Best Infosec-Related Long Reads of the Week, 2/11/23

Moscow's "Safe City" is a surveillance tool of oppression, Weak security leads to Malawi mobile thefts, India's easy ban of TikTok, How L0pht came to be, Ukraine war ushers in new intel gathering era

Metacurity is pleased to offer our free and paid subscribers this weekly digest of the best long-form infosec pieces and related articles that we couldn’t properly fit into our daily crush of news. So tell us what you think, and feel free to share your favorite long reads via email at info@metacurity.com. We’ll gladly credit you with a hat tip. Happy reading!

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Inside Safe City, Moscow’s AI Surveillance Dystopia

Masha Borak has this piece in Wired about how, under the guise of smart city technology, Moscow has built a vast surveillance system it calls “Safe City,” that has relied on massive networks of security cameras and artificial intelligence to become a top Kremlin tool of oppression.

At its inception, Moscow’s face recognition system was fed official watchlists, like the database of wanted people. The system uses these lists to notify the police once a person on the list is detected, but law enforcement can also upload an image and search for wher…