TELL MICROSOFT:
#DROPANYVISION

In June of 2019, Microsoft made a $74 million dollar investment in AnyVision, an Israeli facial recognition company led by former Israeli military and intelligence personnel.

Eylon Etshtein Co-founder and CEOEx-Commando Recon Unit, Israeli Defense Forces

Eylon Etshtein
Co-founder and CEO

Ex-Commando Recon Unit, Israeli Defense Forces

Amir Kain PresidentFormer head of Malmab, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s security department

Amir Kain
President

Former head of Malmab, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s security department

Tamir Paro AdvisorFormer head of Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency

Tamir Paro
Advisor

Former head of Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency

While AnyVision claims their technology helps streamline the operations of West Bank checkpoints — which thousands of Palestinians must pass through everyday to work or visit their families — human rights activists have voiced serious concerns. Amos Toh, a senior researcher on artificial intelligence at Human Rights Watch, told Forbes that the use of such technology in the “very fraught political context” of the Israeli-occupied West Bank could be problematic and requires “special considerations of discrimination.”

Even more alarming than AnyVision’s checkpoint biometrics is a second project that reportedly includes facial recognition technology elsewhere in the West Bank, not just at border crossings. According to Haaretz, cameras deep inside the West Bank try to spot and monitor potential Palestinian assailants. NBC News confirmed that the AnyVision system used for this secret surveillance project enables the Israeli military to identify individuals in any live camera feed and track targets as they move between different feeds. Though the project involves software officially called “Better Tomorrow,” AnyVision employees have aptly nicknamed it “Google Ayosh,” where “Ayosh” means occupied Palestinian territories and “Google” denotes the technology’s ability to search for people.

Young men from Kober, a West Bank village, find a video camera that was hidden in a cemetery by Israeli security forces. In a statement to the Jerusalem Post, AnyVision said they were “not involved with the device that appears in the YouTube video."

Presented with the argument that mass surveillance is being carried out in a territory that is not governed democratically, AnyVision CEO Etshtein told Haaretz: “It’s really a huge dilemma, but I’m not the guy to ask this. Ultimately we’re a technology company that does the maximum so that its technology isn’t misused.”

But if AnyVision is field-testing their technology on Palestinians who live under military occupation and therefore have no choice in the matter, is that not “misuse”?

Meanwhile, at a moment when Microsoft is trying to portray itself as “the [tech] industry’s moral conscience,” its decision to fund AnyVision appears to violate all of its own “six principles for developing and deploying facial recognition technology.”

AnyVision’s use of facial recognition technology most glaringly conflicts with Microsoft’s sixth principle of “lawful surveillance”:

We will advocate for safeguards for people’s democratic freedoms in law enforcement surveillance scenarios and will not deploy facial recognition technology in scenarios that we believe will put these freedoms at risk.

Palestinians under Israeli military occupation do not enjoy democratic freedoms — and AnyVision’s technology only further limits their right to privacy and freedom of movement. As Shankar Narayan, the technology and liberty project director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told NBC, “Face recognition is possibly the most perfect tool for complete government control in public spaces… It’s hard to see how using it on a captive population [like Palestinians in the West Bank] could comply with Microsoft’s ethical principles.”

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Stills taken from an AnyVision promotional video obtained by NBC show what purport to be live camera feeds monitoring Palestinians as they walk through East Jerusalem.

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In the video, the system works across multiple cameras in real time, automatically extracting faces from the various feeds and matching them to a database of suspects.

In response to an NBC investigation and our growing movement opposing the misuse of facial recognition, Microsoft hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct an audit of AnyVision's board and compliance process. “If we discover any violation of our principles, we will end our relationship,” a spokesman for the corporation told NBC.

Now is the time to pressure Microsoft. Let’s show them that tens of thousands of people think AnyVision’s surveillance of Palestinians violates Microsoft’s principles.

Palestinians should have the right to live in dignity without being surveilled, controlled, and criminalized.

Join Jewish Voice for Peace and partners SumofUs MPower Change in calling on Microsoft to #DropAnyVision.