Monthly Archives: June 2024

Sifting Through the Debris of Another Failed Coup in Latin America

This was probably the shortest lived coup d’état in Bolivia’s history. But who was behind it?

As NC readers are no doubt well aware by now, the South American country of Bolivia suffered yet another coup attempt on Wednesday — its second in just five years, and according to the Argentine newspaper El Cronista, its 36th since gaining independence from Spain 199 years ago. Research cited by CNN (in an article that, predictably, doesn’t once mention the US’ storied role in regime change operations) claims that Bolivia has actually suffered 39 coups, including this one, since 1945 alone — more than any country on the planet.

This was probably the shortest lived coup in all that time.

Whereas the 2019 coup was successful, at least in terms of meeting its immediate goals — the coup leaders, with the help of Bolivia’s armed forces and the tacit support of the US government and the Organization of American States (OAS), were able to topple the Evo Morales government and force Morales into exile — this one fizzled out in a matter of hours, leaving big unresolved questions about who was actually behind it.

A Powerless Coup

The coup began on Wednesday afternoon (local time) with an armoured military vehicle ramming the doors of Bolivia’s Palacio de Gobierno. When the doors gave way, dozens of armed soldiers surged into the building. The former Commander General of Bolivia’s armed forces, Juan José Zuñiga, who had been relieved of his position just a day earlier, stepped out of the vehicle and demanded a “change of cabinet.”

Speaking to the cameras, Zuñiga fired off a list of grievances and demands:

“Ministers are going to be changed, but our State cannot continue like this, doing whatever it wants. We are showing our annoyance, it is our duty, an obligation that your Armed Forces take back this homeland again. Enough of impoverishing the people and humiliating the Army… We have come to express our annoyance. We are going to take the Casa Grande (the Big House, the new seat of political power in Bolivia).”

Zuñiga claimed that he and his fellow coup plotters had coordinated the seizure of the National Palace with local police units. Tellingly, the former commander also called for the release of former interim President Jeanine Áñez, who is currently serving 10 years in prison for orchestrating the 2019 coup against Evo Morales. Asked if he recognised the authority of President Luis “Lucho” Arce Catacora, Zuñiga responded: “For the moment.”

Zúñiga’s biggest bugbear appears to have been Evo Morales, the former president and founder of Bolivia’s governing party, Movimiento al Socialismo. Just days before the coup the then-military commander criticised former Morales’ aspirations to return to politics in an interview with a local television channel, warning that he and his soldiers would, if necessary, take action to prevent such an outcome:

“He can no longer be president of this country. If necessary, I will prevent him from trampling on the Constitution, from disobeying the people’s mandate.” 

This was enough to lose Zúñiga his job.

“According to Article 246 of the Constitution, members of the Armed Forces must not discuss politics,” political scientist Lily Peñaranda told the Spanish broadcaster RTVE. “And Zúñiga was accused of having discussed politics precisely in that interview.”

Throughout the melee on Wednesday, the Arce Government remained at its stations in the Casa Grande, which replaced the National Palace as the seat of executive power in La Paz in 2018. Surrounded by his cabinet, Arce announced that Bolivia “cannot allow another coup to take Bolivian lives” [presumably in reference to Jeanine Áñez’s bloody coup against Evo Morales in 2019]:

”We urge everyone to defend democracy. And here we are, standing firm in la Casa Grande, with the entire cabinet. We salute the social organisations and cordially invite them to once again show the path of democracy to the Bolivian people.”

Bolivia’s Foreign Ministry issued the following statement:

The Plurinational State of Bolivia denounces to the international community the irregular mobilizations of some units of the Bolivian army, which threaten the country’s democracy, peace and security.

We call on the international community and the Bolivian population to respect democratic values ​​and support the government of President Luis Arce Catacora, constitutionally and legitimately elected by the sovereign will of the Bolivian people.

Crucially, Bolivia’s still-influential former president, Evo Morales, who is locked in an escalating power struggle with Arce, denounced from his Twitter account “that a Group of the Challapata Special Regiment ‘Mendez Arcos’ have taken over Plaza Murillo with snipers.” Morales called on the supporters of democracy in Bolivia to “defend the Homeland from military groups that are acting against democracy and the people.”

