential users saying like, you know, this is great for combat, this can be used for border control and so on. And we looked at a number of ways that these products are being sold. Yeah, and also just the political pressure to allow for that kind of expansion of the military into civilian life, like, as I mentioned, in publicly funded research.
So yes, there is meant to be a kind of regulation to sort of limit the sale of these products. But in practise, we have a feeling that it's quite flimsy. Also, if you look at some of the countries that some of these products are being sold to, for example, I mean, Israel is a major user of some of these technologies, as well as a producer, then you have to wonder what counts as sort of like unacceptable use of these products.

[Caitlin] (8:17 - 8:46)
So we've talked a little bit about the inherent definition of dual use involves both military and civilian use. What is that relationship? You mentioned already border agencies as a particular linking force, but what does that relationship look like at the moment?
And kind of, do you think it has changed? Or do you think it's just gotten so much more expansive? And so it looks newer because it's bigger?
That's a very torturous way of asking that question.

[Sophie] (8:47 - 12:55)
Well, I can kind of paint a picture of what it looks like. We see it going in more or less two directions. One is, and maybe the more obvious one is where military techs or products like drones and satellites and sensors and things like that, that are made by major arms companies are being promoted and sold for these other uses that you mentioned, for example, border control.
But we also see things happening in kind of the opposite direction where like startups, like tech startups, drone companies and so on are effectively establishing themselves in commercial markets, in consumer facing markets or selling, let's say like small drones to individual consumers, enabling that company to kind of consolidate itself to get off the grounds and then getting like big military contracts and potentially like weaponising its products.
I think a good example of this is U.S. drone firm that makes AI powered drones called Skydio, which was one of the companies that we looked at, which started off initially like selling drones to individual consumers in the U.S. and then started getting like major military contracts that was assisted by the war in Ukraine, which provided an opportunity to them to give a lot of drones away for free. And by giving those freebies away, they then got like more contracts.
And they did the same actually in the U.S. where they were giving drones away for free to U.S. police forces. And surprise, surprise, they now have contracts with, I think it's over 700 or 900, what are called protection agencies, which basically refers to law enforcement in the U.S., particularly being promoted as what they're calling drone as first responder, which I could talk about really a vile, a really horrific thing that we came across in our research. But yeah, so just to just to kind of emphasise that, like, it's not just about kind of big arms companies getting access to like civilian markets.

It's also like not just drone companies, but the big tech companies promoting like AI powered products for military purposes. So it's got kind of two core dimensions, I'd say. What are drone first responders?
So, oh God, this was quite horrific to me as someone based in the U.K. I guess it's a lot more familiar to people over in the States. But the concept is that drones are placed strategically in different sites to be deployed ahead of the police to a suspected crime scene in order to kind of like live stream a situation, help them sort of make an initial assessment and to gather evidence. And it seems to be a concept that caught on across the U.S. and Skydio, one of the companies that we looked at, is sent lots of free drones again to police forces across the U.S. and was basically pushing for contracts for its drone as first responders. Now, one of the things it's also promoting is automatic drone dispatch when 911 calls take place. It's also partnered with Axon, which is a producer of body cams that people may be familiar with, to enable police officers to launch those drones by just like pushing a button on the body cams. So just to add to all of this, its X10 drones, AI powered drones, have the ability to lock on to a particular person like a suspect or a vehicle and track it.
And this is called like the follow me function. Just like the idea of being chased and harassed by a police drone, an AI drone that just won't go away because it's locked on to you was just absolutely horrific to me. And you can imagine that these devices are going to be massively disproportionately deployed to marginalised working class and racialised communities.
So it's terrifying.

[Caitlin] (12:56 - 13:47)
And Axon, literally in this specific context, is a massive red flag because Axon's entire ethics board resigned after a few years ago they suggested deploying Taser drones in schools to be first responders in school shootings. They announced they'd started formally developing Taser equipped drones for this specific purpose. Like there would be a school shooting, you would deploy the Axon Taser drones.
And their entire ethics board said, what on earth are you doing? And resigned. And they said, OK, maybe this is a bad idea.

[Gus]
Wow. Sounds like maybe they don't think it's a bad idea. I mean, they have an ethics board.
[Caitlin]
Well, they did. They did in 2022. I don't know if they still do.

