It is widely reported that Israel is using #AI as a weapon of war to target Hamas operatives in #Gaza. This feels like a pertinent time to discuss the reliability of using AI to wage geo-political war on a densely populated area. It could be argued that bombing is the end game where surveillance software has been employed.
The Conversation recently published a summary of an investigative report from +972, a Jerusalem based publication, that discussed how AI software has moved from a high potential future scenario into present day warfare to obvious, dire consequences.
Let’s recap briefly on how AI technology, such as Pegasus software, over the last decade has been misused when placed directly into the hands of power hungry, shady and sometimes criminal security departments, autocrats and dictatorships. NSO (Israel owned tech firm) built the notorious Pegasus software which is a tool covertly installed to collect private information from a mobile phone. It is has been involved in human rights abuses across and within country lines. The licensed software has targeted truth seekers who act in opposition to Power and the status quo (see Mexico, Spain, Saudi Arabia, etc). In 2021 the Biden Administration blacklisted the software when it became clear that there had been multiple human rights abuses and that it denigrated the USA’s own counter intelligence sweep. Faster Networks wrote about the Guardian podcast, The Pegasus Project here and, concluded that there needed to be a tightening of international rules around surveillance technology. Amnesty believed that the Dubai princesses at the heart of that scandal were targeted by the Saudi Prince (husband/father) using Pegasus software when they tried to escape years of captivity and torture.
Fast forward to 2024 and Pegasus software is still in the news. In March this year, NSO were told to handover the code to Meta following a lawsuit against them that they had used Pegasus software on some 1400 WhatsApp accounts in 2019, the cyberspy litigation continues and NSO remain tightlipped. NSO have re-inserted themselves into US politics since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, to effectively lobby government officials to reinstate their cybertechnology for use in Israel’s defence. In January 2024, 9News aired a clip from CNN that stated, “The IDF told CNN that when “critical intelligence or operational information is received,” it conducts “precise hostage rescue operations in the specific locations where information indicates that the bodies of hostages may be located.”
Antony Lowenstein, independent journalist who last year published a book, The Palestinian Laboratory, has shared in many interviews about how Israel’s occupation of Gaza has been used as a testing ground for surveillance technology and cyberweaponry. Software that goes beyond Pegasus’ capability and combines facial recognition software with data collection and algorithms that can predict targets, albeit unreliably. Software programs unfortunately named, Lavender and Where’s Your Daddy? that are referred to in ‘modern military as kill chains’. A combination of the aforementioned surveillance technologies that find a target, follow them home and kill the whole family. According to Lowenstein in a recent interview, there have been no ramifications for Israel falling prey on October 7, in terms of their surveillance technology being thwarted by a long planned attack from Hamas. An attack that saw all their military defences compromised and the residents in Israel’s south left unprotected and unarmed. Israel is still selling AI software as ‘battle tested’ at arms conferences and direct to autocracies around the world who are in the market for maintaining control over dissident citizens.