The response was swift…

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Washington Frets As Chinese Company Cosco Wraps Up Construction of South America’s Largest Deep Sea Port

“Due to its potential size and volume of operations, Peru’s Chancay mega-port is destined to become a nerve centre of international trade.” And it will be exclusively controlled by Cosco. 

Peru appears to be on the verge of becoming a major global shipping hub, and all thanks to a largely Chinese financed infrastructure project. Over the past five years, the Chinese giant Cosco Shipping Ports has, together with Peruvian mining company Volcan, invested $3.6 billion in transforming a natural deep-water port in Chancay, just 45 miles north of Lima, into a cargo mega-port. The first part of the project, now in its final phase, is slated for inauguration in November when Chinese leader Xi Jinping is scheduled to attend the APEC summit in Peru.

Once the work is finished, Chancay will become South America’s largest deep sea port, boasting two massive terminals. There will be a new container terminal with 11 berths as well as a new four-berth terminal for bulk cargo, general cargo, and rolling cargo, World Cargo News reported.

“We are very focused on the operation,” said Alonso Guinand, commercial manager of Cosco Shipping, in a recent interview with a local Lima television station. “The plan is to inaugurate in November and begin receiving vessels between January, February March next year.”

From Chancay to Shanghai

Commissioned in 2019 (though preliminary work began in 2016), the Chancay megaport is seen as the first of its kind in Latin America: a large-scale Pacific-coast logistics centre serving Asia that could save valuable shipping time by reducing the need to transit either the Panama Canal or Cape Horn. But that is likely to be a long time coming, if it ever transpires. It will also be the first port on South America’s Pacific coast that is able to receive ultra-large vessels – which can transport more than 18,000 containers — because of its nearly 60-foot depth.

The potential impact for trade between South America and East Asia is likely to be significant, reported BBC Mundo in 2023 (translation my own):

The megaport will be one of the main departure points for the raw materials that the region exports to China, such as copper and other minerals that Peru produces in abundance. Due to its size and volume of operations, it is destined to become a nerve centre of international trade.

“The dimensions are so significant that it appears that Chancay is going to become a critical point for shipments to China and all of Asia,” Margaret Myers, an expert on Asia and Latin America at The Dialogue, a think tank, told BBC Mundo.

Through the enormous investment — US$3.6 billion according to official projections — and complex engineering work… the Peruvian government hopes to attract around 50% of the nearly US$580 billion in trade that moves annually between China and South America.

Given the projected shorter shipping times, Chancay is of particular interest to local producurs of agricultural and fishing perishables. According to the Foreign Trade Research and Development Institute of Lima’s Chamber of Commerce, or Idexcam, most of the export value (63%) shipped from Chancay will consist of perishable fishing products (traditional and non-traditional) and non-traditional agricultural products. The port, it says, will not export or import minerals, but will instead transport mainly goods in containers, such as agro-industrial products, toys, packaged products, automobiles, equipment and machinery, among others.

Hopes are high, however, that Chancay will be used to export products from neighbouring countries like Ecuador, which recently signed an FTA with Beijing; Chile, which also has an FTA with China; Colombia, and perhaps even Brazil. Much will depend on whether the road links between Peru and Brazil — particularly the Andean sections — can be improved. Brazilian companies and government ministers are certainly showing an interest in the project. The port will also function as a gateway to South America for imported Chinese manufactured goods, including mobile phones, computers and electric cars.

Not everyone is excited at this prospect. The European Council on Foreign Relations warns that both the US and the EU risk falling behind China in Latin America as they struggle to compete with China’s vertical investment strategy in the region. The US, in time-honoured fashion, is exerting political pressure behind the scenes. According to one report, Washington’s soft-power arm USAID is playing a part in the US’ counter-offensive against China in Peru by investigating “foreign agents” in the country, with a particular focus on “unethical” practices by “Asian” (read: Chinese) multinationals.

China is already Peru’s largest trade partner on both the exports and imports side. A whopping 35% of Peru’s exports go to China, compared with 19% to the US. Peru is the second largest destination for Chinese investment in Latin America, behind only Brazil. It is also one of just five countries in the region, along with Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Ecuador, that have free trade agreements (FTAs) with China, though another five, including Colombia, Panama and Uruguay, are in the process of negotiating FTAs with the Asian giant.

