Amnesty & Big Tech - 7 October Meeting Highlights

Talk by Rebecca White (Amnesty Tech)

We had a good turnout in anticipation of a talk from Rebecca White, a member of the 40 strong Amnesty Tech team within Amnesty's International Secretariat. We were not disappointed.

Amnesty Tech's mission is to: Uncover and disrupt unlawful surveillance of civil society and to empower human rights defenders with the knowledge, technology, and means to become more resilient to digital threats. This is effected by

• research and intelligence gathering on active surveillance campaigns
• providing 'Incident Response' services to individual human rights defenders as well as organisations
• building technology to help act on intelligence gathered
• to use the research to support campaigns and advocacy

Rebecca outlined a number of strands of Amnesty Tech's work interests including:

• making websites 'safe by design' as opposed to harmful and/or addictive (Tik Tok was given as an example)
• targeted digital surveillance
• biased algorithms leading to unfairly discriminatory decisions (e.g. AI to detect ethnic origin from accent)
• spyware

Spyware has become a significant problem with some being triggered when people respond to a plausible message but others (e.g. Pegasus) being 'zero-click'). Some spyware will then delete any evidence of its presence.

Amnesty's position is that all forms of Facial Recognition and Spyware should be banned.

The Group expressed their thanks to Rebecca for an enlightening (and worrying!) talk.

Urgent Actions

Our Secretary related three Urgent Actions as follows:

Alaa Abdel Fattah (Egypt)

Our group received the devastating news that Alaa, one of our two Prisoners of Conscience, was not going to be released on 29 September 2024 because the two years he spent in pre-detention did not count towards his five year sentence. As a result, he now has a release date during 2027 at the earliest. Barbara drew attention to the current Urgent Action as well as the forthcoming reissue of his book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

Maryia Kalesnikava (Belarus)

One of the three prominent women, the others being Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya and Veranika Tsapkala, who played a part in winning, by some margin according to certain sources, the popular vote in the most recent election in which President Lukashenka claimed victory. She is serving an eleven year sentence following conviction on spurious charges of extremism, trying to seize power etc. 

Pakhshan Azizi (Iran)

A Kurdish woman under sentence of death, having on the face of it done nothing other than operating as a social worker assisting refugees and the victims of ISIS, and according to the court verdict, supporting the families of those unlawfully killed during the 2022 nationwide protests.   

The group wrote letters on behalf of the three prisoners.