Shankar Narayan of the American Civil Liberties Union warned of a future all too familiar to Palestinians living under Israeli rule: "The widespread use of face surveillance flips the premise of freedom on its head and you start becoming a society where everyone is tracked, no matter what they do, all the time", Narayan told NBC.
"Face recognition is possibly the most perfect tool for complete government control in public spaces."
According to Yael Berda, a researcher at Harvard University, Israel maintains a list of some 200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank it wants under surveillance around the clock. Technologies such as AnyVision's are seen as vital to keeping this vast group under constant monitoring.
A former AnyVision employee told NBC that the Palestinians were treated as a testing ground. "The technology was field-tested in one of the world's most demanding security environments and we were now rolling it out to the rest of the market," he said.
The Israeli government itself has a growing interest in using these spying technologies in the US and Europe, as its occupation has become the focus of controversy and scrutiny in mainstream political discourse.
In the UK, the shift in the political climate has been highlighted by the election of Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time Palestinian rights activist, to head the opposition Labour Party. In the US, a small group of lawmakers visibly supportive of the Palestinian cause have recently entered Congress, including Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to hold the post.
More generally, Israel fears the flourishing international solidarity movement BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), which calls for a boycott of Israel modelled on the one against apartheid South Africa until it stops oppressing Palestinians. The BDS movement has grown strongly on many US campuses.
As a result, Israeli cyber firms have been drawn ever more deeply into efforts to manipulate public discourse about Israel, apparently including by meddling in foreign elections.
Private 'Mossad for hire'Two notorious examples of such firms have briefly made headlines. Psy-Group, which marketed itself as a "private Mossad for hire", was shut down last year after the FBI began investigating it for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election. Its "Project Butterfly", according to the New Yorker, aimed to "destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within".
Black Cube, meanwhile, was exposed last year to have been carrying out hostile surveillance of leading members of the previous US administration, under Barack Obama. It appears closely linked to Israel's security services, and was a for a time located on an Israeli military base.
Banned by AppleThere are other Israeli firms seeking to blur the distinction between private and public space.
Onavo, an Israeli data collection company established by two veterans of Unit 8200, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Apple banned its VPN app last year over revelations that it was providing unlimited access to users' data.
Israel's strategic affairs minister, Gilad Erdan, who heads a secretive campaign to demonise overseas BDS activists, had regular meetings with another firm, Concert, last year, according to a report in Haaretz. This covert group, which is exempt from Israel's Freedom of Information laws, has received around $36m in funding from the Israeli government. Its directors and shareholders are a "who's who" of Israel's security and intelligence elite.
Another leading Israeli firm, Candiru, is named for a small Amazonian fish that is reputed to secretly invade the human body, where it becomes a parasite. Candiru sells its hacking tools mostly to Western governments, though its operations are shrouded in secrecy.
Its staff are drawn almost exclusively from Unit 8200. In a sign of how closely linked are the public and covert technologies Israeli firms have developed, Candiru's chief executive, Eitan Achlow, previously headed Gett, the taxi service app.
Dystopian futureIsrael's security elite is cashing in on this new market for cyber warfare, exploiting just as it did with the trade in conventional arms a ready made and captive Palestinian population, on which it can test its technology.
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