Jake

🧵What’s the biggest lie the surveillance industry tells? That they only sell to legal clients. That there are red lines. But what do these companies say when they think nobody is watching? We went undercover to find out

NEW: Since October 2023, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit has released dozens of 3D animations illustrating alleged Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian sites The style is unmistakable: satellite zoom-ins, black & white wireframes, and red-textured houses - a new visual language of war

Fascinating work here tracing how the IDF recycled 3D assets from a cyberpunk sci-fi art project, the Scottish Maritime Museum and elsewhere to populate its widely-seen models of supposed enemy locations in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran. One of the most infamous, the alleged underground Hamas command center at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, used to justify an unprecedented assault on the biggest medical center in Gaza, was actually an animation the IDF had used the previous year, saying at the time it was a tunnel beneath a UN school.

On the 16th of March 2025, Earshot was contacted by activists in Serbia to investigate the potential use of sonic weapons by the government on a crowd of protestors as they were holding a silent vigil for the victims of the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse. Earshot received 12 videos that document the moments where a weapon was allegedly used against the protestors. 4 of these videos contain a sound consistent with the noise produced by a Vortex Ring Gun or Vortex Cannon. As this weapon pushes gas out of its cylinder at speeds of 185mph, its expulsion produces a howling noise which has been compared to a jet engine, along with vortex rings that may be ionized. This would create electromagnetic interference with devices such as hearing aids, corroborating reports made by witnesses at the protest. Should this be the vortex cannon, these recordings would be more than 700m away. At this distance the combustion of the weapon is no longer audible; only the distinct whistling sound of the pressure wave as it travels away from the shooter location and towards the crowd can be heard, causing mass panic. As Earshot is looking to further investigate this incident, we ask anyone with video footage from that night that captures the specific sound that can be heard in this post to get in touch with us.