For the past few weeks, the Cook County Board of Commissioners Technology Committee has been considering the Sheriff’s Office to obtain Briefcam, an AI surveillance camera software. Community organizations, including the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, have launched a campaign to fight back against its implementation within Cook County Jail.
The Cook County Board of Commissioners must reject Sherrif Tom Dart’s proposed contract with Briefcam not only because it expands surveillance technologies to everyday Chicagoans, but also because of Briefcam’s direct role in maintaining apartheid and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.
Less known about the adoption of Briefcam is its ties to the zionist occupation of Palestine. Briefcam was built within Hebrew University in 2007 and has been deployed throughout illegally occupied East Jerusalem. Briefcam uses AI to capture every face, license plate and objects within existing security footage and claims that it can identify people through gender, height and age.
Briefcam wasn’t only founded in Israel, it was practiced on Palestinians before it was exported to cities like Chicago. Documents from the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction show that Briefcam is in 98 sites throughout East Jerusalem where a high number of settlers reside in Palestinian homes. Although primarily Palestinians live in East Jerusalem within the West Bank, illegal zionist settlements have repeatedly enacted forced evictions and attacks on Palestinian families.
Additionally, documents in 2021 show that the Israeli police committed to a $1 million contract with Briefcam’s video analysis systems. Israeli police routinely rely on advanced technology to profile, stop and maintain the violence of zionist apartheid against Palestinians crossing through different territories within the West Bank. Briefcam has also been banned by the French Supreme Court due to concerns with civil rights violations.
The Chicago Sheriff’s Office is attracted to the services Briefcam offers because it can use the same strategies to maintain the same forms of racist violence within Cook County Jail. Organizers with Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice have drawn attention to widespread neglect within the Cook County Jail that killed 9 people in the last year. The persistence of inhumane conditions within Cook County Jail has been named a “human rights crisis” by legal experts.
In a letter signed by over 80 partnered organizations, Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice organizers are calling for community members to tell their county commissioners to vote no on contracting with BriefCam and participate in community canvassing events.
Technological developments like Celibrate also represent how surveillance technologies have long been practiced on Palestinians and perfected before their use on Black and Brown bodies in metropolitan cities like Chicago.
Briefcam’s ties to the illegal occupation of the West Bank represent more than an abstract connection between anti-Black violence and zionist violence against Palestinians. Multiple policing tools and companies, including security groups like Allied Universal and policing strategies, originate from the deadly exchange between American police departments and zionist occupation forces.
