Blue Wolf: New Israeli Espionage Technology against Palestinians

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The Israeli occupation is employing various methods of surveillance and spying on Palestinians in the West Bank.

To this end, the IOF has been conducting broad surveillance efforts in the occupied West Bank, according to an Israeli occupation soldier working on espionage programs, to monitor Palestinians by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones, The Washington Post said in a report.

The surveillance program, put into action two years ago, 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 occupation soldier described it as the army's secret "Facebook for Palestinians."

The phone app flashes in different colors; yellow, red, and green to alert soldiers if a person is to be detained, arrested, or left alone, respectively.

To build Blue Wolf's database, soldiers competed last year in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly.

The total number of people photographed is unclear, but it is estimated to be in the thousands, and the unit that collects the most pictures receives prizes.

In addition to Blue Wolf, the Israeli occupation has installed face-scanning cameras in al-Khalil to help soldiers at checkpoints identify Palestinians before they even present their ID cards. 

The Post also quoted an Israeli occupation soldier as saying a wider network of closed-circuit television cameras, dubbed "Hebron Smart City," provides real-time monitoring of the city’s population and can sometimes see into private homes in a live broadcast.

In parallel with Blue Wolf, the Israeli occupation has developed, according to the newspaper, a special application, dubbed 'White Wolf,' which the settlers can use to determine "the identity of Palestinians even before showing their IDs."