They might have resigned and they went, OK, maybe an ethics board was a bad idea given our business strategy. But yeah, it's a name I haven't heard in a little while. But it's fascinating that it's come back up specifically with the exact same kind of drone programme.

[Gus]
That's crazy.

[Sophie] (13:47 - 13:59)
Just that example in of itself that you're talking about now is a prime example of, you know, a drone which could be used for all sorts of purposes being effectively weaponised. Right. So, yeah, horrific.

[Gus] (13:59 - 14:22)
I just saw Skydio in the news recently because they were on the Verge podcast, if I recall correctly. And they started to walk back from their prior red lines around weaponising their drones. And I think they started adding like grenade droppers to their drones.
So, yeah, these ethical boards and these red lines that these companies have, they disappear often.

[Sophie] (14:23 - 15:02)
Yeah. And that's something we've seen, you know, in other cases. So, for example, BAE Systems brought up a logistics drone company called Malloy.
Malloy Aeronautics specialise in heavy lift quadcopters. And soon after BAE bought the company, they were looking at how they could weaponise it. They did tests seeing if it could drop torpedoes and then fitted it with laser guidance systems, which would then enable it to fire weapons.
So this is like a very, very clear example of an arms company buying up a company that's not necessarily like exclusively military and then weaponising the technology.

[Caitlin] (15:02 - 15:27)
It really is often predicated like the police follow me drone is predicated on like every single step of that going right. Right. We launch a drone.
It gets to an ongoing event. The AI is good enough that it can work out the right person to follow, which it definitely isn't. And it definitely won't.
If it follows someone, it will follow the right person who is the quote unquote bad guy. And when police arrive, when they arrive, they'll be tooled up. And the consequences of that person could be quite serious.

[Sophie] (15:28 - 15:28)
Yeah, exactly.

[Caitlin] (15:29 - 15:51)
Every single step leading up in that process will definitely surely have gone right and will definitely surely, you know, lead to the outcome that they want and definitely surely won't lead to innocent people having, you know, what is already quite a bad time with kind of American policing, but also ICE and other kind of response forces having a worse time. Absolutely.

[Sophie] (15:52 - 16:47)
Yeah, mentioned ICE there, but something to note is that where we're seeing like the biggest area of crossover is, is between like the border industry, immigration control and policing and military. But another area like we're seeing is the use of these technologies to, to surveil dissent. So Skydio's drones, for example, have besides like, you know, being used in warfare have also been used against people resisting ICE or people organising against Trump.
In addition to having been used in Palestine to surveil like people in Gaza, they've been used in US universities to monitor students protesting the genocide. So it's you can see how like, yeah, first they get used against like people in the global south, against refugees, but then they get used against those that like organise against those kind of policies.

[Caitlin] (16:47 - 17:24)
The freebies thing is really interesting because it is such a familiar pattern. The famous examples, the one pound Palantir contract in the UK, where they were like, here, try our services, they will cost you a pound and then the next contracts will cost you millions. And also famously, we have a problem with data lock in, like you see it all the time.
Well, I see all the time because I'm, you know, in deep in the ed tech sphere, but you see it all the time in schools, you know, Google giving out huge numbers of Chromebooks for free, particularly in the pandemic. And then, you know, coming back around and being like, actually, now that you are used to using them, now your systems have set up to use them.

[Sophie] (17:24 - 17:24)
Exactly.

[Caitlin] (17:24 - 17:33)
You're in our ecosystem now. Is that really common in these kind of situations or is Skydio in Ukraine a kind of very specific example?

[Sophie] (17:34 - 17:54)
I think it's quite common in sort of the smaller startups because like Palantir was a company, yes, that came to mind with this. And, you know, as you know, it's a military contractor as well. But Skydio was particularly like it seems to be its business strategy and it's done very well for itself by doing that.

[Caitlin] (18:03 - 18:50)
I think it's useful a little bit now to distinguish between technologies that civilians use, like consumer drones that Skydio used to sell versus technology that is used on civilians, like policing technologies. And the other fun example, which I'm going to crowbar in here, even though it doesn't quite fit, is the Pokemon Go sale, all of that walking around data, which is another example of a technology that you wouldn't necessarily think of as a technology that has any military application, which is almost the exact polar opposite of a military technology, which was a kid's game. Being then used in the development of military technology, which is designed to kill people, like is a very disturbing kind of example.

