The secret quest to preserve Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh's diaries

From npr.org

The world's leading Palestinian writer, Raja Shehadeh, has been on a mission to save his most personal work: his diaries.

The award-winning author of more than 20 books has been documenting decades of Palestinian life, starting in 1967 at the very beginning of Israel's occupation of the West Bank when he was a teenager.

Raja Shehadeh's first diary entry from May 11, 1967.       Raja Shehadeh

His diaries capture a unique voice and front row view of history: his meetings with world leaders, his work as a human rights lawyer, and his role as legal advisor to the Palestinians during peace talks with Israel.

Shehadeh, now 75, feared his diaries and archives — kept in his garage in the West Bank city of Ramallah — were at risk of destruction from Israeli military operations. (The Israeli foreign ministry did not respond to requests for comment about Shehadeh's fears.)

So he took part in a two-year, discreet effort to spirit them to Scotland, where he has spent many summers. The archives are now at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Exeter in England has published thousands of pages online.

Shehadeh spoke with NPR's Daniel Estrin about his decades of diary writing, and the secret effort to preserve his archives.

The interview text below has been edited for length and clarity.

How keeping a diary consistently for so long impacted who he is as a writer

 It's been a daily effort...in order to understand better what is happening around me, in order to record and document what is happening. I started when I was...fifteen years old, just before the occupation.  It has been a very good discipline because it helped me understand myself and what's happening around me...I was feeling that we are entering into a historic period that needs to be documented. So I went about writing everything down that was happening and preserving whatever I could preserve.

Raja Shehadeh looks at folders from his archive in 2026.     Yazeed Abu Khdeir

Excerpts from Shehadeh's diary during Israel's invasion of Ramallah at the height of the Palestinian Intifada in 2002

April 2, 2002 

Last night was very noisy. I was awakened many times from the sound of the bombing and shooting ... 

My mood was not good today. I just got too many telephones. The problem then became that the news spread that my spirits (so it was interpreted are down) so I got more calls from those who thought it is their duty to call me to help raise my morale ...

I am beginning to feel like a prisoner in the house, in solitary confinement ... I am thinking of exercising by pacing around the house ...

Then Samer called to say: now they have lifted the curfew ... I was glad to lift the garage door and to turn my car on ... There was absolutely no one on the street. There was dirt and stones and wind and fog but no cars ...

I continued driving up to the center and then saw two big tanks- how big they look, like elephants in a zoo where they don't belong, parked by our office blocking the street entirely ...

The satellite stations show the suffering of the Palestinians like a soap opera ... [Palestinian leader Yaser] Arafat is a rebel rouser. He is now very popular and he dramatizes everything. The Palestinians rather than be a force of change are a source of drama and emotionalism throughout the arab world ...

On Shehadeh's anger at Palestinian leaders for signing a peace accord in the 1990s that didn't stop Israeli settlement expansion

Raja Shehadeh's diary entry for December 2, 1991, written by hand in the Grand Hotel in Washington DC while acting as legal counsel to the Palestinian negotiating team, on notepaper from the Regency Palace hotel, Amman.      Raja Shehadeh

My diaries after that point showed a great anger which I was glad I didn't publish. I mean, it was good that I put all my frustration and anger in the diaries because otherwise I would not have been able to live in Palestine because I was so angry and so frustrated by the leadership and so critical of it.  And so the diary played an important role in helping me vent that frustration without getting myself into trouble.

The leadership...didn't realize that the settlements were the disastrous thing and that they had to be stopped, and no agreement should happen without all settlement activities stopped, and they didn't do that.

On his diary entries documenting Israel's expanding control of the West Bank

 I started recording the changes in the geography and in the roads and in the landscape and in the effect of the settlements.  I used to walk a lot in the West Bank hills, and after the walks, I would record what I saw and how I felt and how the land looked.

I was so confused by what was happening and so wanting to understand it, and so writing it helped me understand it. I had my own way and my own nonconformity. And so describing my world in words helped me grasp it better.

Shehadeh's fear for the safety of his archives due to Israeli military operations

I n the Nakba (the Arabic word for "catastrophe," commonly used to refer to the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians when Israel was established) in 1948, they destroyed so many of the journals and private papers of Palestinians, and they were never found again. And then in 1982 in Lebanon, in Beirut, they went to the Palestine Research Center and took all the papers and all the journals and everything there and destroyed it. And in 2002, in the re-invasion of Ramallah, they went into so many homes and destroyed the private papers and everything. And so I was worried that they would do the same for me.

In 2023, with the Gaza war and the destruction of so much of the archives in Gaza, I became really worried and thought that I must do something to preserve these diaries. I kept the diaries in the garage. If the soldiers, as they did once, (would) enter my house, go to the garage and see them, they would just throw them all over the place and maybe set fire to them.

The two-year effort to move the archives from the West Bank to Scotland

I was very worried that the Israelis would stop it. So the first step was to digitize...page by page by page by page according to the highest standard with the cooperation of the University of Edinburgh University and Exeter University. And so three people worked day and night to digitize the diary … and all the documents that I had collected as well.

