For a long time, people have lived with the prospect of a future the place wars can be fought with so-called killer robots pushed by expertise that at all times appeared otherworldly.
That is now a terrifying actuality, given Israel‘s use of synthetic intelligence in its ongoing lethal assault on the Gaza Strip, documented in reviews and investigations by numerous shops, none extra essential than Israeli publications +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language Local Call.
They revealed the usage of AI packages akin to The Gospel, Lavender and Where’s Daddy?, all of which have been used to establish tens of hundreds of Gazans as targets, observe and strike individuals particularly of their houses, and basically run a “mass assassination factory” with minimal human oversight.
A crucial element of their early April report about Lavender and Where’s Daddy? associated to how the software program have been purportedly gathering knowledge from WhatsApp — the communication behemoth owned by tech large Meta.
That specific piece of data piqued the curiosity of Paul Biggar, a software program engineer, innovator and founding father of Tech For Palestine, a coalition of expertise consultants working to profit Palestinians.
He put out a weblog elevating issues over Meta’s potential involvement in Israel’s devastating AI-powered conflict on Gaza.
Speaking to Anadolu, Biggar mentioned he views Lavender as one of many instruments that Israel is utilizing as a “way of automating the genocide (in Gaza).”
“It allows them to target individuals and create a layer of plausible deniability, where they say that these individuals were identified by AI as being valid targets, which is not true,” he mentioned.
He mentioned there isn’t a “real reason to believe that any of these targets are valid” and the Israeli navy does “no due diligence in identifying or investigating the targets suggested by the AI system.”
WHATSAPP AND META’S ALLEGED INVOLVEMENT
Biggar mentioned his weblog was “specifically about Meta’s involvement” as a result of the reporting on Lavender urged that one of many methods the system identifies targets is “through what WhatsApp groups people are part of.”
What he was referring to was a component within the +972 and Local Call report about “a short guide to building a ‘target machine,’ similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms.”
That information, in accordance with the report, was in a ebook — titled The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World — launched underneath a pen title, Brigadier General Y.S., in English in 2021.
The report mentioned the +972 and Local Call investigation had confirmed the writer “to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200.”
In that information to create an AI system “were several examples of the ‘hundreds and thousands’ of features that can increase an individual’s rating (the likelihood to be identified as a target), such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.”
Biggar termed {that a} “ludicrous” suggestion.
“We know from other sources that Hamas does not coordinate attacks on any sort of mobile phone-based things, WhatsApp or anything like that,” he mentioned.
“So, what they’re really suggesting is who do people know? Who are they friends with? … The membership of a WhatsApp group is in no way incriminating and it is ludicrous to suggest it.”
IS META GIVING INFORMATION TO ISRAEL?
For Biggar, it’s a “fact” that Israel is getting WhatsApp knowledge, however it’s nonetheless unclear whether or not it’s being straight supplied by Meta.
“Perhaps the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has other ways of accessing this data … Perhaps they don’t get it from the front door through Meta,” he mentioned.
One risk is that they’re “getting it through the many Unit 8200 members” now working at Meta, he mentioned, referring to the identical Israeli intelligence unit talked about within the +972 and Local Call report about Lavender.
“Lots of people at Meta used to work at the IDF, used to be in Unit 8200, including their chief information security officer,” Biggar claimed.
“There is also Sheryl Sandberg, their former COO and one of the major people who built Facebook to be what it is today and who remains on their board. She has also been on a propaganda tour for Israel,” he added.
For Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Biggar identified that he has “given donations to (Israeli NGO) Zaka, who are some of the people who created the false propaganda used to justify the genocide to Israelis and to the Western world.”
So, Israel may very well be getting the info straight from Meta by data requests, by the backdoor, or a 3rd undisclosed approach, he mentioned.
In any of those eventualities, the primary subject turns into that “Meta is pitching WhatsApp as being this end-to-end secure thing when they, it seems, should know that is not true,” he mentioned.
‘VULNERABLE TO ABUSE AND INTRUSIVE EXTERNAL SURVEILLANCE’
Bahraini blogger and activist Esra’a Al Shafei believes the reviews about WhatsApp knowledge presumably being utilized by Israel ought to “definitely be taken very seriously.”
“If the allegations in the report are true, it shows that by using WhatsApp, people are risking their lives,” Al Shafei, a board member of the Tor Project, a digital privateness and freedom group, advised Anadolu.
She pointed to metadata — “data around the data itself” — as an space of vulnerability, saying privateness advocates strongly oppose its assortment and storage “particularly for apps like WhatsApp which falsely advertise their product as fully private.”
While WhatsApp encrypts the content material of messages, it nonetheless collects numerous data, together with “app activity … location, financial information (if the user has ever connected that number to a payment portal managed by or accessible to Meta), contacts, groups,” she defined.
