Senator Ted Cruz leads efforts to pass AI amnesty through the NDAA, giving Big Tech federal preemption without rules to protect conservatives and children.

The world is facing the collapse of the 1948 international order established in the wake of World War II, amid the brutal wars in Gaza and Ukraine, while authoritarian policies continue to spread, Amnesty International has warned. The report accused the world's most powerful governments, including China, Russia and the United States, of leading the global disregard for international rules and values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 1948. The war in Gaza, which began on October 7, was a "descent into hell", Secretary-General Agnes Callamard wrote in her preface to the report, where "the'never again' moral and legal lessons [of 1948] were torn into a million pieces". Noting that Hamas had committed "horrific crimes" in its assault on communities in southern Israel on October 7, Callamard said Israel's "campaign of retaliation" had become a "campaign of collective punishment". Amnesty said while Israel continued to disregard international human rights law, the US, its foremost ally, and other countries including the United Kingdom and Germany were guilty of "grotesque double standards" given their willingness to back Israeli and US authorities over Gaza while condemning war crimes by Russia in Ukraine.

In the occupied Palestinian territories, there are cameras everywhere. In Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, residents say cameras were installed by Israeli police up and down their streets, peering into their homes. One resident named Sara said she and her family "could be detected as if the cameras were just in our house … we couldn't feel at home in our own house and had to be fully dressed all the time." Surveillance cameras now cover the Damascus Gate, the main entrance into the old city of Jerusalem and one of the only public areas for Palestinians to gather socially and hold demonstrations. It's at that gate that "Palestinians are being watched and assessed at all times", according to an Amnesty International report, Automated Apartheid.

For activist Issa Amro, the latest revelations from human rights group Amnesty International about Israel's ever-growing use of facial recognition technology against Palestinians come as no surprise. My people are suffering from it," he told Al Jazeera from Hebron. On May 2, Amnesty published a report titled Automated Apartheid, detailing the workings of Israel's Red Wolf programme – a facial recognition technology used to track Palestinians since last year that is believed to be linked to similar, earlier programmes known as Blue Wolf and Wolf Pack. The technology has been deployed at checkpoints in the city of Hebron and other parts of the occupied West Bank – scanning the faces of Palestinians and comparing them against existing databases. Palestinians, like anyone else, have the right to live in a world that upholds equality and dignity. Help dismantle Israel's apartheid and call for an end to the supply of facial recognition technologies used in the Occupied Palestinian ...

As advocates for facial recognition tout the tech's potential to track down the US Capitol rioters, a new Amnesty International campaign has provided a timely reminder of the software's dangers. The NGO has shared a stream of examples of how the software amplifies racist policing and threatens the right to protest -- and called for a global ban on the tech. The Ban the Scan campaign was launched on Tuesday in New York City, where facial recognition has been used 22,000 since 2017. Amnesty notes that the software is often prone to errors. But even when it "works," it can exacerbate discriminatory policing, violate our privacy, and threaten our rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression.

Facial recognition technology amplifies racist policing, threatens the right to protest and should be banned globally, Amnesty International said as it urged New York City to pass a ban on its use in mass surveillance by law enforcement. "Facial recognition risks being weaponised by law enforcement against marginalised communities around the world," said Matt Mahmoudi, AI and human rights researcher at Amnesty. "From New Delhi to New York, this invasive technology turns our identities against us and undermines human rights. "New Yorkers should be able to go out about their daily lives without being tracked by facial recognition. Other major cities across the US have already banned facial recognition, and New York must do the same." Albert Fox Cahn of New York's Urban Justice Centre, which is supporting Amnesty's Ban the Scan campaign, said: "Facial recognition is biased, broken, and antithetical to democracy.

Facial recognition technology amplifies racist policing, threatens the right to protest and should be banned globally, Amnesty International said as it urged New York City to pass a ban on its use in mass surveillance by law enforcement. "Facial recognition risks being weaponised by law enforcement against marginalised communities around the world," said Matt Mahmoudi, AI and human rights researcher at Amnesty. "From New Delhi to New York, this invasive technology turns our identities against us and undermines human rights. "New Yorkers should be able to go out about their daily lives without being tracked by facial recognition. Other major cities across the US have already banned facial recognition, and New York must do the same." Albert Fox Cahn of New York's Urban Justice Centre, which is supporting Amnesty's Ban the Scan campaign, said: "Facial recognition is biased, broken, and antithetical to democracy.

Amnesty International are holding protests across the globe today calling for an end to Googles plan of censoring their search engine in China. Demonstrations will take place outside Googles HQ's in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia,Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, The Netherlands and Spain. It was revealed that Google secretly built the censored search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist certain words such as'human rights' and'student protest'. Amnesty have launched a petition to stop works on the'dystopian' platform which are said to launch in China between January and April 2019. The human rights group say that the move would'set a dangerous precedent for tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments.'