[Sophie] (18:50 - 20:45)
I mean, one thing that I should maybe mention is one way in which that happens is, well, for the big companies buying up the little ones. So we've seen the phenomenon of sort of startups that are not necessarily military companies. They've got some like concept that is, you know, for civilian users.
And then a big arms company comes along and says, hmm, we see potential in this. We could use it to kind of control or attack populations with this. So a number of the big companies have what are called incubators or accelerators, which are sort of initiatives where large companies kind of nurture, quote, small startups by giving them sort of mentoring, access to contacts.
So they were the wealth of sort of contacts, maybe funding to develop their products further. And quite often at the end of that process, the big company will buy the little one. So two of the companies we looked at, Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, have been involved in, like if I had incubators and accelerators specifically designed for dual use technologies.
I mean, that's in the wording. And, you know, we looked at one initiative, which is echo care surveillance for the elderly, which was kind of like using radar to penetrate walls and see if like an elderly person has had a fall, as if you need to go to those kind of lengths to basically help keep people safe. But I think that was an example of an instance where the original technology was designed by a non-military or like a company that wasn't specifically focused on military work.
And then I can't recall whether it was IAI or Elbit, it was one of those two Israeli companies that we looked at, then kind of saw an opportunity there to develop that. And you have to wonder and worry when they start paying interest in that kind of thing.

[Gus] (20:46 - 22:14)
Yeah, for my sins, I have to occasionally read books that I don't like. And I had to read Alex Karp's book, The Technological Republic. Alex Karp being the CEO of Palantir.
And for what it's worth, the first half of his book isn't horrible because it's essentially, it's the other side of the story that you're telling right now, which is he's saying up until recently Silicon Valley and all tech innovation was essentially focused on targeting your eyeballs for advertisements. And he said that was a waste of human potential when it comes to innovation. And so of course he's much happier at the world that you just painted, which is now innovation and money for innovation is going into helping develop x-ray technology to make sure your granny's okay.
Because that same technology can be sold for real uses around the world, according to Alex Karp, that actually helped defend the West, according to Alex Karp, to make sure that the West can dominate the global political and military landscape. That's the world that we built. And so looking at the firms that you have been investigating, it is fascinating to see this infusion of money, but it's not just from Silicon Valley though, right?
Like you mentioned IAI, which is an Israeli firm that is, I think it's owned by the state.

[Sophie] (22:15 - 22:17)
Yeah, a hundred percent owned by the Israeli state.

[Gus] (22:17 - 22:30)
And when I was reviewing this content, I couldn't believe it. It's like, oh, there are still companies owned by governments and these companies are building technology they're selling around the world. You can't separate the government from the firm.

[Sophie] (22:30 - 22:38)
Yeah, Airbus is another example. I think that's kind of 25% owned by a number of European countries. Like it's a kind of a pan-European company.

[Gus] (22:39 - 22:42)
I think Leonardo is linked with the Italian government or the Italian state.

[Caitlin] (22:43 - 23:43)
Yeah. It feels like part of the reason that dual use technology, it feels like more of a problem now than maybe it did in the past. I wonder if it's partly that the things that society has started building or developing now, because they're so data heavy, because they're so surveillance heavy, because of the society that we've built with online advertising and targeting and all this other stuff.
Like, I wonder if they lend themselves more naturally to military uses and vice versa than if we'd built a different society with less targeting and advertising and data collection and surveillance. Like, I wonder how much that relationship is both technically and, I guess, philosophically shaped by the society that over time we've built through surveillance, online surveillance, advertising, data collection, and, you know, over time CCTV and all these other surveillance technologies. So there's already a question.
It's a kind of hypothesis.

