The Weekly Weird #39
X banned in Brazil, your phone is not your friend, Iraq's suicide cult (with a side of child marriage), the world's disappeared journalists, this week in FaRT
Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, in which we tread carefully among the rakes and rattlesnakes around us, trying to recognise them for what they are without stepping on them.
You may have already heard the Summer Special that dropped this past Sunday, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, please do. I ventured into the field to bring you a report on exotic thoughts abroad in the land: Off-planet Satanists, a hidden chamber under the UK’s Parliament, multiple clones of Joe Biden…a cornucopia of conspiracies to consider.
Speaking of cornucopias (cornucopiæ?), let’s unpack the weird that came in over the wire this week…
X Banned In Brazil
Elon Musk is in trouble again. The globe-trotting tech billionaire (and definitely the kid at school who always had the latest console) is on the outs with the Boys from Brazil1.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.
Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.
X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.
The Guardian ran with X goes offline in Brazil after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws and it didn’t take long for the phrase “far-right” to get trotted out:
The banning of X, which has more than 22 million users in Brazil, is the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country’s top court and the rightwing tech billionaire.
Alexandre de Moraes, the influential supreme court judge responsible for the ban, had been spearheading an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of the January 2023 uprising in the capital, Brasília, carried out by supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
[X[ closed its office in Brazil earlier this month, saying its representative had been threatened with arrest if she did not comply with orders it described as "censorship" - as well as illegal under Brazilian law.
[…]
According to the judge's order, a ban will be in effect until X names a new legal representative in the country and pays fines for violating Brazilian law.
In a previous post from one of its official accounts, X had said it would not comply with the demands.
"Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil – simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents," the post said.
"The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that."
Moraes seems to have taken a ‘scorched earth’ approach to his beef with Musk, even punishing Starlink (another Musk company) for fines owed by X.
The NYT again:
Justice Moraes also froze the finances of a second Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect $3 million in fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.
The court order itself sings from the same hymn sheet as speech-attacking politicians and policies around the world at the moment:
In his order, Justice Moraes said Mr. Musk was an “outlaw” who intended to “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law, violating the free choice of the electorate, by keeping voters away from real and accurate information.”
From a 2022 NYT story about the sweeping powers granted to Moraes:
Brazilian authorities, grappling with a torrent of online misinformation ahead of the country’s presidential election, granted the nation’s elections chief unilateral power to order tech companies to remove many online posts and videos — one of the most aggressive actions taken by any country to combat false information.
Under rules passed on Thursday, the elections chief can order the immediate removal of content that he believes has violated previous takedown orders. Social networks must comply with those demands within two hours or face the potential suspension of their services in Brazil.
The move culminates an increasingly assertive strategy by election officials in Brazil to crack down on divisive, misleading and false attacks that have flooded the country’s presidential race in recent days, including claims that candidates are Satanists, cannibals and pedophiles.
But by allowing a single person to decide what can be said online in the run-up to the high-stakes election, which will be held on Oct. 30, Brazil has become a test case in a swelling global debate over how far to go in fighting false and misleading reports.
In case you’re slightly confused by the wording, yes, Moraes is both the ‘elections chief’ and a Supreme Court justice. Is that too much power in too few hands? The 2022 story included a rather prescient quote:
Carlos Affonso Souza, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, said Thursday’s ruling “could go too far, depending on how” Mr. Moraes wields his power.
As mentioned by Axios, one of the things Moraes ordered was that Google and Apple remove VPNs from their app stores to prevent people using them to circumvent the ban on X, even though use of a VPN to access X already carries a fine of nearly $9,000 per infraction.
Moraes had set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for anyone using a virtual private network to access X and initially ordered Apple and Google to remove VPNs from their stories in Brazil, but a court statement said the judge had since suspended this aspect of the order to avoid disrupting other companies.
