Five years on from George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis residents are pushing back against the city’s contract with Zencity, a tech company founded and headed by veterans of the Israeli spying organization, Unit 8200.
ZenCity has signed a three-year contract with the city of Minneapolis, enabling it to gather information about residents’ attitudes towards the police.
But this contract is only one of many. In fact, Zencity’s services are employed by dozens of municipalities across the United States to surveil ordinary Americans and target protestors.
ZenCity uses AI to collect millions of data points from your emails and posts on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Nextdoor. From these, it gauges security threats and advises local governments on how to act accordingly.
In Kent County, MI, ZenCity analyzed residents’ online footprints and used them to determine what level of security the local government needed to meet the protest movement.
In other words, they were there to insulate the government from the voice of the people and limit our ability to effect change.
Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of the vast Israeli surveillance operation on Palestine. Palestinians’ every movement is tracked by facial recognition cameras. Their calls and messages are recorded, and compromising information is gathered for extortion and blackmail.
If you are cheating on your spouse or need medical attention, that information is used against you to turn you into an informant. One Unit 8200 veteran revealed that they were instructed to learn every Arabic slang word for “gay” in order to listen out for them in conversations.
Even worse, Unit 8200 uses AI to develop kill lists of tens of thousands of Gazans for the IDF to target. And it is widely reported that it was behind the Lebanese pager attack – an act of terrorism that injured thousands of civilians.
Israel treats Gaza and the West Bank as a laboratory, sharpening its tech, before selling it around the world. Now that tech has come to the United States.
Residents in Minneapolis are rising up and demanding that the city drop its contract with Zencity.
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Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh.
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