As noted in previous pieces (including most recently here), China has made huge incursions into the US’ so-called “back yard” over the past two decades, as both a trading partner and investor. It is already South America’s largest trade partner, having increased its volume of trade with the region more than 25-fold between 2000 and 2020. The US continues to hold sway over Central America and, pound for pound, is still Latin America and the Caribbean’s largest trading partner. But that is predominantly due to its huge trade flows with Mexico, which account for well over half of all US-LatAm trade.

Chancay will allow Beijing to further strengthen its grip over South America’s resources, warns the Wall Street Journal. There are also concerns that the port could be converted for military use as well as over how data passing through the massive operation could be used by the Chinese Communist Party.

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Latest Biometric Surveillance Scandal in UK Reveals Another Dark Side of AI-Powered Big Brother

Where AI-powered surveillance and control technologies meet capitalism 101

A fresh expose by civil rights group Big Brother Watch has revealed that over the past two years eight train stations across the UK — including busy hubs such as London’s Euston and Waterloo, Manchester Piccadilly, and several smaller stations — have conducted facial and object recognition trials using AI surveillance technology. By rigging Amazon’s AI surveillance software to the stations’ CCTV cameras, the initiative was ostensibly meant to alert station staff to safety incidents and potentially reduce certain types of crime.

The data collected was sent to Amazon Rekognition, according to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request obtained by Big Brother Watch. As WIRED magazine reports, “the extensive trials, overseen by the government-owned rail infrastructure body Network Rail, have deployed object recognition — a type of machine learning that can identify items in videofeeds — to detect people trespassing on tracks, monitor and predict platform overcrowding, identify antisocial behaviour (“running, shouting, skateboarding, smoking”) and spot potential bike thieves.”

In other words, it was all intended to help keep rail passengers safe, train stations clean and tidy and bikes in their place. A Network Rail spokesperson said:

We take the security of the rail network extremely seriously and use a range of advanced technologies across our stations to protect passengers, our colleagues, and the railway infrastructure from crime and other threats.

When we deploy technology, we work with the police and security services to ensure that we’re taking proportionate action, and we always comply with the relevant legislation regarding the use of surveillance technologies.

That is probably not as comforting as it may sound. As I will show later in this article, the (almost certainly outgoing) Sunak government has tried everything it can to gut the limited safeguards protecting the British public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI-empowered surveillance.

Measuring Passenger “Satisfaction”

A particularly “concerning” aspect of the train station trials is their focus on “passenger demographics,” says Jake Hurfurt, the head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch. According to documents released in response to the FOIA request, the AI-powered system could use images from the cameras to produce “a statistical analysis of age range and male/female demographics,” and is also able to “analyse for emotions” such as “happy, sad and angry.”

This is where AI-powered surveillance and control technologies meet capitalism 101. From the WIRED article (emphasis my own):

The images were captured when people crossed a “virtual tripwire” near ticket barriers, and were sent to be analysed by Amazon’s Rekognition system, which allows face and object analysis. It could allow passenger “satisfaction” to be measured, the documents say, noting that “this data could be utilised to maximum advertising and retail revenue.”

The article offers no indication as to how that might be achieved, but the proposal itself should hardly come as a surprise. Besides serving as an instrument of government surveillance control, biometric systems will be used to maximise corporate revenues and profits — whether for the tech giants providing the hardware and software, in this case Amazon, the large financial institutions facilitating the transactions or the retail companies honing their targeted advertising techniques.

It brings to mind two scenes from the 2002 sci-fi movie (based loosely on a Philip K Dick short story), “Minority Report.” In the first, the camera takes a retina scan of the protagonist John A Anderton and a billboard calls out to him, “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now”? In the second, Anderton visits a mall where he is met by an attractive female hologram advising him what clothes to buy. Set in 2054, the film imagines that advertisers will be able to personalise messages on billboards or through holograms via retinal scans.

Apart from the occasional still-born attempt, this particular dystopian scenario is yet to creep into most of our lives, though the widespread use of augmented-reality “wearables” like Apple Vision Pro will certainly make it more possible. As the WIRED article notes, AI researchers have frequently warned that using face analysis technology “to detect emotions is ‘unreliable’ and some say the technology should be banned due to the difficulty of working out how someone may be feeling from audio or video.”

