Leaked docs expose massive Syria propaganda by the West!

So many gullible Muslim individuals, leaders and countries have been fooled by the Western propagandists on the state of affairs in Syria!!! Extreme shia-hatred by the Sunnis & hadths regarding end time prophecies have also helped to promote their cause in this instance. These tactics have also been employed in the past on other issues that we didn't even realise!!!

Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets from BBC to Al Jazeera, and ran a cadre of journalists. A trove of leaked documents exposes the propaganda network.

Leaked docs expose massive Syria propaganda operation waged by Western govt contractors and media
By Ben Norton
GrayZone, September 23, 2020

Leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria’s political and armed opposition.

Virtually every aspect of the Syrian opposition was cultivated and marketed by Western government-backed public relations firms, from their political narratives to their branding, from what they said to where they said it.

The leaked files reveal how Western intelligence cutouts played the media like a fiddle, carefully crafting English- and Arabic-language media coverage of the war on Syria to churn out a constant stream of pro-opposition coverage.

US and European contractors trained and advised Syrian opposition leaders at all levels, from young media activists to the heads of the parallel government-in-exile. These firms also organized interviews for Syrian opposition leaders on mainstream outlets such as BBC and the UK’s Channel 4.

More than half of the stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained in a joint US-UK government program called Basma, which produced hundreds of Syrian opposition media activists.

Western government PR firms not only influenced the way the media covered Syria, but as the leaked documents reveal, they produced their own propagandistic pseudo-news for broadcast on major TV networks in the Middle East, including BBC Arabic, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and Orient TV.

These UK-funded firms functioned as full-time PR flacks for the extremist-dominated Syrian armed opposition. One contractor, called InCoStrat, said it was in constant contact with a network of more than 1,600 international journalists and “influencers,” and used them to push pro-opposition talking points.

Another Western government contractor, ARK, crafted a strategy to “re-brand” Syria’s Salafi-jihadist armed opposition by “softening its image.” ARK boasted that it provided opposition propaganda that “aired almost every day on” major Arabic-language TV networks.

Virtually every major Western corporate media outlet was influenced by the UK government-funded disinformation campaign exposed in the trove of leaked documents, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, CNN to The Guardian, the BBC to Buzzfeed.

The files confirm reporting by journalists including The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal on the role of ARK, the US-UK government contractor, in popularizing the White Helmets in Western media. ARK ran the social media accounts of the White Helmets, and helped turn the Western-funded group into a key propaganda weapon of the Syrian opposition.

The leaked documents consist mainly of material produced under the auspices of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. All of the firms named in the files were contracted by the British government, but many also were running “multi-donor projects” that received funding from the governments of the United States and other Western European countries.

In addition to demonstrating the role these Western intelligence cutouts played in shaping media coverage, the documents shine light on the British government program to train and arm rebel groups in Syria.

Other materials show how London and Western governments worked together to build a new police force in opposition-controlled areas.

Many of these Western-backed opposition groups in Syria were extremist Salafi-jihadists. Some of the UK government contractors whose activities are exposed in these leaked documents were in effect supporting Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and its fanatical offshoots.

The documents were obtained by a group calling itself Anonymous, and were published under a series of files entitled, “Op. HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] Trojan Horse: From Integrity Initiative To Covert Ops Around The Globe. Part 1: Taming Syria.” The unidentified leakers said they aim to “expose criminal activity of the UK’s FCO and secret services,” stating, “We declare war on the British neocolonialism!”

The Grayzone was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the documents. However, the contents tracked closely with reporting on Western destabilization and propaganda operations in Syria by this outlet and many others.

UK Foreign Office and military wage media war on Syria

A leaked UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office report from 2014 reveals a joint operation with the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development to support “strategic communications, research, monitoring and evaluation and operational support to Syrian opposition entities.”

The UK FOC stated clearly that this campaign consisted of “creating network linkages between political movements and media outlets,” by the “building of local independent media platforms.”

The British government planned “Mentoring, training and coaching for enhanced delivery of media services, including digital and social media.”

Its goal was “to provide PR and media handling trainers, as well as technical staff, such as cameramen, webmasters and interpreters,” along with the “production of speeches, press releases and other media communications.”

An additional 2017 government document explains clearly how Britain funded the “selection, training, support and communications mentoring of Syrian activists who share the UK’s vision for a future Syria… and who will abide by a set of values that are consistent with UK policy.”

This initiative entailed British government funding “to support Syrian grassroots media activism within both the civilian and armed opposition spheres,” and was targeted at Syrians living in both “extremist and moderate” opposition-held territory.

In other words, the UK Foreign Office and military crafted plans to wage a comprehensive media war on Syria. To establish an infrastructure capable of managing the propaganda blitz, Britain paid a series of government contractors, including ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), Innovative Communication & Strategies (InCoStrat), and Albany.

The work of these firms overlapped, and some collaborated in their projects to cultivate the Syrian opposition.

Western government contractor ARK plays the media like the fiddle

One of the main British government contractors behind the Syria regime-change scheme was called ARK (Analysis Research Knowledge).

ARK FZC is based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. It brands itself as a humanitarian NGO, claiming it “was created in order to assist the most vulnerable,” by establishing a “social enterprise,? empowering local communities through the provision of agile and sustainable interventions to create greater stability, opportunity and hope for the future.”

In reality ARK is an intelligence cutout that functions as an arm of Western interventionism.

In a leaked document it filed with the British government, ARK said its “focus since 2012 has been delivering highly effective, politically-and conflict-sensitive Syria programming for the governments of the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, Canada, Japan and the European Union.”

ARK boasted of overseeing $66 million worth of contracts to support pro-opposition efforts in Syria.

On its website, ARK lists all of these governments as clients, as well as the United Nations.

In its Syria operations, ARK worked together with another UK contractor called The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), which is directed by Richard Barrett, a former director of global counter-terrorism at MI6.

ARK apparently had operatives on the ground inside Syria at the beginning of the regime-change attempt in 2011, reporting to the UK FCO that “ARK staff are in regular contact with activists and civil society actors whom they initially met during the outbreak of protests in spring 2011.”

The UK contractor boasted an “extensive network of civil society and community actors that ARK has helped through a dedicated capacity building centre ARK established in Gaziantep,” a city in southern Turkey that has been a base of intelligence operations against the Syrian government.

ARK played a central role in developing the foundations of the Syrian political opposition’s narrative. In one leaked document, the firm took credit for the “development of a core Syrian opposition narrative,” which was apparently crafted during a series of workshops with opposition leaders sponsored by the US and UK governments.

ARK trained all levels of the Syrian opposition in communications, from “citizen journalism workshops with Syrian media activists, to working with senior members of the National Coalition to develop a core communications narrative.”

The firm even oversaw the PR strategy for the Supreme Military Council (SMC), the leadership of the official armed wing of Syria’s opposition, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). ARK created a complex PR campaign to “provide a ‘re-branding’ of the SMC in order to distinguish itself from extremist armed opposition groups and to establish the image of a functioning, inclusive, disciplined and professional military body.”

ARK admitted that it sought to whitewash Syria’s armed opposition, which had been largely dominated by Salafi-jihadists, by “Softening the FSA Image.”

ARK took the lead in developing a massive network of opposition media activists in Syria, and openly took credit for inspiring protests inside the country.

In its training centers in Syria and southern Turkey, the Western government contractor reported, “More than 150 activists have been trained and equipped by ARK on topics from the basics of camera handling, lighting, and sound to producing reports, journalistic safety, online security, and ethical reporting.”

The firm flooded Syria with opposition propaganda. In just six months, ARK reported that 668,600 of its print products were distributed inside Syria, including “posters, flyers, informative booklets, activity books and other campaign-related materials.”