 And the second step was to slowly start sending the documents out by ordinary mail without raising any attention to it.

Shehadeh's 40-year quest to investigate the 1985 killing of his father, a prominent lawyer — and the Israeli police investigation files of the killing, which Shehadeh obtained in 2025

Handwritten letter dated January 10, 1949, sent to Aziz Shehadeh by the Akka- based business-owner Bahjat Eleassa from displacement in Lebanon.    Raja Shehadeh

 In the archive is the process by which I went about trying to get the police to investigate and the feelings that I had about it, which extended from '85 to 2025.

It was clear that they had not investigated the main culprit, the man who had sent the letter to my father from prison threatening to kill him if he did not withdraw from a case of land that the family thought belonged to them or they were squatting on it. My suspicion, strong suspicion, is because this man was a collaborator, and he wanted to be protected, and Israel wanted to protect him as a collaborator.

This is where it ended. We could not go beyond that.  

Handwritten notes by Aziz Shehadeh of a meeting of the General Refugee Congress held in Ramallah on June 9, 1950, discussing the fate of refugees.   Raja Shehadeh

The Israeli police revealed all the investigation, but all the investigation was extraneous. It was distracting because the main suspect was not investigated, and that we have found out.

 I had always suspected that it was this man who did it, and when I realized through this case that they have actually not investigated him, I felt that my suspicions were correct, and it gave me closure.

About Shehadeh's diary entries documenting Israel's transformation of the West Bank over the years

I understood from early on that it was a matter of...staying put and persevering. Because I realized that what the Israelis wanted was to make life so difficult for the Palestinians in the occupied territories, to make them leave.

 The only antidote to that is sumud [Arabic for "steadfastness"]. Staying put and entrenching our existence by building institutions, by making work for people, by making it clear that we are here to stay. And I never changed my mind about this. I always realized that sumud was the most important resistance to what Israel was trying to do.

What Shehadeh hopes his legacy will be

Palestine is Heaven, a poem written by Raja Shehadeh at the age of 18 in 1969 and published in the Jerusalem Post newspaper.     Raja Shehadeh

 I'm not so worried about legacy, but I'm concerned that, through the diaries, people will understand how things happened and the developments that things went through. That's very important for me, and this would be perhaps a greater way that I would have served human rights and truth than any other way, whether through my writing of books or articles or speeches. The diaries might bring about the results that I haven't been able to achieve in any other way. I think that is the important thing.

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/12/g-s1-142760/palestinian-writer-archive-scotland-israel-shehadeh 

Dear diary: how OpenAI’s Computer History feature works, and why it’s risky

 From kaspersky.com

By Stan Kaminsky

A new feature in the ChatGPT app for macOS keeps a detailed log of everything you do on your computer, and stores that data in a freely readable text file. We assess the benefits, the risks, and settle on a plan of what to do. 

Picture your computer keeping a diary — the kind kids used to keep logging their daily activities, or the kind travellers, merchants, and nobles kept centuries before that. Here’s what it might look like.

Thursday, September 10.

• 8:00 AM. User read the news on cnn.com and bbc.co.uk (Safari).
• 8:10 AM. User replied to John Kaufman’s email about delivery dates, then sent the same question to the logistics team (Gmail).
• 8:20 AM. User checked his to-do list, reviewed recent updates, and planned out the day’s priorities (Todo).

We’re not exaggerating. This is exactly what your Mac’s new diary looks like. It’s a set of text files that any app on your computer can read — as can anyone sitting at the keyboard. The feature responsible is called Computer History, and it was released by OpenAI in mid-August. At the moment, it only works in the ChatGPT app for Mac, requires a Pro subscription or higher, and is disabled by default. According to its developers, the idea behind History is to let the AI assistant quickly get up to speed on your work context, so it can answer even vague requests, like “send a reminder to whoever I was emailing about last week’s deliveries”. Of course, that convenience comes at a price, ranging from your data being processed on OpenAI’s servers, to the risk of it leaking off your Mac — whether to a nosy family member or straight into the hands of cybercriminals.

How ChatGPT Computer History works

If this sounds a lot like Microsoft’s similar Recall feature, or Chronicle, which OpenAI itself announced earlier, that’s no coincidence. Both were built with the same goal in mind, just using different methods. Having watched Recall turn into the PR disaster it was, the team behind Computer History decided against constantly taking and analysing screenshots. Instead, ChatGPT relies on macOS’s Accessibility features to read the text on your screen and track your actions: mouse clicks, text typed into fields, switching between apps, and the like. All of this gets stored as a stream of raw activity data inside the ChatGPT container (app group), which only the ChatGPT app itself, or other apps you’ve specifically given permission, can access. In tests run by digital forensics researchers, just two hours of normal computer use generated around 3500 of these logged events.

That raw data remains on your computer for up to 48 hours. During this time, the ChatGPT app periodically runs hidden chat sessions behind the scenes, where it asks the AI to summarize related events into a single recap. Essentially diary entries, these summaries get saved as plain text files in a folder that any app on your Mac can open: ~/.codex/memories/extensions/skysight/.