On the other side of the English channel the EU Parliament has voted for a broad ban on the use of Live Facial Recognition systems in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, as we reported in October last year, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many…

As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government. Police forces are also being urged to step up their use of LFR. The technology has also been deployed at the Coronation of King Charles III, sports events including Formula 1, and concerts, despite ongoing concerns about its accuracy as well as the huge ethical and privacy issues it raises.

In what is surely one of the most brazen and egregious examples of mission creep you’re likely to find, the government has also authorised the police to create a vast facial recognition database out of passport photos of people in the UK . The ultimate goal, it seems, is to get rid of passports altogether and replace them with facial recognition technology…

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Quelle Surprise: NYT Piece on Nigeria’s “Worst Economic Crisis in Decades” Completely Ignores Its Disastrous CBDC Experiment

The world’s largest live central bank digital currency (CBDC) program has so far been a destructive flop. And that is probably the last thing the editors of the New York Times want its readers to know.

Two years ago, Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy and before the COVID-19 pandemic was hotly tipped to become Africa’s first trillion-dollar economy. By the end of this year, it is (according to a recent IMF forecast) expected to have dropped to fourth place in the continental rankings, behind South Africa, Egypt and Algeria. This follows years of slow growth, currency crises, poor governance, fuel shortages (in Africa’s largest oil producing country) and double-digit inflation. In recent months, citizens have resorted to looting food warehouses as almost half the population of Africa’s most populous nation suffer from hunger.

A new piece in the New York Times, titled “Nigeria Faces Its Worst Economic Crisis in Decades”, paints a vivid  picture:

People in Africa’s most populous nation are suffering as the price of food, fuel and medicine has skyrocketed out of reach for many…

The pain is widespread. Unions strike to protest salaries of around $20 a month. People die in stampedes, desperate for free sacks of rice. Hospitals are overrun with women wracked by spasms from calcium deficiencies…

A nation of entrepreneurs, Nigeria’s more than 200 million citizens are skilled at managing in tough circumstances, without the services states usually provide. They generate their own electricity and source their own water. They take up arms and defend their communities when the armed forces cannot. They negotiate with kidnappers when family members are abducted.

But right now, their resourcefulness is being stretched to the limit…

More than 87 million people in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, live below the poverty line — the world’s second-largest poor population after India, a country seven times its size. And punishing inflation means poverty rates are expected to rise still further this year and next, according to the World Bank.

So, what are the root causes of Nigeria’s constantly worsening crisis? According to the “Gray Lady”, there are two main drivers, both of which can be blamed on the country’s relatively new President Bola Tinubu: his government’s partial removal of fuel subsidies and the floating of Nigeria’s already weak naira currency, which together have caused major price rises, particularly for basics such as food. From the Times‘ article:

Until recently, the government subsidized [largely imported] petroleum, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Many Nigerians said the subsidy was the only useful contribution from a neglectful and predatory government. Successive presidents have pledged to remove the subsidy, which drains a hefty chunk of government revenue — and later backtracked fearing mass unrest.

Bola Tinubu, who was elected Nigeria’s president last year, initially followed through.

“It was a necessary action for my country not to go bankrupt,” Mr. Tinubu said in April, at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.

Instead, many Nigerians are going bankrupt — or working multiple jobs to stay afloat…

The government has twice devalued the naira in the past year, trying to enable it to float more freely and attract foreign investment. The upshot: It’s lost nearly 70 percent of its value against the dollar.

Nigeria cannot produce enough food for its growing population; food imports rise 11 percent annually. The currency devaluation caused those imports — already expensive because of high tariffs — to explode in price.

“A Dead Economy”

On the one hand, this is a pretty accurate depiction of recent developments in Nigeria. But it ignores everything that happened before Tinubu came to office 15 months ago. As a government spokesman said in response to the Times article, Tinubu inherited a “dead economy,” which is also largely true. Inflation was already above 20% and economic growth was stalling. One reason for that is the central bank’s disastrous flirtation with central bank digital currency (CBDC), which culminated in a demonetisation program that upended economic activity for almost the entire first quarter of 2023.