[Sophie] (23:44 - 26:23)
Yeah, I think it's absolutely right. That is part of it. But our relationship to technology, yeah, is a major aspect of it.
In particular, the changing nature of tech, some technologies, I think, lend themselves more to being dual use because of their expensive nature. And I'm thinking particularly about satellites, because there are quite a lot of satellites that are being sold for both military and quite a range of purposes, like academic research or, you know, spying on other governments and, yeah, all sorts of purposes. So satellites cost a hell of a lot of money to send into space.
So it's kind of inbuilt, if you like, into the tech. Another technological change is just the huge explosion in the drone industry. Again, drones have so many potential uses.
And so it's sort of, in a way, unsurprising. So I think simply like the technological changes alone are one quite big reason why this has been a growing phenomenon. But I would say an important one to kind of bear in mind is geopolitical factors.
So war in Ukraine was one big reason that the production of drones have kind of gone through the roof, especially the growth in the AI drone market because of the role of signal jamming in that conflict. So AI drones, the idea is that they can get around that problem. But in particular, I want to emphasise the occupation of Palestine because Palestine is a context where brutality is just normalised.
It's a place where these technologies of surveillance and control are being experimented and Palestinians are paying the price for that. And, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that there are like a couple of Israeli companies in our list. Those companies happen to be, I would say, particularly explicit or quite blatant in their marketing and pretty shameless, I would say.
They have some quite horrific products and there just seems to be no shame whatsoever in putting that all over their websites. And so, you know, it comes from a context where the lines between the military policing and border control is completely blurred and that concept is being exported. So some of those Israeli companies are really pushing those like, let's say, border sensor towers for border agencies around the world to surveil migrants in transit.
And so they're playing quite a role in like the militarisation of borders from like the US-Mexican border to like borders in Europe. So I think, yeah, I wanted to put those two kind of geopolitical elements on the map as well.

[Caitlin] (26:24 - 27:06)
And I think that actually brings us fairly neatly round. I'll explain why to the EU funding and the economic funding you want to talk about because we've been working for years on how EU funding is being used by surveillance technologies and deploy them to prevent migrants reaching EU borders in places like the Sahel in Africa and kind of quite distant from the EU, sometimes from EU funding, which sometimes it's pots of money that sound like they should be rather more benign than the technology that they've been used to buy. And so like how much of a role has EU funding played in these technologies? I don't know.
My brain was reaching for a word and I have no idea what the word was. So technologies will do.

[Sophie] (27:06 - 31:13)
I think it's been really important because ostensibly like Horizon Europe, which is the EU's publicly funded research and innovation programme. So they give like taxpayer money to universities and companies to collaborate on research projects and to address a specific aim. And that project, Horizon, theoretically only funds civilian research.
It's not meant to fund like defence work. However, something that just astounds me is that major arms companies have been getting funding from as part of these Horizon programmes for years. I mean, not just funding.
I'm talking about huge amounts of money. So, for example, Israel Aerospace Industry, they keep coming back to them, but they're quite a clear cut case, I would say. That company was selected for at least 44 EU research projects over a 20 year period.
And they got over 23 million euros in principally taxpayers money for that. And that's to participate in projects that look at like, you know, drone swarm surveillance at the borders and things like that. And so the idea that that's not going to blur the lines further by inviting arms companies or giving them money to be involved in civilian projects.
I think the EU plays a huge role in that. And they've been getting money for a long time already to do that. You know, let's not forget there's already like distinct funding from like the European Defence Fund for military research, like huge amount of funding.
So that already exists. Like they don't need more. But the really worrying thing is that now the EU commission wants to actively expand the scope of Horizons funding so that dual use research is explicitly included in the scope.
So basically they're already benefiting, but it's like we want to kind of include them more. And I know there have been academics who have been like seriously, you know, strongly opposed to this, just sort of like giving yet more funding and power to basically the arms industry from taxpayers' money. Fun times.
That IAI figure really astounded me. I couldn't believe it when I was looking at it. Oh, and the thing I should say, actually, one thing that would be really interesting to investigate further is we were trying to follow the kind of breadcrumbs from some of these projects.
And these projects are like ludicrously named, like they're usually these very long acronyms. And they get the money, they set up a website and then do the research. They've been paid for.
And then a couple of years later, the website disappears. You know, where did this go? Where did like people's money end up?
And it's often very opaque and hard to follow. However, we try to follow some of these breadcrumbs, just to see where these projects had actually taken them.
And what we found were a number of examples of products that appeared to have been launched sometime after the research project had concluded, that bore a remarkable similarity to what was described in the research product. So I'm talking about like arms companies, like some of the Israeli companies I was mentioning, launching products that basically did address the problem that was kind of described in the research grant. So what we're thinking is that this public money used for civilian research is ultimately being used in one way or another to support the development of weapons and surveillance technology by arms companies.
I mean, it's unsurprising, because it's not like they're learned something. There's a reason that they're getting involved in this besides the money. So yeah, it's something that's very hard to conclusively confirm.
But if you have a look at some of the profiles that have been published on the Privacy International website, you'll see some examples that we mentioned.

