The Discursive Construction of Biometric Surveillance in the Israeli Press

Israel’s Mass Surveillance during COVID-19: A Missed Opportunity

“…Israel's permanent state of emergency is constantly criticized and challenged by human rights organizations, activists, and academics, both in public discourse and in court. While democratic countries commonly declare emergency ad hoc and for a limited period of time to tackle specific threats, its permanence in Israel has made it an intrinsic part of the country's political culture, thereby allowing for discrimination against specific populations, privacy violation, and other controversial practices (see Marciano 2016).…”

“…However, in 2017, after years of vigorous public debate and two petitions submitted to Israel's High Court of Justice, Israel ratified the establishment of a mandatory centralized biometric database for storing its citizens' body measurements, including fingerprints and face templates (Marciano 2019b). While this step signified a critical phase in the formation of Israel as a surveillance society (Marciano 2016), it relied on purely civil infrastructure and administration, largely detached from any traces of securitization and militarization that usually characterize national projects in the country. In this sense, it was a promising step away from Israel's nation-in-arms tradition toward a more civil, demilitarized arrangement.…”

“…In other words, while this initiative brought Israel closer to the disreputable status of a surveillance society, it was essentially civil, similar to many other Western countries. It was supplemented by relatively critical media coverage that emphasized citizens' right to privacy and warned against the erosion of Israel's democratic tradition (Marciano 2019a). Overall, Israel's obsession with its history seemed to be abating in a way that resolved the ongoing tension between securitization/militarization and democratization/demilitarization.…”

Whose dystopia is it anyway? Deepfakes and social media regulation

“…Studying journalistic framing of new media and communication technologies becomes an important space for understanding political, social, and cultural trends, as well as potential influence on audiences (Marciano, 2019). In this context, journalistic framing practices bring forward the salient topics discussed in specific social settings; highlight the importance of specific decoding frames in political, economic, and cultural discussions; and activate ties or associations between specific sociocultural issues and existing decoding structures in society (Entman, 1993; Iyengar and Kinder, 2010; McCombs and Shaw, 1972).…”

“…By means of a qualitative–interpretive narrative analysis, we examine in this article journalists’ framing of the need to regulate social media platforms. Given that journalistic framing of technologies becomes an important arena for unpacking political, social, and cultural trends (Marciano, 2019), we analyze contemporary journalistic reporting about deepfakes published on global news platforms to address how the call for such regulation interacts with three important topics: exploitation and harm of vulnerable groups, the state of concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in the current digital, post-truth ecosystem, and the future of traditional gatekeeping and accountability in a fake-saturated society. These are further unpacked in the following sections of the article.…”