In mid-December 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria began calling in old 200-, 500- and 1,000-naira notes in a bid to mop up excess cash, rein in inflation, combat rising insecurity, curb vote buying and further “entrench” a cashless economy. But the central bank failed to print nearly enough new high-denomination notes to replace the old ones, leading to an acute shortage of cash in a still heavily cash-based economy. In the space of just two months (Dec 2022–Feb 2023), cash in circulation declined by almost 70%, per official data from the CBN.

As in India’s 2016 demonetisation program, businesses went bust. Lives were ruined. But as we noted at the time, the resulting economic pain was seen by the central bank as a necessary evil, a wee psychological nudge to push Nigerians into finally abandoning cash and embracing digital payment options:

Demonetisation may well break some public resistance toward the CNB’s eNaira but it will be at huge social and economic cost. As in India, that cost will be borne disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable. As even the Associated Press reports, analysts worry the initiative will “hurt” daily transactions that people and businesses make, particularly given that Nigeria’s digital payment systems, including the eNaira, are often unreliable:

“The policy is intended to cause discomfort, to move you from cash to cashless because they (the central bank) have said they want to make it uncomfortable and expensive for you to hold cash,” economic analyst Kalu Aja said. “That is a positive for the CBN (because) the more discomforting they are able to achieve, the more people can move.”

The CBN’s prime objective in culling cash was to leave people with little choice but to use digital payment methods — ideally the CBN’s floundering digital currency, the eNaira. Among its list of reasons for pursuing demonetisation, published in October 2022, the CBN said the redesign of the currency will “help deepen our drive to entrench a cashless economy as it will be complemented by increased minting of our eNaira.” Also in October, the central bank’s governor, Godwin Emefiele, said: “The destination, as far as I am concerned, is to achieve a 100% cashless economy in Nigeria”.

That didn’t happen, for a number of reasons: first, tens of millions of Nigerians cannot even use digital payments since they do not own a smart phone or have access to the Internet. Roughly half of the country is unbanked. In other words, many, if not most, Nigerians had no possible means of using digital payment methods even if they had wanted to. They were given an impossible choice from day-one. Many of them took to the streets to protest the restrictions and cash shortages. Banks were vandalised; some were even burnt to the ground.

Those that could switch to digital payments ended up swamping the limited digital payment networks available. Put simply, the infrastructure, including the eNaira itself, was not ready to take up the slack. Many digital payments failed, fuelling even more chaos, frustration and resentment. In February, Nigeria’s Supreme Court ruled the demonetisation program unconstitutional, calling for it to be postponed due to the amount of chaos and hardship it was generating. A month later, the CBN finally obeyed the court order and put back into circulation the old high denomination bills.

But the damage had already been done, both at the micro and macro level…

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Milei’s Latest Plan to Embroil Argentina in Ukraine Conflict Involves Sending Five French Fighter Jets That Cannot Fly

Milei’s government appears to be determined to turn Argentina into the first Latin American country to send weapons to Ukraine.

In April we warned that Javier Milei Seems Intent on Embroiling Argentina in War, Whether in Ukraine or the Middle East (Or Both). At that time, the Argentine president had just expressed “solidarity and unwavering commitment” to the State of Israel following Iran’s retaliatory attacks on Israel after Israel’s bombings of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. After holding a cabinet meeting attended, if not chaired, by Israel’s ambassador to Argentina, Milei allegedly said off-screen that Argentina “cannot be neutral in the Third World War”.

“Milei is determined to take sides in international conflicts, believing that this positions him as an international leader,” says geopolitical analyst Gonzalo Fiore Viani. “Everything he does is to reinforce that image and not to advance Argentina’s national interests.”

Milei seems determined to involve Argentina not only in the escalating tensions in the Middle East, but also in the meat grinder that is Ukraine. Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III welcomed Argentina as a new member of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (aka Ramstein Group) during his opening address at the group’s 23rd meeting. The Ramstein Group is an alliance of (mainly NATO) countries that meets monthly at the Ramstein air base in Germany to coordinate the ongoing donation of military aid to the Zelensky government.

A “Gift” for Zelensky

During his tour of Europe, Milei will participate in the G7 summit in Orgo Egnazia, at the invitation of Italian PM Georgia Meloni. He will also take part in the pie-in-the-sky Summit on Peace in Ukraine in Geneva on June 15-16, in which Russia, like many other prominent non-NATO countries, has refused to participate, describing the event as “irrelevant”. As for Milei’s government, it appears determined to turn Argentina into the first Latin American country to send weapons to Ukraine.