In one document spelling out the UK contractors’ communications operations in Syria, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN boasted of overseeing the following media assets inside the country: 97 video stringers, 23 writers, 49 distributors, 23 photographers, 19 in-country trainers, eight training centers, three media offices, and 32 research officers.

ARK emphasized that it had “well-established contacts” with some of the top media outlets in the world, naming Reuters, the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Al Jazeera, Sky News Arabic, Orient TV, and Al Arabiya.

The UK contractor added, “ARK has provided regular branded and unbranded content to key pan-Arab and Syria-focused satellite TV channels such as Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, BBC Arabic, Orient TV, Aleppo Today, Souria al-Ghadd, and Souria al-Sha’ab since 2012.”

“ARK products promoting HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) priorities by fostering attitudinal and behavioural change are broadcast almost every day on pan-Arab channels,” the firm bragged. “In 2014, 20 branded and un-branded Syria reports were produced on average by ARK each month and broadcast on major pan-Arab television channels such as Al Arabiya, Al Jazeera, and Orient TV.”

“ARK has almost daily conversations with channels and weekly meetings to engage and understand editorial preferences,” the Western intelligence cutout said.

The firm also took credit for placing 10 articles per month in pan-Arab newspapers such as Al Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat.

US-UK program Basma cultivates Syrian media activists

The Syrian opposition media war was organized within the framework of a project called Basma. ARK worked with other Western government contractors through Basma in order to train Syrian opposition activists.

With funding from both the US and UK governments, Basma developed into an enormously influential platform. Its Arabic Facebook page had over 500,000 followers, and on YouTube it built up a large following as well.

Mainstream corporate media outlets misleadingly portrayed Basma as a “Syrian citizen journalism platform,” or a “civil society group working for a ‘liberatory, progressive transition to a new Syria.'” In reality it was a Western government astroturfing operation to cultivate opposition propagandists.

Nine of the 16 stringers used by Al Jazeera in Syria were trained through the US/UK government’s Basma initiative, ARK boasted in a leaked document.

In an earlier report for the UK FCO, filed just three years into its work, ARK claimed to have “trained over 1,400 beneficiaries representing over 210 beneficiary organisations in more than 130 workshops, and disbursed more than 53,000 individual pieces of equipment,” in a vast network that reached “into all of Syria’s 14 governorates,” which included both opposition- and government-held areas.

The Western contractor published a map highlighting its network of stringers and media activists and their relationships with the White Helmets as well as newly created police forces across opposition-controlled Syria.

In its trainings, ARK developed opposition spokespeople, taught them how to speak with the press, and then helped arrange interviews with mainstream Arabic- and English-language media outlets.

ARK described its strategy “to identify credible, moderate civilian governance spokespeople who will be promoted as go-to interlocutors for regional and international media. They will echo key messages linked to the coordinated local campaigns across all media, with consortium platforms able to cover this messaging as well and encourage other outlets to pick it up.”

In addition to working with the international press and cultivating opposition leaders, ARK helped develop a massive opposition media super-structure.

ARK said it was a “key implementer of a multi-donor effort to develop a network of FM radio stations and community magazines inside Syria since 2012.” The contractor worked with 14 FM stations and 11 magazines inside Syria, including both Arabic- and Kurdish-language radio.

To propagate opposition broadcasts across Syria, ARK designed what it called “Radio in a Box” (RIAB) kits in 2012. The firm took credit for providing equipment to 48 transmission sites.

ARK also circulated up to 30,000 magazines per month. It reported that “ARK-supported magazines were the three most popular in Aleppo City; the most popular magazine in Homs City; and the most popular magazine in Qamishli.”

A Syrian opposition propaganda outlet directly run by ARK, called Moubader, developed a huge following on social media, including more than 200,000 likes on Facebook. ARK printed 15,000 copies per month of a “high-quality hard copy” Moubader magazine and distributed it “across opposition-held areas of Syria.”

The British contractor TGSN, which worked alongside ARK, developed its own outlet called the “Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office (RFS),” a leaked document shows. This confirms a 2016 report in The Grayzone by contributor Rania Khalek, who obtained emails showing how the UK government-backed RFS media office offered to pay one journalist a staggering $17,000 per month to produce propaganda for Syrian rebels.

Another leaked record shows that in just one year, in 2018 – which was apparently the final year of ARK’s Syria program – the firm billed the UK government for a staggering 2.3 million British pounds.

This enormous ARK propaganda operation was directed by Firas Budeiri, who had previously served as the Syria director for the UK-based international NGO Save the Children.

40 percent of ARK’s Syria project team were Syrian citizens, and another 25 percent were Turkish. The firm said its Syria team staff had “extensive experience managing programmes and conducting research funded by many different governmental clients in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, the Palestinian Territories, Iraq and other conflict-affected states.”

Western contractor ARK cultivates White Helmets “to keep Syria in the news”

The Western contractor ARK was a central force in launching the White Helmets operation.

The leaked documents show ARK ran the Twitter and Facebook pages of Syria Civil Defense, known more commonly as the White Helmets.

ARK took credit for developing “an internationally-focused communications campaign designed to raise global awareness of the (White Helmets) teams and their life saving work.”

ARK also facilitated communications between the White Helmets and The Syria Campaign, a PR firm run out of London and New York that helped popularize the White Helmets in the United States.

It was apparently “following subsequent discussions with ARK and the teams” that The Syria Campaign “selected civil defence to front its campaign to keep Syria in the news,” the firm wrote in a report for the UK Foreign Office.

“With ARK’s guidance, TSC (The Syria Campaign) also attended ARK’s civil defence training sessions to create media content for its #WhiteHelmets campaign which launched in August 2014 and has since gone viral,” the Western contractor added.

In 2014, ARK produced a long-form documentary on the White Helmets, titled “Digging for Life,” which was repeatedly broadcast on Orient TV.

While it was running the White Helmets’ social media accounts, ARK bragged that it was boosting followers and views on the Facebook page for Idlib City Council.

The Syrian city of Idlib was taken over by al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which then went on to publicly execute women who were accused of adultery.

While effectively aiding these al-Qaeda-aligned extremist groups, ARK and the British intelligence cutout TGSN also signed a document with the FCO hilariously pledging to follow “UK guidance on gender sensitivity” and “ensure gender is considered in all capacity building and campaign development.”

Setting the stage for lawfare on Syria

Another leaked document shows the Western government-backed firm ARK revealing that, back in 2011, it worked with another government contractor called Tsamota to help develop the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability (SCJA). In 2014, SCJA changed its name to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA).

The Grayzone exposed CIJA as a Western government-funded regime-change organization whose investigators collaborated with al-Qaeda and its extremist allies in order to wage lawfare on the Syrian government.

ARK noted that the project initially worked “with seed funding from the UK Conflict Pool to support investigative and forensic training for Syrian war crimes investigators” and has since “grown to become a major component of Syria’s transitional justice architecture.”

Since the US, European Union, and their Middle East allies lost the military phase of their war on Syria, CIJA has taken the lead in trying to prolong the regime-change campaign through lawfare.
InCoStrat creates media network, helps them interview al-Qaeda

In the leaked documents, another UK government contractor called Innovative Communications Strategies (InCoStrat) boasted of building a massive “network of over 1600 journalists and key influencers with an interest in Syria.”

InCoStrat stressed that it was “managing and delivering a multi donor project in support of UK Foreign Policy objectives” in Syria, “specifically providing strategic communication support to the moderate armed opposition.”

Other funders of InCoStrat’s work with the opposition in Syria, the firm disclosed, included the US government, the United Arab Emirates, and anti-Assad Syrian businessmen.

InCoStrat served as a liaison between its government clients and the Syrian National Coalition, the Western-backed parallel government that the opposition tried to create. InCoStrat advised senior leaders of this Syrian shadow regime, and even ran the National Coalition’s own media office from Istanbul, Turkey.