[Caitlin] 31:13 - 31:42)
The links will be available in all good descriptions on the podcast app nearest you. But I mean, that raises, I think, an interesting question, which is, when you're investigating these kinds of companies and these kinds of technologies, obviously, they're not public bodies, right? They don't respond to FOIA requests necessarily.

How have you found those investigations? Are they particularly opaque? You do a lot of company investigations.
Is it worse with these kind of companies? Or is it kind of similar? What's the vibe?

[Sophie] (31:42 - 31:57)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, with the type of research that we do, which is focused on companies, they can always claim, you know, the exemption to FOIA requests around sort of competition and, you know, what do they call it? Sort of like...

[Gus] (31:57 - 31:59)
Commercial confidentiality.

[Sophie] (31:59 – 32:04)
That's the one, yeah, commercial confidentiality, which is just mad.

[Gus] (32:04 - 32:29)
Yeah, to be clear, this is when governments, when you ask the government to disclose information around a procurement process, and the government says, we cannot disclose the company's documentation because it would breach commercial confidentiality, it kind of blows your mind as a taxpayer, as a citizen who deserves to know what documents the government has. And the government's protecting a company from disclosure. It just drives me crazy whenever I see that.

[Sophie] (32:29 - 33:33)
Absolutely. It's like your health is a really exceptional kind of regime if you're a company. And so, generally speaking, we can't sort of just ask direct questions like that.
But sometimes you can find ways around it, just in terms of how you word the FOIAs. In this particular case, we didn't submit freedom of information requests. We just use primarily publicly available information, a lot of it just really coming through these companies' websites, going through their tedious brochures and looking at just incredibly maddening product descriptions.

And it was a little bit of a painful process, but just kind of piecing that together, going through news reports as well of news cases. So, we were looking at every kind of range of context in which their technologies were reported to have been used. Yeah.
And also, there's a number of really good websites out there that document sort of lobbying, because that's something we had to look at as well, and sort of transparency-based websites. So, I'm very grateful for the groups that run those.

[Gus] (33:33 - 34:10)
These companies are proud. It's in their advertising materials about how their technologies battle-tested. I remember this from the surveillance industry, because back, say, 2009 to 2014, I think both of our organisations were going to trade shows and getting the materials from surveillance trade shows.

And in the first few years, they were all a little cagey about disclosure. And then I remember hearing about how the surveillance companies started to get very proud of the attention they're receiving from organisations like ours, and it became part of their sell. And it's like, oh my god, these people are shameless.

[Caitlin] (34:11 - 34:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Which, it doesn't bring me to this example, but I was reading the report about what's driving the militarisation of tech, available on all good corporate watch websites, which again will be a link in the description.

And one thing caught my eye, which is that BAE Systems, I mean, fairly famous arms company, is collaborating with the UK's Cranfield University on requisitioning 6G masks, or like, that you would be able to use them as kind of like weird AI battle stations in some way, which was such a neat little nexus of like, wrong conspiracy theories with potential future reality that I just found it really, really striking.

[Sophie] (34:55 - 36:13)
Yeah, there's not a lot of information yet about that, but it's just, yeah, they're collaborating with Cranfield University, which is based in Bedford in the UK. And the research involves looking at how they can exploit 6G masks when they exist, because I had to look up like, do they exist now? But no, they're not yet out there, but like when they come, they want to see if they can use them as emergency command and control centres for the army.
So like, for listeners who aren't aware, command and control basically refers to kind of platforms that fuse data from different sources, like sensors and cameras and so on. And often more recently, like powered with AI to kind of like, process and analyse that data and then present possible like, or even recommended courses of action for the army or for the police, let's say. So this is a kind of quite a dystopian example.
And you wonder why people are fearful of these technologies. It's in many ways, good reasons because, you know, can we trust these companies if they're going to allow for these systems to be exploited by the military? So yeah, that was a particularly disturbing example.
But as I said, there's not much information online as of yet on that.