In an interview with CNN Español’s Andrés Oppenheimer in April, Milei even entertained the possibility of sending military personnel into the meat grinder, a proposal that enjoys the support of just 21% of the population, according to a survey by the consultant Gustavo Córdoba. Any decision to send troops would have to go through Congress first, an unnamed diplomatic source told La Politica Online.

The same is not true of sending arms. A new article by Infobae suggests that Milei wants to gift Ukraine’s (now wholly unelected) President Volodymyr Zelensky five French-made fighter jets (readers will have to excuse the rather crude pro-NATO propaganda in the first paragraph):

Javier Milei approved a plan designed by Luis Petri and Diana Mondino to support Ukraine’s war effort against Russia, which started an illegal war in Europe to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s imperial dreams.

It involves sending to Volodimir Zelensky’s government five Super Etendard combat aircraft that are out of use due to the embargo that Great Britain applies against Argentina as a result of the Malvinas War.

France’s participation is key to overcoming this geopolitical obstacle, and Chancellor Mondino and Defense Minister Luis Petri have been working for weeks to advance this secret move that also involves the United States and NATO.

Mondino discussed this complex issue during the meetings he held in Paris with Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné, in a secret meeting she held with NATO in Brussels, and when she visited Jake Sullivan… at the… White House.

So, the plan has been discussed at the highest levels, though it is not yet clear whether it enjoys the all-essential blessing of the Biden administration. As readers may recall, Washington, Kiev and Brussels already tried to persuade Latin American countries to donate their Russian-made weaponry to Ukraine’s war effort, to no avail.

By this point, NATO’s demoralised members are presumably delighted to bring any new country on board with project Ukraine, even one with so little money or weaponry to offer…

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Mastercard Launches Its Biometric Retail Payment System in Europe, Using Poland As a Testing Ground

“Buy with your eyes, pay with your glance!”

After running pilot tests in Brazil and parts of the Asia Pacific for roughly two years, Mastercard is finally rolling out its biometric retail payments system in Europe. The world’s largest payment card company appears to be determined to wean consumers off not only cash, its eternal rival, but also credit and debit cards, its main line of business until now. To that end, it is piloting its Biometric Checkout Program in Poland in collaboration with local fintech company PayEye, which will be providing its iris and face biometric technology.

From the company’s press release, titled “Buy with your eyes, pay with your glance!”:

Mastercard’s global Biometric Checkout Program, represents a first-of-its-kind technology framework to help establish standards for new ways to pay, allowing cardholders to use a wide range of biometric payment authentication methods such as palm, face or iris scan. This simplifies the checkout process in store, as consumers no longer need to use a physical payment card, cash or a mobile device to pay for purchases. With Mastercard Biometric Checkout Program, secure and convenient experiences are possible simply by using your biometrics.

“Mastercard is a pioneer of innovative payment methods and drive security, and standardization and Poland is an (sic) perfect place for such a groundbreaking pilot,” said Marta Życińska, general manager Poland, Mastercard.

If you, like me, are wondering, “Why Poland?”, the answer is simple: Poles are apparently more inclined to adopt dystopian disruptive new technologies — at least according to Mastercard. From the industry publication, Biometrics Update:

The global payments giant says it chose Poland as its first European country to pilot the program because of its receptiveness to new technologies. According to their survey, four out of five Polish people say that they use or have used biometric technology while among the 18–25-year-olds category, almost all are familiar with using biometrics.

“Poland was one of the first countries where contactless payments with Mastercard cards were introduced and we know that Polish consumers are leaders in adopting innovative technologies,” says Marta Życińska, Mastercard’s general manager for Poland.

The pilots will be conducted in five stores in Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, Poznań and Czeladź. Empik has over 350 stores across Poland.

This will be the first time Mastercard has piloted a Biometric Checkout Program in Europe. In May, 2022, the company unveiled to much fanfare plans to launch a pilot “biometric checkout program” in the UK, but that so far appears to have come to naught. Before testing the system on UK consumers, the company first trialled it in Brazil. It then expanded its pilot programs program to the Asia Pacific region and launched its second pilot in Latin America earlier this June.

