Robert Fisk
@indyvoices
17 hours ago

So, while we continue to be mesmerised by Covid-19, here are a few Middle East tales that should be going viral this week.

Let’s start with a little divestment story. Microsoft has said it’s going to sell its stake in AnyVision, an Israeli facial recognition startup, after civil liberties groups in the US complained that the technology could, in police hands, lead to arbitrary arrests and limit freedom of expression. NBC news – praise where praise is due – broke the original story of Microsoft’s funding for the Israeli company last October, pointing out that it used facial recognition to observe Palestinians throughout the occupied West Bank, in spite of Microsoft’s promise to avoid using the technology if it encroached on democratic freedoms.

AnyVision has won the Israel Defence Prize, counts a former head of Mossad among its board of advisers, and its president is Amir Kain, who was director of the Israeli defence ministry’s security department until 2015. It’s run by Eylon Etshtein, who was a member of an Israeli army commando reconnaissance unit. When he initially responded to NBC, Etshtein objected to the use of the word “occupied” for the West Bank and described AnyVision as the “most ethical company known to man”. AnyVision had earlier publicly acknowledged that it provided facial recognition technology at 27 Israeli checkpoints which West Bank Palestinians must use to cross into Israel as migrant workers. It provided, the company said, an “unbiased safeguard at the border to detect and deter persons who have committed unlawful activities”.

But Microsoft’s president, Bradford Lee Smith, more than a year ago called for government regulation of facial recognition technology. He said Microsoft would not “deploy facial recognition technology in scenarios that we believe will put these freedoms at risk”. So it’s amazing – given AnyVision’s intimate connections with Israeli security – that Microsoft did not take a closer look at its original decision to fund Etshtein’s startup.

read more here:

and:

A few days ago, Bernie Sanders announced that US sanctions should not be contributing to Iran’s “humanitarian disaster” and that its economic war against Tehran should, at least temporarily, during the coronavirus crisis, be lifted. So what did Joe think about that?

Well, the wordsmith frontrunner responded with this imperishable statement: “I don’t have enough information about the situation in Iran right now.”