When you chat with the assistant, or when certain automated features kick in, these notes can be pulled into the conversation for more context-aware responses. OpenAI is especially keen on pointing out that the assistant can spot patterns in your workflows and offer to automate them, creating what it calls “skills” that replicate your actions for you.

Once a summary is ready, the raw activity data behind it is deleted. OpenAI says it won’t keep those hidden background chats or use them to train its AI, except where required by law. The diary-style summaries that get pulled into your conversations, though, are stored on OpenAI’s servers under the exact same rules as your regular chats and the assistant’s memory, so your pre-existing privacy settings will apply to them too.

What Computer History can see, and what you can turn off

Since the whole feature runs on accessibility tools, ChatGPT only picks up what your operating system is already willing to share with those tools. That includes window titles, blocks of text, image captions in your browser, text you’re typing into a field as you type it, and the names of interface elements you click on. Watching a video? The AI can’t see the video itself, but it can read the window title, the site name, and the video description. Browsing photos? It sees file and folder names, not the actual images. Audio is never recorded or saved in any situation. All that gets logged from a video call is the meeting window title, unless the call itself has live captions turned on. Password fields that are masked (shown as dots) aren’t read at all and, according to OpenAI, private browsing windows are never scanned.

One thing that sets this apart from Microsoft Recall is the clearly spelled out step-by-step procedure the user needs to go through to turn it on. Computer History never activates itself. You have to navigate to the settings menu, then Integrations → Computer History and turn it on manually after reading through the warnings and explanations. You’ll also need access to the agent’s memory enabled for the feature to work. From there, you choose which apps and websites you want it to track, and confirm a series of macOS permission prompts.

For companies using a business subscription, this requires approval at two levels: an administrator first has to enable Computer History for the whole organization, and then each employee has to turn it on individually.

At any point, you can go to Computer History → Permissions and either list specific apps and sites to exclude from tracking, or, conversely, set ChatGPT to only watch a limited list you choose (Include only these apps, Include only these websites).

To see what your own computer’s diary looks like, check Computer History → History. From there, you can delete individual entries or disable the tracking of specific apps directly from the list.

The risks of using ChatGPT Computer History

We covered the risks of centralized storage of someone’s entire activity in our earlier piece on Microsoft Recall, and most of what we said there applies to ChatGPT Computer History.

• You might assume your chats and emails are private, protected by passwords and encryption. But a copy of the most important parts of those conversations is sitting in plain text files that anyone with access to your computer, and plenty of other apps, can open.
• The people you’re messaging have no idea this extra copy exists. If they’ve turned on, say, a self-destructing chat feature, but the messaging app’s window itself isn’t marked as private, that precaution does nothing to protect them.
• Even if you trust OpenAI completely and take its privacy promises at face value, your data can still be stolen directly off your computer by an info stealer. Mac-targeting info stealers have exploded over the past two years, so this isn’t a hypothetical risk. And the people who write this type of malware move fast, quickly updating it to grab whatever new type of data looks promising. OpenAI’s files are a boon for them: everything you’ve done, already summarized by AI into something easy to read. While there are no passwords or credit card numbers in there, the available details are likely enough to craft a convincing targeted urgent email from the boss.
• And if a nosy co-worker or family member gets their hands on your computer, reading through the diary of your work and life would take them all of five minutes.

Computer History: turn it off, or just configure it?

We’d recommend limiting or fully disabling Computer History if your work involves sensitive information. This especially applies to doctors, lawyers, and anyone else bound by professional confidentiality, or handling personal or medical data. The same goes for anyone living with an overly controlling family member, or working in an office with nosy co-workers.

If none of that applies to you and you’d like to try out how useful the AI’s search and auto-generated skills actually are, here’s how to set things up safely.

• Lock down your Mac’s login. Turn off auto-login, and set your Mac to require a password immediately after the screensaver kicks in or it wakes from sleep. Use a strong password along with Touch ID, and make sure FileVault disk encryption is turned on.
• Set up your exclusions. Manually add every messaging app you use for private conversations, along with any finance apps or sites, and anywhere else you keep sensitive information, to Computer History’s exclusion list.
• Check in regularly. At least a couple of times a week, visit Computer History settings to see which apps and sites it’s been tracking. This helps you catch and remove any sources of private information you forgot to exclude earlier.

No matter how you configure Computer History, the two most common ways your data could end up in the wrong hands — on any Mac — are a macOS info stealer snatching it directly from your computer, and typing your information into a fake website. To guard against both, make sure you’re running full-featured security software on your Mac, such as Kaspersky for macOS.

AI can create privacy risks you might never think to look for. You can read about more of them in our other posts:

• Attacks on Gemini: the possibilities are endless
• Why AI agents need an iron curtain
• Knives, kinks, and shooters: what AI toys are really saying to kids
• AI and the new reality of sextortion

And if you’d like to know how to turn off AI features that activate on your computer or smartphone without your knowledge, check out our guide, Unplugged: how to disable AI on your computer and smartphone.

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/chatgpt-computer-history-macos-risks-benefits/56380/