By Sophia Goodfriend
In April 2024 international news sources circulated a video of a talk delivered by a senior Israeli military official during a tech conference at Tel Aviv University about a year earlier. The speaker, whose face is not shown, introduces himself only as “Colonel Yoav,” the head of data science and AI for Unit 8200, an elite outfit within Israel’s intelligence directorate. He is there to talk about the force’s embrace of artificial intelligence for the purposes of, as one slide in his presentation puts it, “finding new terrorists.”
During Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, Colonel Yoav explains, his unit had used AI to generate two hundred targets, a process that in the past would have taken “almost a year.” In comparison, he suggests, the algorithm could identify likely members of militant organizations in practically no time: “Let’s say we have some terrorists that form a group, and we know only some of them. By practicing our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest.”
When Israel again began bombing Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023—commencing a war on the Strip that leading experts and human rights organizations have termed a genocide—it used AI to increase its surveillance and killing capacity. In lengthy exposés published in the Israeli/Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine, the journalist Yuval Abraham identified two separate machine-learning algorithms that were churning out lists of people or places to bomb, enabling the Israeli air force to strike targets at an unprecedented speed and scale. The first, called Habsora, or “The Gospel,” offered up locations that were supposedly linked to militant groups or their members, though sources told Abraham that the majority of its suggestions were private residences. The second, called Lavender, made “kill lists” of individual people, assigning scores that approximated how likely they were to belong to a militant group. Intelligence officers told Abraham that, at the start of the war, the military established that operatives could subject Lavender’s recommendations to only the barest scrutiny, even though it had been determined that the program made errors in around 10 percent of cases, sometimes suggesting targets with no Hamas affiliation. “I would invest twenty seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day,” one officer said. “I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval.”
Read the article from the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS here. It was reprinted from Portside.