Regardless of your political stripe, it seems a little overreach-y to ban a social media platform, and freeze the accounts of a totally unrelated company owned by the same person, and order Google and Apple to remove X from their app stores, and levy a fine on anyone who accesses X through a VPN, and then on top of that try to get VPNs themselves removed from app stores.
The Indian Express described the company Brazil is keeping by banning X:
With this decision, Brazil becomes the latest addition to the list of countries that have banned X, including China, Russia, Iran, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, and North Korea.
The Indian Express also pointed out how “the feud between X and the Brazilian judiciary appears to have a lot in common with the legal tussle that broke out between Twitter and the Indian government roughly three years ago.”
For instance, X pushing back against the blocking orders issued by the Brazilian Supreme Court seems to have triggered the sequence of events leading to its ban. The social media platform, which was known as Twitter at the time, had similarly resisted blocking the accounts of journalists, activists, and politicians at the request of the Indian government during the farmers’ protests back in 2021. These orders were issued under Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, making them confidential in nature. Brazil’s blocking orders are also similarly kept secret, as per reports.
Alleged threats of arrest against X’s legal representative in the South American country mirrors a previous instance where Uttar Pradesh Police had summoned Manish Maheshwari, the then-managing director of Twitter India, over accusations that the platform showed a disputed map of India that did not reflect the country’s declared borders. The Delhi Police had also knocked on Twitter India’s office in the capital after posts by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party members had been flagged as “manipulated media”.
On the verge of losing its safe harbour protections, Twitter had been engaged in a protracted legal battle with the Indian government for not appointing an India-based liaison as required by the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Similarly, the order issued by Justice de Moreas required X to name a legal representative in Brazil, which the platform failed to do in time.
Is this part of a global crackdown on speech, or a genuine law enforcement effort in good faith?
Answers on a postcard.
Your Phone Is Not Your Friend
Ever had a conversation about an upcoming beach holiday and then unlocked your phone to find ads for suncream and swimsuits? Ever sent an email mentioning a desire to visit the in-laws and then seen ads pop up for train tickets and flights?
Did your eyes meet those of your friend or partner and share a moment of eerie “Is my phone listening to me?” wonderment?
Well, according to an exclusive report in 404 Media:
Media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners, according to a CMG presentation obtained by 404 Media.
Quoting a slide deck issued by CMG touting their Active Listening service:
“Smart devices capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations. Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers. We use AI to collect this data from 470+ sources to improve campaign deployment, targeting and performance.”
The Creep Factor gets jacked up further by the way in which the granularity of their eavesdropping offering is described:
The deck does not say where CMG allegedly sources this voice data, be that a particular brand of smart TV, a smart speaker, or smartphone loaded with a particular app. It says that once it has used the voice data to identify an audience that is “ready-to-buy,” CMG builds a list of those audience members and uploads it to ad platforms to then target advertisements. It says for $100 a day, CMG can target people in a 10-mile radius, or $200 a day for a 20-mile radius.
404 Media expand on the horror, including a mention of a small start-up with the terrifying name MindSift:
When 404 Media originally reported on Active Listening in December, CMG’s website said “What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode—it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage.” CMG deleted this page from its website following publication of our piece.
404 Media also reported that employees of MindSift, a tiny New Hampshire-based company, boasted on their own podcast about targeting advertisements by listening to peoples’ everyday conversations through microphones in their smart speakers. After publication of that piece, MindSift’s social media went dormant and the company wiped mentions of the voice data capability from their Instagram page.
The Daily Mail added more on the widespread (and justified) perception of surveillance that comes with these devices:
For years, smart-device users have speculated that their phones or tablets are listening to what they say. But most tech companies have flat-out denied these claims.
For example, Meta's online privacy center states, 'We understand that sometimes ads can be so specific, it seems like we must be listening to your conversations through your microphone, but we're not.'
But this leak is just the latest development in a wave of reporting that suggests your phone really is listening to you, and that sites like Facebook may be cashing in on what you say.
