Right, so this story seems absolutely nuts, but it seems that not only are Israel using Artificial Intelligence programs to label Palestinian individuals and their families as potential targets for bombing, but that amongst the data used by the AI systems to choose targets is real time data being provided by the social media messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Meta, the umbrella organisation which also includes Facebook. So what is this AI that has been developed, how on Earth can Israel claim to be avoiding excess casualties when it is allowing a computer algorithm essentially to pick targets and how on Earth is WhatsApp data coming into their possession, in real time as it would have to, to target a given person in a given place at that very moment, in order to launch airstrikes on that area?
Right, so if you were wondering how on Earth Israel were killing so many innocent civilians, the committing of genocide in Gaza in their relentless pursuit of Hamas and were of the opinion they simply didn’t care, you weren’t wrong in that assessment, but it isn’t actually the entire story either, because it might not be people choosing these targets and being indiscriminate about it, but an Artificial Intelligence program for generating targets is being used by the Israeli military, going by the name Lavender, and it doesn’t appear to be that choosy either, though of course like any AI a lot of that can come from how it is designed and programmed, but also it seems is based on the data it is provided with to generate such responses.
Now some news sources ponder the morality and ethics of using such a method to select targets, I personally think we passed that point long ago, but if you still consider the IDF the most moral army in the world or in any way ethical in what they do, the evidence they’ve blatantly planted, from laptops with Hebrew keyboards, to pointing at calendars as if they are some kind of Hamas task lists and weaponry stored behind MRI machines in hospitals, well, there’s probably a Nigerian Prince in your emails with the deal of the century for you.
So what is this Lavender AI? Well here’s an excerpt from the Israeli magazine +972 to explain. Prepare to be horrifed:
‘According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.’
Indiscriminate targeting, the kill lists generated treated as Gospel, which ironically is the name of another AI the Israeli’s apparently use, which marks building for targeting in the way Lavender targets people. +972 also made reference to the IDF choosing unguided missiles for these targets, so-called dumb bombs, which destroy whole buildings, instead of targeting levels, and which of course create more casualties, the basis being the dumb bombs are cheaper and they ‘don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people.’
It's a vile creation, it’s an abuse of AI, which more and more of us are using, and it’s come to light that some of the targeting data of individuals has come from WhatsApp and my good friend Steve Walker at Skwawkbox has been investigating this and in one of his latest articles is indeed asking the very relevant question right now, as to how Israel are getting this data.
It tickled me in a weird way I suppose, as we have the prospect of tiktok being banned in the states, because they don’t like the Chinese ownership of the platform and feel threatened by this, and yet US owned WhatsApp might be feeding Israel targeting data, so who’s the bigger social media threat here?
How are they getting the data though? Well Skwawkbox postulated a couple of possible ways.
Now your data held by any social media platform is protected under confidentiality laws, wherever the platform is based, and indeed the content of any messages on any bigger platforms certainly have a level of encryption involved and certainly this is the case with WhatsApp too, end to end encryption as is the claim, however a 2021 Freedom of Information request to the FBI turned up something rather interesting in relation to WhatsApp and this is that although the message contents remain confidential, sender and receiver metadata can be obtained by the authorities in real time, with no more than a 15 minute lag, whereas other platforms cannot provide such data in anything like as fast a manner and therefore WhatsApp access by the likes of the FBI, by law enforcement, is very useful to them in seeking to apprehend a given target, who might be sending or receiving WhatsApp messages.
Could the US therefore, be providing this data, in real time to Israel, or do the Israeli authorities have such access? Bearing in mind that Lavender as stated previously was most heavily used in the early days, post October 7th, how long have they had this AI and how long might they have had access to WhatsApp for?
Well, we don’t know for sure that this is how they got the data, but given the real time requirement needed to enact airstrikes, it is certainly plausible.
This assumes the US are knowingly allowing Israel access to this WhatsApp metadata though. Perhaps they don’t? Perhaps they’ve been hacked.
Another plausible possibility as Skwawkbox identified is the Israeli cyber-security firm NSO, which were sued by Apple back in 2021 for allegedly targeting Apple users with their Pegasus hacking software, which has also targeted WhatsApp users and has certainly been used to ill effect before, it is known for instance that the Saudi’s used it against the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and we know how that story turned out.
At the end of the day, these are two possibilities, quite plausible, but we need to know how the Israelis are obtaining WhatsApp data in order to target and kill Palestinians in Gaza.
Could this all amount to more charges at the end of the day against the Israeli state or ministers within it? Well we shall have to wait and see, but right now a bigger problem for Netanyahu is that impending potential arrest warrant from the ICC, that Biden is trying to block, but it seems he’s not having much luck! Oh dear, how sad, never mind here’s hoping the ICC stands firm, but will it given the Chief Prosecutor’s Tory links? Well he might, he’s digging his heels in apparently, but find out all about that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.