JP Morgan Chase Joins the Race

Mastercard is not the only large financial institution testing out this still relatively nascent payment technology. The company’s largest rival (after cash, of course) and fellow duopolist, Visa, recently showcased its pay-by-palm biometric payment technology at an event in Singapore. During the event, visitors were invited to try out the palm reader and link their signature to their payment card for a transaction.

“The future of biometric payments is promising and is set to revolutionise the retail experience,” said Kunal Chatterjee, Head of Innovation at Visa Asia Pacific. But it may take time for the technology to reach critical mass. Various factors, he said, influence the level of acceptance of biometric payments, including regulation, technology and consumer priorities, which can vary from country to country.

The largest bank in the US, JP Morgan Chase, is also piloting both face and palm pay technologies, with a view to fully launching a biometric checkout service with its merchants early next year. Given JPM is the largest merchant acquirer in the US, processing around 37 billion transactions in 2022, the impact on the payments landscape in the US could be huge. According to Prashant Sharma, executive director of biometrics and identity solutions at JPMorgan, merchants are highly interested in tapping biometrics, “because everybody wants to provide a streamlined, personalized experience to the consumer.”

Biometrics have already seeped into many other aspects of everyday life, including travel and communication. Many national passports these days include biometric data. Hundreds of millions — perhaps even billions — of people use a biometric authentication factor, such as a fingerprint or face scan, to unlock their smartphones and other digital devices. Soon, biometric identifiers may even be necessary to log onto social media platforms.

In other words, people are already giving away their most private data to work, communicate, cross borders, or get on planes. Will they do the same to speed up their shopping experience?

It is far from clear. As we reported last year, a push back against biometric surveillance and control systems has been gathering momentum on both sides of the north Atlantic, particularly the Western one. In the US, a small but growing handful of cities, including New York, have passed biometrics laws. Likewise, a growing number of states have followed Illinois’ lead in passing laws that expressly govern the processing of biometric data. In Illinois alone, more than 1,000 class action lawsuits have been filed under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

In the UK, meanwhile, the unmanned store experience offered by Amazon has been such a flop that the company has had to begin opening stores with actual flesh-and-blood human beings serving customers. Across the English Channel, there have been murmurings of protests in Belgium, France and other countries. But despite this growing backlash, there is a sense of inevitability to all of this…

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X Premium Users Face Stark Choice: Hand Over Biometric Identitifiers to “Spooky” Israeli Firm or Get Demonetised

“The personal data processed by this X subcontractor includes data of a sovereign nature. An identity document is a sensitive document. This raises a number of questions…”

In late May, online influencers who produce revenue-generating content on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, received notifications that they will have to pass identity verification checks by July 1. Those checks require users to take a selfie and a photograph of a government-issued ID. Failure to do this will mean they will no longer continue receiving income from the platform. According to some sources, content producers that have not yet provided the requested photos are already being locked out of their accounts.

Here’s a screenshot of the automated message sent to users with creator subscriptions and ads revenue share programs, courtesy of the user known as Censored Men:

Imagen

Naturally, many users are up in arms about this new condition, particularly those with liberal (in the classic sense) sensibilities. After all, Elon Musk himself posted a tweet in July 2023 stating that his X platform would protect anonymous users, or “anons” as he called them.

There is a very important lesson in all this — one that Yves flagged up in her 2021 post, If Your Business Depends on a Platform, You Don’t Have a Business:

[I]t’s all well and good to want to be the creative person and not be bogged down with having to deal with the business side of publishing (and trust me, I do not like administrativa). However, when you choose to hand off the tech and monetization activities to the suits, you are at their mercy.

Sensitive and “Sovereign” Data

Users’ concerns on Twitter/X were further magnified when they learnt that the company that would be handling the face biometrics matching is AU10TIX, an Israeli firm with deep ties to the country’s intelligence agencies. It is also a big global player in the fast-emerging digital identity industry. In a 2023 article, the company identified lack of public awareness and trust and concerns about security and privacy as major obstacles to the mass roll out of digital IDs. In response, the article said, “governments and organizations must prioritize educating the public about the benefits, security measures, and safeguards associated with digital identities.”

