‘Digital Chokehold’: Tool Developed by Tech Giants to Stop Terrorists Enables Mass Surveillance, Censorship (PhotoDNA)
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT, founded by tech giants Meta, Microsoft, YouTube and X, is supposed to fight crimes against society’s most vulnerable. But the invisible, always-on monitoring system that watches nearly everything we send, store, and share online is throttling debate and stifling reforms.
Most people have no idea how far-reaching modern digital surveillance has become. In the wake of the Epstein scandal and the rise of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program, the public has largely accepted new monitoring tools as necessary to fight crimes against society’s most vulnerable.
That acceptance has allowed governments and Big Tech to quietly deploy one of the largest surveillance infrastructures in human history — an invisible, always-on monitoring system that watches nearly everything we send, store and share online.
At the heart of this infrastructure is PhotoDNA. Developed by Microsoft in 2009, PhotoDNA generates a digital fingerprint, or hash, for every image or video uploaded to participating platforms, which include Google, Meta, Apple, Dropbox, Twitter, Discord and many more.