Be careful what you say on social media—even if you’re simply giving your opinion on a hyper-local topic related to how your city or town functions. Someone from an Israeli organization, innocuously called Zencity, might be listening, perhaps even turning your comments on Facebook or Twitter over to local authorities, including the police.
In a time when cities are under pressure to defund or even abolish the police, directing precious resources to a foreign tech company might prove problematic to citizens seeking greater transparency regarding their tax dollars.
A recent report from WCCO-TV, Minneapolis’s CBS affiliate, outlined Zencity’s activities in cities across the United States, stating that, “Nearly 200 cities across the country, including six in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, are using a tech tool to keep an eye on what you say online.”
Among these cities is Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a suburb just north of the Twin Cities. It borders Brooklyn Center, where a young Black man, Daunte Wright, was killed by a white police officer in April.
Matt Rabe works for the Brooklyn Park Police Department as a community engagement officer and is tasked with managing the city’s contract with Zencity. In an interview with WCCO, Rabe said that if someone in the community posts a comment online that professes hate for the Brooklyn Park police, he and his colleagues will be able to “see that negative sentiment,” thanks to Zencity’s reports.
Zencity uses artificial intelligence tools to collect comments people make on public social media pages, and then aggregates that data for the municipalities they are working for.
Before the data is turned over to police or government officials, Zencity reportedly scrubs it of personally identifying information.
Rabe painted Zencity as a helpful civic tool, designed to capture the thoughts of local residents so that entities like the Brooklyn Park Police Department can nurture trust and “positive sentiment” from the community.
This sounds an awful lot like eavesdropping.
For one thing, citizens in Brooklyn Park and other cities on Zencity’s client list, including St. Paul, are not told ahead of time that their social media commentary is being captured and turned over—anonymously or not—to government officials.
This amounts to a violation of privacy, in the eyes of one St. Paul resident interviewed for the report by WCCO’s David Schuman.
Organizations like Zencity often frame their services as being about greater transparency. But as St. Paul resident and privacy advocate Don Gemberling told Schuman, not letting members of the public know that their online posts are being monitored and turned over to local officials is anything but transparent.
The fact that Zencity is an Israel-based operation might raise a few eyebrows as well. NSO Group, one of Israel’s “star cybersecurity companies,” as National Public Radio put it, has been implicated in a global spying scandal.
In that case, NSO Group, with a hand from Israeli officials, reportedly helped governments around the world spy on citizens through its cell phone hacking technology known as Pegasus spyware. Some of those targeted are very high profile individuals, such as France’s president Emanuel Macron, while others are activists or journalists.
The Washington Post has reported that Hatice Cengiz, fiancé of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi, had her phone tapped by NSO Group during the harrowing days after his murder.
NSO Group has claimed innocence, saying that their only mission is to help governments tackle crime and terrorism (while also making a profit, of course). Still, the company has faced questions from reporters and critics about how its spyware is being used.
NSO Group officials have deflected blame by claiming that all governments spy on their citizens, according to NPR.
This may be where Zencity comes in. Zencity, like NSO Group, is part of Israel’s prominent—and profitable—cyber-surveillance industry, even though it likely occupies a softer, gentler niche. It was founded in Israel in 2015 by former urban planner and first-time entrepreneur Eyal Feder-Levy.
As a guest on a podcast devoted to entrepreneurial success stories, Feder-Levy described Zencity in jaunty terms: “The whole purpose of what we’re doing at Zencity is to help these weird organizations called local governments make better decisions.”
It is weird that relatively small municipal governments in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other states would outsource their community engagement work to an Israeli tech company that, when it first launched, netted $13.5 million in startup funds.
Venture capitalists don’t give out millions of dollars to companies that simply want to help governments function better, do they? This seems like a very flimsy cover story for outfits that are seeking profit and privatization—not to mention militarization—all while trying to convince cash-strapped governments to hand over more and more taxpayer dollars.
In St. Paul, Zencity’s services were free for the first six months, and a city official there told WCCO that the contract will not be extended. In Brooklyn Park, the city’s year-long deal with Zencity is costing taxpayers $18,000.
Rabe, the Brooklyn Park community engagement officer who manages the Zencity account, says the money is coming directly out of the city’s police and communications budget.
In a time when cities, including nearby Brooklyn Center, are under pressure to defund or even abolish the police, directing precious resources to a foreign tech company might prove problematic to citizens seeking greater transparency regarding their tax dollars.
It seems as though it would be preferable instead for Zencity’s paying customers to divert that money back into the community.
That’s if Brooklyn Park residents even know about Zencity in the first place. Rabe stated that the city’s contract with Zencity did not require city council approval, meaning public oversight of this data-capturing arrangement apparently does not really exist.
While $18,000 might be a drop in the bucket for a startup with millions of venture capital dollars on hand, it could allow a small city like Brooklyn Park to host some listening sessions—that is, if the goal is actually to find out what constituents think about how they are being governed and policed.