The Western contractor took credit for organizing a 2014 BBC interview with Ahmad Jarba, the then-president of the opposition National Coalition.

The firm added that “journalists have often reached out to us in search of the appropriate people for their programmes.” As an example, InCoStrat said it helped plant its own Syrian opposition activists in BBC Arabic reports. The firm then added, “Once making the initial connections we encouraged the Syrians to maintain the relationships with the journalists in the BBC instead of using ourselves as the conduit.”

Like ARK, InCoStrat worked closely with the press. The firm said it had “extensive experience in engaging Arab and international news media,” adding that it worked directly with “heads of regional news in major satellite TV networks, press bureaus and print media.”

“Key members of InCoStrat have previously worked as Middle East correspondents for some of the world’s largest news agencies including Reuters,” the Western contractor added.

Also like ARK, InCoStrat established a vast media infrastructure. The firm set up Syrian opposition media offices in Dera’a, Syria; Istanbul and Reyhanli, Turkey; and Amman, Jordan.

InCoStrat worked with 130 stringers across Syria, and said it had more than 120 reporters working inside the country, along with “an additional five official spokesmen who appear several times a week on international and regional TV.”

InCoStrat also established eight FM radio stations and six community magazines across Syria.

The firm reported that it penetrated the armed opposition by developing “strong relationships with 54 brigade commanders in Syria’s southern front,” that involved “daily, direct engagement with the commanders and their officers inside Syria,” as well as defected officers Free Syrian Army (FSA) units in government-held Damascus.

In the leaked documents, InCoStrat boasted that its reporters organized interviews with many armed opposition militias, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
Don’t just plants media stories; “initiate an event” to create your own scandals

In its media war on Damascus, InCoStrat pursued a two-pronged campaign that consisted of the following: “a) Guerrilla Campaign. Use the media to create the event. b) Guerrilla Tactics. Initiate an event to create the media effect.”

The intelligence cutout therefore sought to use the media as a weapon to advance tangible political demands of the Syrian opposition.

In one case, InCoStrat took credit for a successful international campaign to force the Syrian government to lift its siege of the extremist-held opposition stronghold of Homs. The Grayzone contributor Rania Khalek reported on the crisis in Homs, which was besieged by Damascus after the far-right Sunni fundamentalists that controlled it began carrying out sectarian massacres against religious minorities and kidnapping Alawite civilians.

“We connected international journalists with Syrians living in besieged Homs,” InCoStrat explained. It organized an interview between Britain’s Channel 4 and a doctor in the city, which helped raise international attention, ultimately leading to an end to the siege.

In another instance, the UK contractor said it “produced postcards, posters and reports” comparing the secular government of Bashar al-Assad to the fundamentalist Salafi-jihadists in ISIS. Then it “provided a credible, Arabic-English speaking Syrian spokesperson to engage the media.”

The campaign was very successful, according to InCoStrat: Al-Jazeera America and The National published the firm’s propaganda posters. The British contractor also organized interviews on the topic with The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, The Times, Buzzfeed, Al-Jazeera, Suriya Al-Sham, and Orient.

After regime change comes Nation Building Inc.

InCoStrat has apparently been involved in numerous Western-backed regime-change operations.

In one leaked document, the firm said it helped to train civil society organizations in marketing, media, and communications in Afghanistan, Honduras, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. It even trained a team of anti-Saddam Hussein journalists inside Basra, Iraq after the joint US-UK invasion.

In addition to contracting for the United Kingdom, InCoStrat disclosed that it has worked for the governments of the United States, Singapore, Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, and Libya.

After NATO destroyed the Libyan state in a regime-change war in 2011, InCoStrat was brought in in 2012 to conduct similar communications work for the Libyan National Transitional Council, the Western-backed opposition that sought to take power.
Coordinating with extremist militias, cooking news to “reinforce the core narrative”

The leaked documents shed further light on a UK government contractor called Albany.

Albany boasted that it “secured the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance UK foreign policy interests.

The firm helped create an influential Syrian opposition media outfit called Enab Baladi. Founded in 2011 in the anti-Assad hub of Daraya, at the beginning of the war, Enab Baladi was aggressively marketed in the Western press as a grassroots Syrian media operation.

In reality, Enab Baladi was the product of a British contractor that took responsibility for its evolution “from an amateur-run entity into one of the most prominent Syrian media organizations.”

Albany also coordinated communications between opposition media outlets and extremist Islamist opposition groups by hiring an “engagement leader (who) has deep credibility with key groups including (north) Failaq ash-Sham, Jabha Shammiyeh, Jaysh Idleb al Hur, Ahrar ash-Sham, (center) Jaysh al Islam, Failaq al Rahman, and (south) Jaysh Tahrir.” Many of these militias were linked to al-Qaeda and are now recognized by the US Department of State and European governments as official terrorist groups.

Unlike other Western government contractors active in Syria, which often tried to feign a semblance of balance, Albany made it clear that its media reporting was nothing more than propaganda.

The firm admitted that it trained Syrian media activists in a unique “newsroom process” that called to “curate” news by “collecting and organising stories and content that support and reinforce the core narrative.”

In 2014, Albany boasted of running the Syrian National Coalition’s communications team at the Geneva Peace talks.

Albany also warned that revelations of Western government funding for these opposition media organizations that were being portrayed as grassroots initiatives would discredit them.

When internal emails were leaked showing that the massive opposition media platform Basma Syria was funded by the United States and Britain, Albany wrote, “the Basma brand has been compromised following leaks about funding project aims.”

The leaks on social media “have damaged the credibility and trustworthiness of the existing branded platform,” Albany wrote. “Credibility and trust are the key currencies of the activities envisaged and for this reason we consider it essential to refresh the approach if the content to be disseminated is to have effect.” The Basma website was taken down soon after.

These files provide clear insight into how the Syrian opposition was cultivated by Western governments with imperial designs on Damascus, and was kept afloat with staggering sums of cash that flowed from the pockets of British taxpayers – often to the benefit of fanatical militiamen allied with Al Qaeda.

While Dutch prosecutors prepare war crimes charges against the Syrian government for fighting off the onslaught, the leaked files are a reminder of the leading role that Western states and their war-profiteering companies played in the carefully organized destruction of the country.

How the British Empire abandoned its most vocal Muslim supporter

The vocal Muslim supporter mentioned herein is the famed Holy Quran translator & commentator Abdullah Yusuf Ali. More details about him can be found in this Wiki article.

How the British Empire abandoned its most vocal Muslim supporter
TRT, Saad Hasan 3 Sep 2019

Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote perhaps the most famous translation of the Quran but he also supported the British against the Ottomans and died a lonely man.

On a frigid December morning in 1953, a policeman found a half-conscious old man slumped on a street bench in the Westminster area of London. He was in a delirious state and died a day later on December 10.

That man was Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the famous 20th-century translator of the Quran. He died alone, homeless, and with no one by his side. When the news reached Pakistan’s embassy in London, it dispatched someone to pay for his last rites.

“It pains me to think that so able and eminent a gentleman should have met with so pathetic an end,” Mirza Abul Hassan Ispahani, Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London, wrote in a letter to his prime minister two days later.  

Generations of Muslims in English-speaking countries have grown up reading Yusuf Ali’s interpretation of the Quran. More than 200 editions of it have been published so far, making it perhaps the most read commentary in any non-Arabic language.

“Ask any English-speaking Muslim what translation and commentary of the Quran they originally studied, and the chances are that it was the one by Abdullah Yusuf Ali,” writes a commentator.

