Blue Wolf facial recognition in West Bank by the Israel Defense Force
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Surveillance
| Summary |
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| 0 |
Products and Institutions:
| Product Deployed | Blue Wolf Software |
|---|---|
| Institutions ⠉ | |
| Datasets | Blue Wolf Dataset |
| Search software |
Status and Events:
| Status | Ongoing |
|---|---|
| Events | Start (1 January 2019, Speculative, , According to recently discharged soldiers the program has been going on for the last two years already.) |
| Start Date | |
| End Date |
Users:
| Involved Entities | |
|---|---|
| Managed by | Israel Defense Forces Blue Wolf |
| Used by | Israel Defense Forces |
Location:
| City | Hebron |
|---|---|
| Country ⠉ | Occupied Palestinian territories |
Description[ ]
The Israel Defense Force build up an extensive database of faces of Palesinians and developed a phone app called "Blue Wolf" that can identiy a photographed person and indicate whether the person should be left alone, ddetained, or arrested. Additionally, this can also be integrated with existing CCTV cameras.
HEBRON, West Bank — The Israeli military has been conducting a broad surveillance effort in the occupied West Bank to monitor Palestinians by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones, according to descriptions of the program by recent Israeli soldiers. 1
The surveillance initiative, rolled out over the past two years, involves in part a smartphone technology called Blue Wolf that captures photos of Palestinians’ faces and matches them to a database of images so extensive that one former soldier described it as the army’s secret “Facebook for Palestinians.” The phone app flashes in different colors to alert soldiers if a person is to be detained, arrested or left alone. 1
The Israel Defense Force build up the respective dataset themselves by photographing people living in Palestine.
To build the database used by Blue Wolf, soldiers competed last year in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly, with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit. The total number of people photographed is unclear but, at a minimum, ran well into the thousands. 1