The kicker, as usual, is that besides some possible Terms and Conditions violations, this all may be legal:
Although it may seem surprising, Active Listening is perfectly legal, CMG claimed in a since-deleted blog post from November 2023.
'We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal? The short answer is: yes. It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you,' the post reads.
'When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page terms of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included.'
This could explain how CMG is getting away with this in states with wiretapping laws that prohibits recording somebody without their knowledge, like California.
Brilliant.
Iraq’s Suicide Cult (With A Side Of Child Marriage)
Middle East Eye reported this week on a “lottery-based suicide sect that has seen dozens of deaths” in Iraq.
The Allahiyah movement, also known as the Qurban ("sacrifice") group, is thought to have formed in Basra and Dhi Qar in early 2020 and has as many as 2,500 adherents.
[…]
Gatherings, posted on social media, show large groups of men dancing to loud electronic music and chanting slogans of sacrifice to Ali bin Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad.
That began to change in 2021, when the first reports emerged of young men associated with the group hanging themselves in Husseiniyahs, buildings designed for Shia religious, spiritual and social gatherings.
How exactly does the suicide cult work?
"We believe that Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, peace be upon him, is God incarnate on Earth, and that sacrifices must be offered to him in order to gain his satisfaction and forgiveness," a member of the Qurban group told HuffPost Iraq in June.
[…]
"We hold a draw among the members of the group, and whoever’s name comes up has the honour of offering himself as a sacrifice to Imam Ali, which is the highest goal of existence," they said, adding they had plans to spread their message to "young people in schools and universities" and even outside the country.
This might be an apropos moment to mention The Lottery, the 1948 short story by Shirley Jackson.
As for the bleak outlook for young people in Iraq, the Middle East Eye article sums it up:
Politicians and religious figures have been keen to stress that Allahiyah is a "deviant" group, claiming its ideology violates the Iraqi constitution.
But the group's activities are part of a wider picture of a society that is unable to provide a future for many of its young people.
Speaking of a future for many young people, another story from MEE brings up the prospect of legally sanctioned child marriage in Iraq.
At issue is a proposed amendment to Iraq’s 1959 Personal Status Law (Law Nº 188), which has weathered multiple amendment attempts in the past and is seen by citizens, especially women, as a key secular protection against overt religious control.
According to a draft of the bill, which had its first reading on Monday, the changes would require a Muslim couple to choose either the Sunni or Shia sect when concluding a marriage contract.
They can then choose that sect to represent them in "all matters of personal status" rather than the civil judiciary.
So where does the question of child marriage enter into all this? Well, it’s a little complicated, but worth unpacking.
Many Iraqi marriages are unregistered and conducted by religious figures, making them illegal under the current Iraqi Personal Status Law.
Twenty-two percent of unregistered marriages, according to the UN, involve girls under 14 and the proposed amendments could see those marriages legitimised by the state.
Amendments have been tried in the past, but never made it through the legislative process.
Previous versions of the bill have included rules preventing Muslim men from marrying non-Muslims, the legalisation of marital rape and banning women from leaving the house without their husband's permission.
The latest version is considerably less explicit, but campaigners fear its passage would allow religious authorities to introduce these rules through their establishment of the Personal Status code.
The draft requires Shia and Sunni endowments to submit a "code of legal rulings" to parliament six months after ratifying the amendments, stipulating the Shia code would be based on Jaafari jurisprudence.
In case you’re not a scholar of Islamic legalese, “legal experts have warned that [child marriage] could be permitted under Jaafari jurisprudence, an interpretation of religious law followed by some Shia.”
Despite past failures to amend the Personal Status Law, campaigners believe this attempt might squeak through.
Unlike previous attempts to pass these reforms, [Tamara] Amir told MEE that she believes the current government - led by Coordination Framework member Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani - will succeed in getting it passed, despite Iraqi society being "divided" on the issue.
"They would further entrench gender inequality and put vulnerable individuals at greater risk," she said.