Yusuf Ali's work and affiliations solidify his place as a giant of his time. He was one of the most senior
Muslim civil servants during the British Raj, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Aga Khan, inaugurated the first mosque in Canada, represented India at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919, was a trustee of London’s oldest mosque, and a known educationist. He was also a prolific writer on Islam. But how did a prominent Muslim like him meet such a terrible end? Why was he forgotten so quickly?

A child of his time

In 1915, during World War I, the British faced a dilemma. Nearly half a million soldiers were Muslims from the Indian Subcontinent — modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — which was then under colonial rule. Some refused to fight the Turkish Ottoman soldiers who had joined the war against the allied army.

A mutiny broke out in November of that year in Singapore where Indian Muslim soldiers turned their guns on officers and took control of the island. The uprising was quickly crushed and 70 Muslim men were lined up against a wall and executed.

The events shook British officials. Many Muslims considered the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Reshad as their Caliph. Their personal affinity and strong connection led to the Khilafat Movement in India that called for boycotting the British. Abdullah Yusuf Ali thought otherwise.

“Fight ye glorious soldiers, Gurkha, Sikh or Muslim, Rajput or Brahman!” he said in a November 1914 speech at a London event in front of top British military officials. “You have comrades in the British army whose fellowship and lead are a priceless possession to you.”

In his talks and articles throughout the war, he urged fellow Muslims to side with the British, at times doing it so effusively that his rhetoric appeared jingoistic.

“The Ottoman Caliph announces Jihad against the British and what does Yusuf Ali do? He goes around European countries asking Muslims to fight for the British,” Humayun Ansari, a professor of Islam at the University of London, told TRT World.

“He was consistently loyal to the British and considered the British Empire to be a blessing. In his
understanding of Islam he was very liberal. He wanted a reconciliation between the Muslim and Western philosophy.”

Yusuf Ali was born in 1871 in Surat, western India, during a period of great introspection for the Muslims of India as their rule over the region for centuries came to an end and they were at the mercy of the English and a more politically organised Hindu majority.  

Among the Muslims there was a realisation that they would have to study English, attain a modern education and learn British ways to get government jobs and regain their lost social status.

Yusuf Ali, who came from a middle-class family, proved to be an exceptional student throughout his school years and after matriculating from a missionary school, he won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University in London. The scholarship was given to only nine Indian students each year.

“We have to look at him in the context of his times. That was a generation when the British claimed
superiority over the natives. And then you have somebody who can emerge and beat them at their own game,” says Jamil Sherif, who wrote Yusuf Ali’s biography titled Searching for Solace.

“Yusuf Ali’s approach was to show through his writing that Islam had made major contributions through the ages. But I think his compromise was that he saw religion mainly in spiritual terms and he saw socio-political dimensions of Islam as not really relevant in the days of empire,” he told TRT World.

At Cambridge, Yusuf Ali excelled in English composition, Arabic and other subjects. He also cleared the intensely competitive exam for the elite Indian Civil Service (ICS). In subsequent years, he rose to become perhaps the highest-ranking Muslim civil servant in India when he worked under Cabinet’s member of finance. He was a devout Muslim, making sure he offered daily prayers, attended religious congregations and led prayers at the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, a town near London.

At the same time, he was against political Islam and insisted that Muslims could do better under British rule and that they should focus on educating themselves as opposed to agitating for independence.

Over the years, he remained affiliated with different institutions and also served as the principal of
Lahore’s Islamia College - he was invited to take the position by the venerated poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal. But behind the veneer of his intellect, busy schedule and scholarly importance, he was a man suffering from internal conflicts.

When the east meets west

Yusuf Ali was a troubled man. He married twice and both relationships ended bitterly. In 1900, just a few years into his role as a civil servant, he married Teresa Mary Shalders, in a ceremony at the St. Peter’s Church in England.

“It was a bold and uninhibited act by the young couple, who may have looked at the dawn of the new century and thought everything possible - including the harmony of races, religions, and continents,” Sherif, who uses M.A. Sherif as his pen name, writes in his book. But any hope of making a statement with this marriage of two different cultures faded in a few short years. They had four kids over the years but Yusuf Ali spent most of this time in India as a government officer while Shalders, who was in England, fell in love with another man.

Their divorce in 1911 was particularly painful for Yusuf Ali and he might have hinted at that period in the preface of his Quranic commentary when he wrote: “A man’s life is subject to inner storms...which nearly unseated my reason and made life meaningless.”

He won custody of their children but became estranged from them over time. “These children by their continued ill-will towards me have alienated my affection for them, so much that I confer no benefit on them by this will,” Yusuf Ali later wrote in his will.

As an ICS officer, he rose swiftly from an assistant magistrate to more important positions, and the British government increasingly relied on him as its key propagandist.

Yusuf Ali was not entirely oblivious to the systematic discrimination that Muslims faced under British rule. “He wrote about how Britain was using Indian revenue in the Great War. That’s a very subtle way of criticism. He also made references to discrimination suffered [by locals] on the basis of colour,” says Sherif.

In the early 1920s, Yusuf Ali married Gertrude Anne Mawbey, who he liked to call Masuma (innocent). That marriage didn’t work out either. It was during this personal crisis that Ali began the monumental work of writing an English translation of the Quran, often working on solitary ocean liner journeys which he took at the behest of the British government.

“Yusuf Ali’s bond with the Quran was forged in these times of anguish when searching for solace,” writes Sherif. Prominent scholars such as Marmaduke Picktall and others had already done a lot to introduce the West to Islam’s holiest book but Yusuf Ali did it with humility and open-mindedness which set his work apart. “His interpretation is very balanced. It doesn’t force you to any particular corner, it can be read by all the schools of thought. It’s a very broadminded, compassionate approach to studying religion,” Sherif tells TRT World.

Yusuf Ali was a Dawoodi Bohra, a strain of Shia Islam, but he garnered enough respect across the spectrum to lead congregations at Sunni mosques.

“In his translation of the Quran, published between 1934 and 1937, Yusuf Ali expounded the spiritual side of Islam more than its worldly view,” writes A R Kidwai, a prominent researcher.

His excellent command over the English language lends a poetic touch to the thousands of footnotes and he didn’t shy away from using English poets such as Longfellow and Milton to explain the word of God.

Besides dealing with his matrimonial failures, he had a hard time coming to terms with what happened to Arab Muslims after World War I. “Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not criticise the League of Nations when it dismembered the Ottoman empire,” says Sherif. “But what really shook him was the proposal to partition Palestine.”

For someone groomed to believe that the English people were true to their word, the haphazard division of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Israel was unsettling for Yusuf Ali.

In 1937 he attended many meetings and conferences fighting the case of Palestinians and warned Western powers about creation of a Jewish state on Muslim land.

“One way alone can bring thee peace:
That ancient rights be not suppressed,
That aliens from encroachments cease,
And Quds be given its rightful rest,”

he wrote in the poem Palestine published in January 1938.

However, Palestine’s tragedy wasn’t enough to deter his loyalty to the British as he travelled to India at the urging of England’s Ministry of Information to rally Muslim support after it declared war on Germany in 1939.

In Delhi, he met Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan and spoke to students about the need for India’s support for the British. That was a time of turmoil in India as both Muslims and Hindus had begun rallying for independence.

Upon his return, he wrote articles and gave speeches, asking Indians to unite in defence of the empire and drop their demand for political reforms. But his appearance as an important player in international events quickly faded after the war ended in 1944.  

We might never know what broke him in the end. But as the British pulled out of the subcontinent in the days of its waning global status, so did Yusuf Ali slowly recede from the newspapers, his powerful friends no longer found a use for him.

Yusuf Ali spent his last years living in the National Liberal Club on a monthly pension that he received
against his government job.

“How did the British treat him? There’s certainly a question mark there. They didn’t recognise his
contribution as much as he probably expected,” says Humayun Ansari.