In other words, not only will X’s premium users have to give up their biometric details and a government-issued ID number in order to be able to continue generating an income stream on the platform, the company to which they will be entrusting that sensitive data is deeply embedded within Israel’s intelligence security complex. This is particularly worrisome for users living in Arabic countries with strained relations with Israel, reports the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Today…

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Some Initial Thoughts on Mexico’s Genuinely Historic Election

Claudia Sheinbaum’s epic electoral victory would not have been possible without AMLO’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity. The question is: what will she do with her newfound power after the hand over on Oct. 1?

The word “historic” tends to slip too easily into newspaper headlines in post election analysis, but in the case of Mexico’s elections this past weekend, history was most definitely made — on a number of fronts. For the first time in over 200 years of (relative) national independence, Mexico has its first female president. As the Washington Post reported with time-honoured sensitivity, “Mexico is famous for its macho culture,” yet it “has just elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in what was essentially a race between two women engineers.”

The Post contrasts this landmark achievement in Mexico with the “two-man contest” about to take place in the US between Biden and Trump, while predictably ignoring Robert Kennedy Junior’s independent candidacy in the presidential race. It correctly points out that Mexico is “eclipsing its northern neighbour on gender parity in governance”, and not just in the highest office: “women hold half the seats in Mexico’s legislature — roughly double the percentage in the U.S. Congress” — and there is a larger share of female governors than in the US.

Electoral Bloodbath

The elections were historic for another reason: the sheer scale of the bloodbath. According to projections made by the National Electoral Institute, or INE, the 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor garnered around 58-60% of votes. That is around 30 percentage points more than her conservative rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, and some 50 percentage points ahead of the only man in the race, centrist candidate Jorge Alvarez Maynez. It is also six percentage points more than Mexico’s outgoing President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s vote haul in 2018 (53.2%) and according to El País, the highest vote count of any presidential candidate in recent history.

Support for Mexico’s traditional parties, the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which in Gálvez fielded a unified candidate who was uniquely unqualified to govern, once again crumbled, both at the national and state level. Sheinbaum’s ruling MORENA party also benefited from a mass exodus into its ranks of PRI governors, senators and representatives, some, unfortunately, with long histories of corruption.

Sheinbaum’s crushing victory would not have been possible without López Obrador’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity. As the US pollster Gallup reported just days before the election, López Obrador (aka AMLO) is ending his six-year term with record high approval ratings of 80%, making him one of the world’s most popular national leaders. It puts to shame his presidential counterparts in North America. After less than four years in office, Joe Biden is the least popular US president in 75 years, according to Newsweek, while Trudeau’s approval ratings consistently hover at or below 40%.

In 2023, confidence in the national government was twice as high in Mexico as it was in the U.S. (30%). What’s more, public approval of, and confidence in, the government actually grew over time, as opposed to steadily or rapidly declining. When was the last time that happened in your country?

First Jewish President

Sheinbaum is not just Mexico’s first female president; she is also its first Jewish president — no mean feat in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations and whose Jewish community represents just 0.03% of the populace. A daughter of a Sephardic mother and an Ashkenazi father who were both active in left-wing movements in the 60’s, Sheinbaum is not a practising Jew. During the campaign she described herself as “non-religious.”

Like her parents, Sheinbaum’s background was in academia before entering politics in the late ’90s. Per Wikipedia:

“[She] studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she earned an undergraduate degree in 1989. She earned a master’s degree in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1995 in energy engineering…

In 1995, she joined the faculty at the Institute of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She was a researcher at the Institute of Engineering and is a member of both the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In 1999, she received the prize for best UNAM young researcher in engineering and technological innovation…

In 2007, she joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the United Nations in the field of energy and industry, as a contributing writer on the topic “Mitigation of Climate Change” for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

A Sheinbaum presidency is unlikely to result in a substantial shift in Mexico’s stance toward Isreal and Palestine. The North American nation has maintained ties with both Israel and Palestine for decades and has consistently held a fairly neutral position on the Middle Eastern conflict regardless of the ruling political party.

“If we take sides we would not help to bring about what should matter most to all of us: that the war stops, that there are no more deaths, dead, murdered in Gaza,” said AMLO last week. “That is why we have acted very cautiously.”

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