“Even though WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, and claims to not have any backdoors to any government, the metadata alone is sufficient to expose detailed information about users, especially if the user’s phone number is attached to other Meta products and related activities,” she mentioned.
“This is why the IDF plausibly could utilize metadata to track and locate WhatsApp users,” she added.
However, Al Shafei emphasised that every one of this doesn’t imply that Meta or WhatsApp are essentially collaborating with Israel, however “by the very act of collecting this information, they’re making themselves vulnerable to abuse and intrusive external surveillance.”
MORE HACKING THAN HANDOFF
Researcher and journalist Sophia Goodfriend believes the case of Israel utilizing WhatsApp knowledge has extra to do with hacking than deliberate cooperation.
“With WhatsApp in particular, that’s a case of the military simply hacking into phones and going through WhatsApp data,” she advised Anadolu.
“WhatsApp isn’t necessarily providing all of that information to the Israeli military,” mentioned Goodfriend, who has written for numerous shops, together with +972 Magazine, on warfare, automation and digital rights.
This is much less about “collaboration and more the Israeli military, like many militaries around the world, (being) able to hack into these technologies,” she mentioned.
Also, she defined, there are various cases the place militaries use applied sciences in methods which are in opposition to the insurance policies of the businesses themselves.
“There was a case in March, a report by the New York Times, about the (Israeli) military using a Google image database to build up biometric surveillance of Gazans who were fleeing from the north into the south in the first few months of the war,” she mentioned.
“That’s a case of the Israeli military using an open-source database against its own stipulations.”
In such instances, she careworn that tech companies “who find their technologies being used to build up military surveillance systems or inform military operations have a responsibility to ensure that their own technologies are not going directly against their use policies.”
While main firms straight collaborating with militaries for such operations is “not happening as much,” there are other forms of collaboration with non-public civilian expertise companies, she mentioned.
“You have plenty of examples of start-ups contracted to build up different surveillance technologies that could be informing lethal targeting systems,” she mentioned.
“It’s a messy kind of technological ecosystem and plenty of civilian firms are implicated just by virtue of contracts and subcontracting, and even just having their technology out there and the Israeli military being able to use it.”
Regarding what Israel makes use of to feed the AI techniques it has employed in Gaza, she pointed to its “pretty advanced network of surveillance technologies … across the West Bank, Gaza, as well as Israel proper.”
“This includes biometric surveillance, cyberhacking technologies, drone reconnaissance, GPS tracking, and social media monitoring as well,” she mentioned.
“All of these different sources feed into systems like the ones we’re seeing rolled out in Gaza, including Lavender and Where’s Daddy?” she added.
On the precise AI techniques and their position within the destruction of Gaza, Goodfriend mentioned it was one other instance of “how militaries can use these systems to carry out their own agendas.”
“We saw Israel’s military really emphasizing destruction rather than accuracy … (and) we saw these systems really abetting this military campaign,” she mentioned.
However, she emphasised that these techniques are “quite rudimentary” and actually “are not autonomous weapon systems acting without human oversight.”
“It was actually the decision-makers who are calling the shots. If all the reporting is confirmed, it’s really the decision-makers who are … directing the military to bomb all these targets and to rely on AI to produce an endless stream of targets to be bombed,” she mentioned.
CALL FOR ANSWERS
In a press release to Anadolu, a WhatsApp spokesperson mentioned the corporate has “no information that these reports are accurate.”
“WhatsApp has no backdoors and we do not provide bulk information to any government. For over a decade, Meta has provided consistent transparency reports and those include the limited circumstances when WhatsApp information has been requested,” learn the assertion.
Such requests are reviewed and evaluated “based on applicable law and consistent with internationally recognized standards, including human rights,” it mentioned.
“Our next report will come next month, on time. We do agree there is much more to privacy than end-to-end encryption, which is why we work hard to protect the limited information available to us and we continue to build more features to protect people’s information,” the assertion added.
For Biggar, the Tech For Palestine founder, that isn’t sufficient, and he desires solutions from Meta.
“Meta should be issuing a public report that states exactly what they know. They should be doing an investigation beyond what they know. They need to do an investigation both internally and externally … to discover, was the IDF accessing this information … (or) who were they getting it from internally?” he mentioned.
“If it was a hack that was not revealed, did Meta know about this hack or flaws in their encryption? They have been marketing it as end-to-end … (so) were they aware that it was not end-to-end for people in Palestine?”
Al Shafei concurred, saying the “responsible thing for Meta to do is fully investigate the … allegations in the reports on Lavender regarding how they’re utilizing WhatsApp’s metadata to track, harm or kill its users throughout Palestine.”
“Simply claiming that they’re absolved of liability because they don’t actively play a role in providing a backdoor is insufficient. WhatsApp is used by billions of people and these users have a right to know what the dangers are in using the app, or what WhatsApp and Meta will do to proactively protect them from such misuse,” she mentioned.
Source: www.anews.com.tr