His powerful friends in the Muslim community including Pakistan’s then ambassador Ispahani had also lost track of Ali’s whereabouts, not bothering to check on him.

“That is an indictment of the Muslim society that we were not able to honour and care for someone of his stature,” says Jamil Sherif.

Bionic Eye To Fully Restore Vision In Blind People!

Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia have built a bionic eye that promises to bring back vision with the help of a brain implant. It works by bypassing damaged optic nerves to allow signals to be transmitted from the retina to the vision centre of the brain.

Doctors Build World’s First Bionic Eye To Fully Restore Vision In Blind People
Monit Khanna
India Times, Sep 17, 2020

It is no secret that life is challenging for individuals dealing with blindness. For those of us who can see, we don't fully understand just how important is the gift of sight.

Researchers around the world have been working to cure this with various bionic solutions but none of them has yet been able to come to the market to help better people’s lives. Well, it looks like one contender has come awfully close.

Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia have built a bionic eyethat promises to bring back vision with the help of a brain implant. The team claims this is the world’s first bionic eye.

The bionic eye dubbed ‘Gennaris bionic vision system’ has been under development for nearly a decade now. It works by bypassing damaged optic nerves to allow signals to be transmitted from the retina to the vision centre of the brain.

The system is simple. The user would have to wear a custom-designed headgear that has the camera and a wireless transmitter installed. A set of 9 millimeter tiles are implanted in the brain that receives the signals from the aforementioned receiver.

Arthur Lowery, professor at Monash University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, said in a statement, “Our design creates a visual pattern from combinations of up to 172 spots of light (phosphenes) which provides information for the individual to navigate indoor and outdoor environments, and recognize the presence of people and objects around them.”

World's first bionic eye for full vision restoration

Researchers are looking to advance their system to help people with untreatable neurological conditions like limb paralysis, quadriplegia, to help make their lives better, “If successful, the MVG [Monash Vision Group] team will look to create a new commercial enterprise focused on providing vision to people with untreatable blindness and movement to the arms of people paralyzed by quadriplegia, transforming their health care,” say researchers.

Researchers have seen successful results in sheep with minimal side effects where it was safely implanted into their brains using a pneumatic inserter with a total of 2,00 hours of simulation. They are now preparing to take it to the next level for its first-ever human clinical trial, that is expected to be conducted in Melbourne.

The researchers are now looking to secure funding to speed up the manufacturing process and distribution.

India's ancient caste system rears its ugly head in Silicon Valley!

Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians and many of them are allegedly making life a living hell for Dalits, those who are classified as the lowest of the low in India, whose horrifying historical persecution has continued in the cradle of tech.

The white supremacist America has their own version of Dalits - the Blacks. So, it will be difficult to get justice in the USA. This Dalit bashing would be challenging to prove in courts.

The caste system in India is a system of social stratification, which was transformed by the British Raj, and is today the basis of reservation in India. The origins of caste system in India are shrouded in mystery, but seems to have begun more than 2,000 years ago. Under this system, which is associated with Hinduism, people were mainly categorised by their occupations. Although originally caste depended upon a person’s work, it later became hereditary. Each person was born into a unalterable social status.

The four primary castes are:

1) Brahmin, the priests

2) Kshatriya, the warriors and nobility

3) Vaisya, the farmers, traders and artisans

4) Shudra, the tenant farmers and servants

Dalits, the untouchables, were those born outside of the caste system. They were considered so impure that any contact with them by a caste member would contaminate the other person. The caste-person would have to bathe and wash his clothing immediately. Untouchables could not even eat in the same room as caste members. The untouchables did work that no one else would do, like scavenging animal carcasses, leatherwork, or killing rats and other pests. They could not be cremated when they died.

Although the early Vedic sources name four primary castes, yet there are thousands of sub-castes and communities within the Hindu society. These sub-castes are the basis of both social status and occupation.

How India's ancient caste system is ruining lives in Silicon Valley
By Rajiv Rao for New Tech for Old India
ZDNet, September 22, 2020

It may seem bizarre that the caste system, a centuries-old system that organises and stratifies human society, continues to play a heavy role in deciding which Indians prosper and which don't within a space many consider to be an uber-meritocracy -- the US tech landscape.

A recent lawsuit against two Indians, filed by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing on behalf of another Indian, has made waves over the past few months for all the wrong reasons. It has illuminated how the Indian caste system has terrorised one of the most marginalised groups in India.

Except, this time, it is happening in the US tech industry, a place that people normally associate with egalitarianism and a thirst for talent regardless of colour, race, religion, or any other creed.

Caste is a 2,000 year-old system for classifying society in the Indian subcontinent -- or whatever other definition that can be used for the geographic spread that was depleted and then amputated by British colonial rule.

In this stratification, the priests -- or the "Brahman" class -- were at the top, the warriors or "Kshatriyas" came next, the merchants or "Vaishyas" formed the third tier, while labourers, artisans, and servants, known as "Shudras", came last and essentially served the other three castes. Of course, it's not so simple -- in reality, there are over 5,000 castes and over 25,000 sub-castes in India, spawned by sheer geographical, cultural, and religious diversity.

What is homogenous across the country, however, is another category that exists completely outside of the caste system, on a rung so low that if you were forced to come up with the worst moral and physical degradations that you could think of, they would in all likelihood pale in comparison to what has transpired in India over centuries and continues to do so today.

These people that are deemed to be on the lowest rung are the Dalits. Self-named, Dalit means "oppressed", but they are also referred to by Indian society as "achoot", or, "untouchable". Dalits have historically been involved in occupations such as working with leather, cleaning sewers, or killing rats and were therefore considered "spiritually impure".

Not so long ago, if a Dalit saw a higher caste walking down the road, they would have to flung themselves to the ground to not contaminate the upper caste (UC) person with their shadow. Violaters would be beaten, often to death, and incredulously, they still are today.

All across India, Dalits -- who comprise at least 25% of the population, or a staggering 400 million people -- are barred from drawing water from the wells of UCs. Dalit children are either denied education or cannot study with UC peers; their villages are separate and hence, they are forbidden from walking through upper caste ones; they cannot eat where UCs eat; they cannot pray where UCs pray and God help them if they marry out of their caste. Their woman and children are physically and sexually abused on a serial scale.

If a person is born as a Dalit, they will die a Dalit, and their children are almost certainly destined to a life with no upward mobility.

While many scholars contend that the caste system became more inflexible under the British, who transformed it into a rigid, more easily governable structure that privileged Brahmans even more, others say this narrative is just an attempt by upper-caste Indian Americans to rewrite history books and erase any mention of Dalit oppression. While the British Raj did have a complex, destructive effect on caste, India's pre-modern history was also most definitely defined by castes.

Coming back to the lawsuit, it focuses on a Dalit engineer -- John Doe for the lawsuit's purposes -- who has twenty years of experience in software development that was placed under the leadership of Sundar Iyer at Cisco.

Iyer was a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and grew up in Bombay as an upper-caste Indian. He also completed his PhD at Stanford, founded two companies that were both acquired by Cisco, and has been named MIT Innovator of the year. A man of science and reason, and a person who places a premium on ideas, you would imagine.

Much like Iyer, John Doe also graduated from IIT.

The lawsuit alleges that the upper-caste Iyer recognised John Doe and instantly began ridiculing him in front of all the other higher-caste Indian employees at Cisco, saying that John Doe was a Dalit and only got into the engineering school because of affirmative action, which India implemented in 1980 under the then-Prime Minister VP Singh.

When John Doe indicated to Cisco's human resources team that he wanted to file a complaint, he was allegedly told by the department that "caste discrimination was not unlawful". Soon after, John Doe found himself demoted from his lead role on two projects. The lawsuit says that for two years, Iyer waged a sustained onslaught against John Doe's career. He isolated him, didn't give him any bonuses, and thwarted any chances for promotion.