[Gus] (36:13 - 36:38)
And let's also remember that 5G is something that the UK is trying to move on from because they don't like the dependency on Chinese technology. So it's the layers upon layers of whether it starts at a conspiracy level and actually gets to the reality of that. We don't want one type of technology because it could be exploited by somebody else, but we want technology that we can exploit ourselves.
It's just extraordinary.

[Caitlin] (36:39 - 37:04)
But it also raises the spectre of academic funding, these kind of academic relationships with these companies and the academic kind of research relationships with arms companies, which I think has really been a very long running relationship, the relationship between universities and arms companies. A contentious relationship, but one that the whole history of the internet is universities and militaries in some respects.

[Sophie] (37:05 - 37:05)
Yeah, absolutely.

[Gus] (37:19 - 37:56)
So apart from this like dark hunger that we have in this sector, the people who work in this sector, this dark hunger, to see that the companies we pick on when they behave particularly egregiously or where their technology is used for worsening and worsening cases, apart from that dark hunger of ours, why do you do this? Why do you uncover this? Why do you spend your time shifting from one industry to the next just to feed this hunger of like bad people behaving badly?
What is it that drives you in a more noble sense?

[Sophie] (37:56 - 37:58)
Do you mean like why does Corporate Watch do this research?

[Gus] (8:59 - 9:01)
Why do you? Yeah, why does Corporate Watch, but why do you?

[Sophie] (38:02 - 38:56)
Okay. So I guess I'm driven by many of the same reasons as my fellow workers at Corporate Watch, which is, first of all, we just don't want to see these companies get away with it. We think it's really important to support grassroots resistance to corporate might.
And secondly, we know that people can organise effectively if they are armed with the information they need, driven by a lot of passion and determination, and are able to take organised strategic campaigns against companies. And there have been a lot of successes in history and in more recent times, whether that's just kicking a company out of your university or from your local area. So our motto is information for action.
We help groups find leverage that they can use to those ends.

[Gus] (38:56 – 39:03)
Nice. It gets you out of bed to know that you can have that kind of effect to give openings for people to go after these companies.

[Sophie] (39:03 - 39:57)
Yeah. I mean, we're very conscious that there's an overwhelming amount of depressing news every day. And we're a political organisation and not partly political, but we're a radical organisation.
So a mission of ours, a priority, is not to just depress and overwhelm people. We don't want to just contribute to that in the way that often I think the mainstream media does. It's sort of like more bad stuff, but people are not necessarily feeling...
They're not feeling empowered to do anything about it. They're quite the opposite. So we try to sort of spotlight groups that are organising against a particular issue or have organised effectively historically to inspire action.
And we often include projects and groups that people can get involved in to push for positive change and not just leave people feeling despair.

[Caitlin] (39:57 - 40:04)
Does that give you hope or optimism that there are so many people kind of taking on that challenge? It's a mix.

[Sophie] (40:04 – 41:30)
I'd say one of the recommendations in this report was that basically people mobilise against the arms and surveillance industries, which are effectively one and the same in many cases. And there has been a really concerted and impassioned campaign in the UK to basically get rid of the presence of some of these arms manufacturers. And I'm thinking obviously most recently of the campaign against Elbit Systems.
And that was very powerful. That led to the loss of contracts and so on and factories being closed. But inevitably that also led to repression.
That couldn't be tolerated. So then hence the proscription of Palestine Action. I think companies like Elbit Systems would absolutely love people to stop talking about them and to kind of be distracted by let's say the prescription.
But I think it's really, really important to not do that and to not stop talking about the atrocities their products are facilitating and the fact that these are actually being exported to other contexts, like being used against refugees and so on. So the kind of strength of reaction against some of these arms companies has been like, yes, really inspiring and beautiful. There's the inevitable repression.
But I think activists can be very creative. And I think there are other ways to organise and stop, not just kind of abandon the focus on companies like Elbit Systems.