"We urge policymakers to reject these proposals and instead focus on strengthening protections for women and children."
Let’s hope Iraq, which has been through enough over the years, is spared yet another dystopian development.
The World’s Disappeared Journalists
August 30 was the “International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.”
Rather than referring to magicians vanishing their assistants, the day in question has a much more sombre meaning.
From Statista:
Enforced disappearances are the arrest or abduction of a person by or on behalf of the state, followed by that same authorities’ refusal to acknowledge it. The move is used as a means to silence opposition and to spread terror.
Punishing the inconveniently curious is an unfortunately long and glorious tradition around the world.
Commenting on the global pattern of disappearances, [Reporters Without Borders] secretary-general Christophe Deloire said: “China invented the ‘enforced vacation,’ Syria developed mass disappearances and Africa copied South America, which sadly pioneered enforced disappearance.”
“Instead of decreasing, this barbaric practice is diversifying, spreading all over the world and creating more and more victims among journalists and bloggers every year. We deplore the impunity usually enjoyed by the perpetrators of these crimes and the lack of commitment by democratic governments to bring them to an end.”
Using a Reporters Without Borders database, Statista have created a graphic showing the distribution of “this barbaric practice.”
This Week In FaRT
Okay, I’m being childish, but stay with me.
I’ve noticed that in coverage of facial recognition technology, the initialisation FRT has become standard. However, I humbly propose that using the first two letters of ‘facial’ would upgrade the initialisation to an acronym, FaRT, which is easier to say, funnier to read, and a more suitable descriptor of something intrusive and unwelcome that stinks.
Two stories from the FaRT sector came in this week, both from Biometric Update. The first is about NEC, a world pioneer in FaRT.
NEC Corporation has launched a new biometric system so customers can utilize its facial recognition to authenticate individuals even while they are moving, addressing an increasingly common requirement for crowded places like airports.
Note the use of the word “authenticate”, which has a specific meaning in relation to FaRT.
A primer on key terms from Abhishek Jadhav at Biometric Update (emphasis mine):
In biometric security, it’s important to distinguish between authentication, verification, and identification, as these terms are often mistakenly used interchangeably.
[…]
Biometric verification is a process that confirms an individual’s claimed identity by comparing their biometric data to a specific stored record. It’s like answering the question, “Are you who you say you are?” This process uses a one-to-one (1:1) matching system, where the biometric sample is compared to a single stored record to verify the claimed identity. It’s commonly used for access control, such as financial transactions, demonstrating its practical relevance.
[…]
[Biometric identification] determines the individual’s identity by comparing their biometric data against a database of stored biometric information. It answers the question, “Who is this person?” It involves a one-to-many (1:N) matching system, where the biometric sample is compared to multiple records in the database to find a match. It’s commonly used in border control and law enforcement.
[…]
Biometric authentication evaluates the genuineness of an individual as a method of confirming their authorization to access the system or specific information. It involves establishing trust in the authenticity, validating a person’s identity and an authenticator.
Authentication can include a one-to-one or one-to-many comparison depending on the use case. Unlocking your smartphone with your fingerprint or face, for example, is one-to-one. A casino checking your face against a database of known card sharps is one-to-many.
Back to the NEC biometric authentication system:
The system can authenticate a large number of people, processing up to 100 individuals per minute, according to the company announcement. NEC says it decreases the necessity for physical barriers, thereby reducing congestion and waiting times.
In other words…
The new facial recognition system incorporates features that consider movement patterns and clothing characteristics. This approach is designed to enhance the system’s accuracy in identifying and confirming individuals in dynamic environments. The system can generate visual alerts through overhead displays, enabling immediate attention to unauthorized attempts. It also supports integration with AR glasses and projection mapping systems.
NEC states that the system can be implemented with minimal hardware requirements, utilizing only a single camera and a “palm-sized” edge terminal. The terminal is equipped with hardware acceleration for facial recognition processing and can manage computations for real-time biometric authentication on-site.