Then, in a tragic double-whammy, Iyer was replaced by Ramana Kompella, also an upper caste engineer, who in a not-so-remarkable coincidence -- considering how heavily networked upper-caste Indian techies are -- also went to IIT. 90% of Indian immigrants in the US are upper caste. He was one year behind Iyer for his studies and also went to Stanford. Kompella eventually went on to teach at Purdue before leaving for Google, and then worked at Cisco.

If John Doe thought his salvation had finally arrived, he couldn't have been more mistaken. The same pattern of intimidation allegedly continued under Kompella.

"Because both knew Doe is Dalit, they had certain expectations for him at Cisco," the lawsuit alleges.

"Doe was expected to accept a caste hierarchy within the workplace where Doe held the lowest status within the team and, as a result, received less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment because of his religion, ancestry, national origin/ethnicity, and race/colour."

Cisco has vehemently denied any of this. "Cisco is committed to an inclusive workplace for all," the company said in a statement to online news site thewire.

"We have robust processes to report and investigate concerns raised by employees which were followed in this case dating back to 2016, and have determined we were fully in compliance with all laws as well as our own policies. Cisco will vigorously defend itself against the allegations made in this complaint."

So far, neither Iyer nor Kompella have come forth with public statements about the lawsuit.

The lawsuit immediately opened up a wave of stories by Dalit techies who detailed their persecution in the US by high-caste Indians. At least 250 Dalit techies working in firms such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Netflix have reported instances of harassment, humiliation, bullying, and career-halting interventions by high caste Indians.

One Dalit woman who is from the Valkimi caste, whose occupation historically has been to clean up excrement, was humiliated by her Indian co-workers and asked to clean up after team meetings as some sort of sick joke. Another Cisco hand who worked there between 2007 and 2013 said his peer group discussed their own caste identities incessantly and were constantly trying to figure his out.

Dalits are still looked at as essentially subhuman, genetically inferior, and lazy by most upper-caste Hindus. This has been a special societal coding, effortlessly passed down from generation to generation.

You may be designing the hottest network switches or AI visual interfaces and have graduated from the most elite institutions, but that has not made a difference on how people have been conditioned to think when it comes to what cradle of caste people are disgorged from.

So, when a tightly knit club of upper-caste Indians get together, you can be assured that there's a good chance that team composition for prized projects, promotions, and bonuses will only be for the chosen ones.

Meanwhile, the life of Dalit engineers are stalked by the daily terror of being outed.

Bullied, humiliated, with careers in tatters and H-1B visas revoked, their history continues to be a living nightmare.

Rainbow Colored Glass Gem Corn!

Glass Gem Corn: Poster Child For The Return To Heirloom Seeds
NPR, November 25, 2019

Brittle corn stalks border a backyard garden in Flagstaff, Ariz., on a windswept mesa surrounded by ponderosa pine trees. They look dried-up and ordinary, but the garden's owner, Carol Fritzinger, says opening up the husks to see what's inside is like Christmas morning.

"Oooh, this one's a pink and purple variety," she says, laughing as she peels back a husk to show a translucent, rainbow-colored corn cob inside. "You just never know!"

"Glass Gem" is like no other corn in the world. It's a throwback to ancient varieties and bred specifically for its beauty. A photo of one stunning rainbow-colored corn cob went viral in 2012. Since then, it's inspired thousands of people to get involved with seed saving.

"I want everyone to grow it," Fritzinger says, showing off a cob patterned with red-and-white swirls like peppermint candy. "So I give as much seed away as people will take."

"Glass Gem" has its own Facebook page with more than 19,000 followers, but its journey from an Oklahoma cornfield to Internet fame started with a man named Carl Barnes. Barnes wanted to explore his Cherokee roots, so he began collecting and planting ancient varieties of corn. A mix of Cherokee, Osage, and Pawnee varieties produced two tiny, multicolored cobs, which he showcased at a native plant gathering. The colors enthralled a grower named Greg Schoen.

Barnes didn't have much of the unusual corn, but he gave a handful of kernels to Schoen. That was in the spring of 1995, around the time the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Schoen, living in Oklahoma at the time, was carrying the kernels around in his pocket when the news of the bombing reached him. He pulled them out and looked at them.

"It was like I got this strong impression," he remembers, "a voice was saying: this seed is going to change things."

Schoen moved to New Mexico a few years later, planted the corn, and crossed it with Pueblo popcorn. Ears appeared with not only brilliant colors but a shiny, glasslike hue. Schoen felt it was more than a pretty plant. It was a piece of the past that had nearly been lost. He says corn is woven with human culture, but diverse traits bred by generations of farmers began to vanish when agriculture became big business. For Schoen, saving that heritage wasn't just about genetic variety: "it also has cultural memory, and that's a powerful force."

Schoen gave away seeds to anyone who wanted them, including Belle Starr and Bill McDorman, a couple who had just started a seed saving school in, of all places, Cornville, Arizona. Starr and McDorman didn't know what to expect from their first crop of corn. But they took a group of students out to the garden to shuck off the husks at harvest time.

The colorful cobs that emerged were "beyond belief," McDorman says. Starr adds, "People were crying in our class, they were literally crying, it was so beautiful."

A year later, McDorman and Starr took over directorship of the nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson. They put a photo of the multicolored corn on the Website with Greg Schoen's original caption: "Glass Gem." Thousands of orders for seeds poured in. Other seed-saving groups took up the challenge of increasing the small stock of Glass Gem. So many people tried to order it from a company called Seeds Trust, their Website crashed.

"One ear of corn is that famous picture of Glass Gem," McDorman says. "One little ear that's now changing the world... and has, in the end, been called the poster child for the whole return to heirloom seeds."

Starr and McDorman are now the directors of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, a group that saves seeds by giving them away through a network of "seed stewards." Its mission is to protect locally adapted seeds that produce hardier, tastier — and prettier — crops, part of a larger vision for a more sustainable food system. "When you start saving seeds from something you've grown," McDorman says, "and then plant it again, you're rejoining a ritual — a 10,000-year-old ritual — that created all the foods we eat out of wild plants." For him, the story of Glass Gem corn isn't just about food or beauty. It's about protecting stories and a sense of place.

The Microsoft Police State!

Microsoft helps police surveil and patrol communities through its own offerings and a network of partnerships -- while its PR efforts obscure this.

The Microsoft Police State: Mass Surveillance, Facial Recognition, and the Azure Cloud
Michael Kwet
The Intercept, July 15 2020

Nationwide protests against racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

With partnership, support, and critical infrastructure provided by Microsoft, a shadow industry of smaller corporations provide mass surveillance to law enforcement agencies. Genetec offers cloud-based CCTV and big data analytics for mass surveillance in major U.S. cities. Veritone provides facial recognition services to law enforcement agencies. And a wide range of partners provide high-tech policing equipment for the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, which turns cop cars into all-seeing surveillance patrols. All of this is conducted together with Microsoft and hosted on the Azure Government Cloud.

Last month, hundreds of Microsoft employees petitioned their CEO, Satya Nadella, to cancel contracts with law enforcement agencies, support Black Lives Matter, and endorse defunding the police. In response, Microsoft ignored the complaint and instead banned sales of its own facial recognition software to police in the United States, directing eyes away from Microsoft’s other contributions to police surveillance. The strategy worked:

The press and activists alike praised the move, reinforcing Microsoft’s said position as a moral leader in
tech.

Yet it’s not clear how long Microsoft will escape major scrutiny. Policing is increasingly done with active cooperation from tech companies, and Microsoft, along with Amazon and other cloud providers, is one of the major players in this space.