[Caitlin] (41:30 – 41:35)
Yeah, I think that's a really nice place to start. Is there anything that you wanted to say that you didn't get the chance to say?

[Sophie] (41:35 - 42:13)
I guess just one other little thing, which is that I think there's quite a lot of potential scope in pushback against the growth in like the militarisation of surveillance tech in academia. And there has been opposition voiced by various people in consultations, different academics and researchers have objected to the expansion of horizon. But I think there's real scope for, you know, a more sort of organised resistance to that particular move.
So and that's just another way that people could get involved in the fight back against the militarisation of tech.

[Caitlin] (42:13 - 42:24)
Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
We really love talking to you and we think you could do it for a lot longer. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.

[Gus] (42:37 - 43:45)
I just want to reflect one thing that was throughout Sophie's arguments, which is the role of the money. You know, five years ago, when we started looking at the militarisation of tech, there was like one unicorn and that was Andruil. And there was one company that people kept on talking about as like a sign of the times being Palantir.
And then the last five years, everything's just gotten so flush, full of cash. As you rightly identified, Caitlin, there's the universities who are getting money from this industry. As we also explore, there is the EU funding going to these firms to fund so-called research that ends up getting then deployed.
There is the venture capitalists who are investing the money. There's governments who invest. These are government owned companies in some cases.
The extraordinary amount of money just getting into this sector at the exact same time as governments are struggling to pay for welfare and health services. It just, it blows my mind how that dark hunger, we've identified a trend that is way too powerful. It just, yeah, it kind of blows my mind.

[Caitlin] (43:45 - 44:06)
I think when I was growing up, which obviously was, is still ongoing, but when I was growing up, the kind of buzzwordy, I didn't know what it meant because I was like 10, was the military-industrial complex. And like everyone was against the military-industrial complex. And as a 10 year old, I too was against the military-industrial complex, though I did not know what it meant.

[Gus] (44:06 - 44:11)
Dwight Eisenhower, president of the United States, warned against it. It was not a good thing.

[Caitlin] (44:11 - 46:03)
Obviously things are different now, but I think the underlying factors, which are money and power and control are the same. And what is unfortunate is that whilst money and power and control are driving technological change and technological change is driving money and power and control, we still have to live in the society they're building. And the argument around the military-industrial complex, particularly around the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, one more than the other, was that like the military-industrial complex doesn't prevent wars, it drives wars, right?
And the money that is to be made doesn't lead to fewer wars, right? It leads to more wars. And what worries me is I think what war is, or the state of war, particularly as these technologies drip into civilian contexts, it's not so much war now as it is dystopia, as it is surveillance, as it is creeping capacity for authoritarianism, even if it isn't currently authoritarianism.
And that freaks me out because that's the society that we have to live in. That's the society that's being developed. Even if it's not the society now, it's the building blocks for the potential for the next government or the government after that, or the government after that to take those building blocks and build something that is just very disturbing and different.
And I always struggle when we talk about militarisation to distinguish what is new, what is different, what is a modern instantiation of previous trends. And it's not because I don't think things aren't new or different, it's just I've struggled to articulate why I think they're new or different. And increasingly, I think it's that societal something, the articulation thing isn't going well.
But you know what I mean?

[Gus] (46:04 - 46:16)
I know what you mean. Don't forget, for my sins, I'm an academic. I'm an ex-academic and I understand exactly what you're talking about.
You're talking about the fabric of society is being re-woven.

[Caitlin] (46:17 - 46:22)
I don't think there is such a thing as an ex-academic. Once you're an academic, then there's a kind of embedded way of thinking.

[Gus] (46:23 – 46:24)
Yeah, you're ruined for life.

[Caitlin] (46:24 - 46:27)
Unfortunately, just claws at the edges of your brain forever. Exactly.

[Gus] (46:30 – 47:06)
Well, thanks everyone for listening. You can have to be the first to learn more about our work at pvcy.org slash pod signup. And we'll include the many links to all the work that we referenced throughout this edition, all the relevant articles and all the relevant reports in the description, wherever you're listening, or on our website at pvcy.org slash tech pill.
Don't forget to rate and subscribe to their podcast on whichever platform you use. Music is courtesy of Sepia, and this podcast was produced by Max Burnell for Privacy International.