The second story is about Essex police using FaRT on the streets of Clacton and Southend in the UK.
Police in Essex, England have used Corsight AI’s live facial intelligence tools to make several recent arrests. A release from the company says three people were arrested at the Clacton Airshow on August 22 and two more were nabbed in Southend on August 25 and 26, including for sexual assault and common assault cases. Per a release from the police force, for the Clacton Airshow deployment, “there were five positive alerts leading to three arrests.”
“In Southend, there were also five positive alerts which resulted in two arrests – one for harassment and one for sexual assault.”
Britain’s public is more accepting of or at least less vocally against FaRT, and as a result there is more FaRT in public in the UK than other comparable nations otherwise self-describing as democratic and free.
Joel McConvey, the author of the article, points out that “the British mindset (usually) prefers order to chaos and rules over revolutions.”
As he puts it:
After all, if you are in London, you are on camera, namely one of the CCTV cameras in the city, of which there are somewhere between 625,000 and 950,000, depending on estimates – about one for every ten to fourteen people who live there.
This particular example showcased live FaRT, specifically in a law enforcement mode.
Corsight AI’s system monitors for known offenders, people on watchlists and “protected vulnerable individuals at risk of harm.” It says images of anyone who does not trigger a match are deleted “almost instantly,” ensuring no data retention or storage.
With our newfound grasp of biometric vocabulary, we can see that this is “identification”, a one-to-many system.
Besides my own layperson’s queasiness about what happens to the presumption of innocence in a situation where everyone is scanned a priori and then deleted only if they aren’t ‘guilty’, there’s the question of whether or not a company’s promise to “almost instantly” delete your captured face is trustworthy.
When the technology in question comes from overseas military application, my queasiness increases (emphasis mine).
The facial intelligence system has been created in collaboration with Digital Barriers, which provides edge-based video surveillance services, including real-time facial recognition from security cameras, vehicle-mounted cameras and body cameras. The company has deployed live cellular video monitoring services for military operations in Afghanistan, royal and presidential events, and the Olympics.
In an op-ed (perhaps an apologia?) for Biometric Update, “Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner” writes:
In surveillance perspective is everything. Your viewpoint affects what you will see and therefore what you will miss.
Poetically put. Perhaps it would have been worth noting in the article’s byline that, as per a 14 November 2023 press release, Fraser Sampson is on the board of directors of Facewatch, “the UK’s leading facial recognition retail security company.” After all, perspective is everything. A former public watchdog is perceived as a stalwart defender of the public good. A director of a company selling FaRT to retailers could be more readily perceived as shilling the technology he is profiting from the uptake of. After all, “your viewpoint affects what you will see and therefore what you will miss.”
Sampson opines in his op-ed (emphasis in the original):
We, the people, are now using sophisticated surveillance tools once the preserve of state intelligence agencies, routinely and at minimal financial cost. We freely share personal datasets – including our facial images – with private companies and government on our smart devices for access control, identity verification and threat mitigation. From this societal vantage point it seems reasonable for the police to infer that many citizens not only support them using new remote biometric technology but also expect them to do so, to protect communities, prevent serious harm and detect dangerous offenders – who by the way are also using it to potentially devasting effect.
Let me ask you: If you didn’t know he was a director of a for-profit company actively selling FaRT, would his argument sound stronger?
Why is it that advocates of surveillance are so sanguine about concealment when they are doing it, while arguing so strenuously that the public needs to accept the intrusion of being watched, measured, weighed, and checked against one another for their own security?
I suppose FaRT is like a fart: If you do it, it’s fine, but if someone else does it, it’s gross.
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.
Outro music is Banned In The U.S.A. by 2 Live Crew, an evergreen anthem against censorship.
Stay sane, friends.
No, not child clones of Josef Mengele as in the book and Gregory Peck film. But alliteration is fun.