Because partnerships and services hosting third party vendors on the Azure cloud do not have to be announced to the public, it is impossible to know full extent of Microsoft’s involvement in the policing domain, or the status of publicly announced third party services, potentially including some of the previously announced relationships mentioned below. Microsoft declined to comment.

Microsoft: From Police Intelligence to the Azure Cloud

In the wake of 9/11, Microsoft made major contributions to centralized intelligence centers for law
enforcement agencies. Around 2009, it began working on a surveillance platform for the NYPD called the Domain Awareness System, or DAS, which was unveiled to the public in 2012. The system was built with leadership from Microsoft along with NYPD officers.

While some details about the DAS have been disclosed to the public, many are still missing. The most
comprehensive account to date appeared in a 2017 paper by NYPD officers.

The DAS integrates disparate sources of information to perform three core functions: real-time alerting,
investigations, and police analytics.

Through the DAS, the NYPD watches the personal movements of the entire city. In its early days, the system ingested information from closed-circuit TV cameras, environmental sensors (to detect radiation and dangerous chemicals), and automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. By 2010, it began adding geocoded NYPD records of complaints, arrests, 911 calls, and warrants “to give context to the sensor data.” Thereafter, it added video analytics, automatic pattern recognition, predictive policing, and a mobile app for cops.

By 2016, the system had ingested 2 billion license plate images from ALPR cameras (3 million reads per day, archived for five years), 15 million complaints, more than 33 billion public records, over 9,000 NYPD and privately operated camera feeds, videos from 20,000-plus body cameras, and more. To make sense of it all, analytics algorithms pick out relevant data, including for predictive policing.

The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.

While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.

Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations.

Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.

Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.

Microsoft’s Surveillance-Based IoT Patrol Car

A rich array of Microsoft’s cloud-based offerings is on full display with a concept called “The Connected Officer.” Microsoft situates this concept as part of the Internet of Things, or IoT, in which gadgets are connected to online servers and thus made more useful. “The Connected Officer,” Microsoft has written, will “bring IoT to policing.”

With the Internet of Things, physical objects are assigned unique identifiers and transfer data over networks in an automated fashion. If a police officer draws a gun from its holster, for example, a notification can be sent over the network to alert other officers there may be danger. Real Time Crime Centers could then locate the officer on a map and monitor the situation from a command and control center.

According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.

While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”

The MAPP vehicle is outfitted with gear from third-party vendors that stream surveillance data into the Azure cloud for law enforcement agencies. Mounted to the roof, a 360-degree high-resolution camera streams live video to Azure and the laptop inside the vehicle, with access also available on a mobile phone or remote computer. The vehicle also sports an automatic license plate reader that can read 5,000 plates per minute — whether the car is stationary or on the move — and cross-check them against a database in Azure and run by Genetec’s license plate reader solution, AutoVu. A proximity camera on the vehicle is designed to alert the officers when their vehicle is being approached.

Patrolling the skies is a drone provided by Microsoft partner Aeryon Labs, the SkyRanger, to provide real-time streaming video. (Aeryon Labs is now part of surveillance giant FLIR Systems.) According to Nathan Beckham of Microsoft Public Safety and Justice, the vehicle’s drones “follow it around and see a bigger view of it.” The drones, writes DroneLife, can “provide aerial views to the integrated data platform, allowing officers to assess ongoing situations in real time, or to gather forensic evidence from a crime scene.”

Police robots are also part of the MAPP platform. Products from ReconRobotics, for example, “integrat[ed] with Microsoft’s Patrol Car of the Future Program” in 2016. Microsoft says ReconRobotics provides their MAPP vehicle with a “small, lightweight but powerful robot” that “can be easily deployed and remotely controlled by patrol officers to provide real-time information to decision-makers.”

Another Microsoft partner, SuperDroid Robots, has also announced they will provide the Microsoft MAPP vehicle with two compact remote-controlled surveillance robots, the MLT “Jack Russell” and the LT2-F “Bloodhound,” the latter of which can climb stairs and obstacles.

Although it sports a Microsoft insignia on the hood and door, the physical vehicle the company uses to promote MAPP isn’t for sale by Microsoft, and you probably won’t see Microsoft-labeled cars driving around. Rather, Microsoft provides MAPP as a platform through which to transform existing cop cars into IoT surveillance vehicles: “It’s really about being able to take all this data and put it up in the cloud, being able to source that data with their data, and start making relevant information out of it,” said Beckham.

Indeed, Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.” According to Beckham, the information collected and stored in the Azure cloud will help officers “identify bad actors” and “let the officers be aware of the environment that is going on around them.” As an example, he said, “We’re hoping with machine learning and AI in the future, we can start pattern matching” with MAPP vehicles providing data to help find “bad actors.”

Last October, South African police announced Microsoft partnered with the city of Durban for “21st century” smart policing. Durban’s version of the the MAPP solution includes a 360-degree ALPR to scan license plates and a facial recognition camera from Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision for use when the vehicle is stationary (e.g., parked at an event).

According to South African news outlet ITWeb, the metro police will use the MAPP solution “to deter criminal activities based on data analysis through predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms.” The vehicle has already been rolled out in Cape Town, where Microsoft recently opened a new Azure data center — an extension of the digital colonialism I wrote about in 2018.

Much like the U.S. (albiet with some different dynamics), South Africa faces the scourge of police brutality that disproportionately impacts people of color. The country had its own George Floyd moment during the recent Covid-19 lockdown when the military and police brutally beat 40-year-old Collins Khosa in the poor Alexandra township, leading to his death — over a cup of beer. (A military inquiry found that Khosa’s death was not linked to his injuries at the hands of authorities; Khosa’s family and many others in South Africa have rejected the review as a whitewash.)

The MAPP solution will be used for “zero tolerance” policing. For example, Durban Metro Police spokesperson Parboo Sewpersad said the rollout aims to punish “littering, drinking and driving, and drinking and walking” during summer festivities.

It is difficult to determine where else the MAPP vehicle may be deployed. The rollout in South Africa suggests Microsoft sees Africa as a place to experiment with its police surveillance technologies.

Microsoft: Powering CCTV and Police Intelligence in the City

Beyond wiring police vehicles, video surveillance provides another lucrative source of profits for Microsoft, as it is loaded with data packets to transmit, store, and process — earning fees each step of the way.

When building a CCTV network packed with cameras, cities and businesses typically use a video management system, or VMS, to do things like display multiple camera feeds on a video wall or offer the option to search through footage. A leading VMS provider, Genetec, offers the core VMS integrated into Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System. A close partner of Microsoft for over 20 years, the two companies work together on integrating surveillance services on the Azure cloud.

Some of the most high-profile city police forces are using Genetec and Microsoft for video surveillance and analytics.

Through a public-private partnership called Operation Shield, Atlanta’s camera network has grown from 17 downtown cameras to a wide net of 10,600 cameras that officials hope will soon cover all city quadrants. Genetec and Microsoft Azure power the CCTV network.

On June 14, Atlanta’s Chief of Police, Erika Shields, resigned after APD cops shot and killed a 27-year-old Black man, Rayshard Brooks. Last month, six Atlanta police officers were charged for using excessive force against protesters of police violence.

In 2019, Atlanta Police Foundation COO Marshall Freeman told me the foundation had just completed a “department-wide rollout” for Microsoft Aware (Domain Awareness System). Freeman said the Atlanta Police Department uses Microsoft machine learning to correlate data, and plans to add Microsoft’s video analytics. 

“We can always continue to go back to Microsoft and have the builders expand on the technology and continue to build out the platform,” he added.

In Chicago, 35,000 cameras cover the city with a plug-in surveillance network. The back-end currently uses Genetec Stratocast and Genetec’s Federation service, which manages access to cameras across a federated network of CCTV cameras — a network of camera networks, so to speak.

In 2017, Genetec custom-built their Citigraf platform for the Chicago Police Department — the second-largest police force in the country — as a way to make sense of the department’s vast array of data. Powered by Microsoft Azure, Citigraf ingests information from surveillance sensors and database records. Using real-time and historical data, it performs calculations, visualizations, alerts, and other tasks to create “deep situational awareness” for the CPD. Microsoft is partnering with Genetec to build a “correlation engine” to make sense of the surveillance data.

Chicago’s police force has a brutal history of racism, corruption, and even two decades’ worth of torturing suspects. During police violence protests following Floyd’s murder, the CPD attacked and beat protesters, including five Black protesters to the point of hospitalization.

The city of Detroit uses Genetec Stratocast and Microsoft Azure to power their controversial Project Green Light. Launched in 2016 in tandem with a new Real Time Crime Center, the project allows local businesses — or other participating entities, such as churches and public housing — to install video cameras on their premises and stream surveillance feeds to the Detroit Police Department. Participants can place a “green light” next to the cameras to warn the public — which is 80 percent Black — that “you are being watched by the police.”

In 2015, the DPD stated, “the day is coming where police will have access to cameras everywhere allowing the police to virtually patrol nearly any area of the city without ever stepping foot.”

DPD Assistant Chief David LeValley explained to me that prior to creating the new command center, the department sent a team of people to several other U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, and the Drug Enforcement Administration center in El Paso, Texas, to scope out their intel centers. “Our Real Time Crime Center is an all-encompassing intelligence center, it’s not just Project Green Light,” he explained.

The expansion of police surveillance in Detroit has been swift. Today, Project Green Light has around 2,800 cameras installed across over 700 locations, and two smaller Real Time Crime Centers are being added, a development trending in cities like Chicago. LeValley told me those RTTCs will do things like “pattern recognition” and “reports for critical incidents.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, activists in Detroit have recharged their efforts to abolish Project
Green Light in the fight against police surveillance, which local community advocates like Tawana Petty and Eric Williams deem racist. This year, two Black men, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams and Michael Oliver, were wrongfully arrested after being misidentified by the DPD’s facial recognition technology.

Nakia Wallace, a co-organizer of Detroit Will Breathe, told me Project Green Light “pre-criminalizes” people and “gives the police the right to keep tabs on you if they think you are guilty” and “harass Black and brown communities.” “Linking together cameras” across wide areas is “hyper-surveillance” and “has to be stopped,” she added.

The “function that the [DPD] serve,” Wallace said, is “the protection of property and white supremacy.”

“They’re hyper-militarized, and even in the wake of that, people are still dying in the city” because “they have no interest in the livelihood of Detroit citizens.” Instead of militarizing, we need to “stop pretending like poor Black people are inherently criminals, and start looking at social services and things that prevent people from going into a life of crime.”

In a 2017 blog post, Microsoft boasted about the partnership with Genetec for the DPD, stating that Project Green Light is “a great example of how cities can improve public safety, citizens’ quality of life, and economic growth with today’s technologies.”

Microsoft Actually Does Supply Facial Recognition Technology

While Microsoft has been powering intelligence centers and CCTV networks in the shadows, the company has publicly focused on facial recognition regulations. On June 11, Microsoft joined Amazon and IBM in saying it will not sell its facial recognition technology to police until there are regulations in place.

This is a PR stunt that confused how Microsoft’s relationship to policing works technically and ethically, in a number of ways.

First, while the press occasionally criticizes Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System, most attention to
Microsoft policing focuses on facial recognition. This is mistaken: Microsoft is providing software to power a variety of policing technologies that undermine civil rights and liberties — even without facial recognition.

Second, facial recognition is a notable feature of many video surveillance systems and Real Time Crime Centers that Microsoft powers. The cities of New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit are among those utilizing Microsoft services to collect, store, and process the visual surveillance data used for facial recognition. Microsoft services are part and parcel of many police facial recognition surveillance systems.

Third, at least one facial recognition company, Veritone, has been left out of the conversation. A Microsoft partner, the Southern California artificial intelligence outfit offers cloud-based software called IDentify, which runs on Microsoft’s cloud and helps law enforcement agencies flag the faces of potential suspects.

In a 2020 keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show, speaking alongside executives from Microsoft, Deloitte, and Oracle, Veritone CEO Chad Steelberg claimed that thanks to Veritone’s IDentify software on Azure, cops have helped catch “hundreds and hundreds of suspects and violent offenders.” Veritone’s Redact product expedites prosecutions, and Illuminate allows investigators to “cull down evidence” and obtain anomaly “detection insights.”

In a recent webinar, Veritone explained how IDentify leverages data police already have, such as arrest
records. If a person is detected and has no known match, the IDentify software can profile suspects by
creating a “person of interest database” that “will allow you to simply save unknown faces to this database and continuously monitor for those faces over time.”

Veritone claims to deploy services in “about 150 locations,” but does not name which ones use IDentify. It launched a pilot test with the Anaheim Police Department in 2019.

Microsoft lists Veritone IDentify as a facial recognition law enforcement product offering in its app
repository online. The promotional video on the Microsoft website advertises IDentify’s ability to:

    … compare your known offender and person of interest databases with video evidence to quickly and
automatically identify suspects for investigation. Simply upload evidence from surveillance systems, body cameras, and more. … But best of all, you’re not chained to your desk! Snap a picture and identify suspects while out on patrol, to verify statements, and preserve ongoing investigations.

Veritone has been a staunch defender of its facial recognition technology. In May 2019, the company tweeted:

In a promotional video featuring Microsoft, Veritone’s Jon Gacek said, “You can see why at Veritone we’re excited to be tightly partnered with Microsoft Azure team. Their vision and our vision is very common.”

 Smoke, Mirrors, and Misdirection

Despite claims to the contrary, Microsoft is providing facial recognition services to law enforcement through partnerships and services to companies like Veritone and Genetec, and through its Domain Awareness System.

Microsoft’s public relations strategy is designed to mislead the public by veering attention away from its wide-ranging services to police. Instead, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith urges the public to focus on facial recognition regulation and the issue of Microsoft’s own facial recognition software, as if their other software and service offerings, partnerships, concepts, and marketing are not integral to a whole ecosystem of facial recognition and mass surveillance systems offered by smaller companies.

Esteemed Microsoft scholars, such as Kate Crawford, co-founder of the Microsoft-funded think tank, AI Now Institute, have followed this playbook. Crawford recently praised Microsoft’s facial recognition PR and criticized companies like Clearview AI and Palantir, while ignoring the Microsoft Domain Awareness System, Microsoft’s surveillance partnerships, and Microsoft’s role as a cloud provider for facial recognition services.

Crawford and AI Now co-founder Meredith Whittaker have condemned predictive policing but haven’t explained the fact that Microsoft plays a central role in predictive policing for police. Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft and its advocates may claim that it is a “neutral” cloud provider and it’s up to other companies and police departments to decide how they use Microsoft software. Yet these companies are partnering with Microsoft, and Microsoft is getting paid to run their mass surveillance and facial recognition services on the Azure cloud — services that disproportionately affect people of color.

If these Microsoft clients were offering sex trafficking services on the Azure cloud, Microsoft would surely close their accounts. And because law enforcement agencies purchase surveillance technologies using taxpayer dollars, the public is actually paying Microsoft for its own police surveillance.

If activists force corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Oracle to terminate partnerships and infrastructure services for third parties conducting police surveillance, then cloud providers would have to acknowledge they are accountable for what is done on their clouds. Moving forward, activists could press to replace corporate ownership of digital infrastructure and data with community ownership at the local level.

There is a lot at stake in this moment.