Skynet in Action in Israel

Beta testing a key component of hands-off AI-driven warfare

A fascinating, dystopian exposé by +972 Magazine reveals Israel’s use of its secret AI called ‘Lavender’ to target and kill Hamas operatives.

From ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.

In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”

The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.

“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.

The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.

Israel is reportedly also using two other automated AI systems in conjunction with Lavender. One, called “Where’s Daddy?” tracks individuals marked by Lavender and notifies the military when they entered their homes. Another, called “The Gospel” is the architectural complement to Lavender, marking buildings that are likely locations of Hamas operations.

The entire essay is worth a read.

Hat tip to Open Source Defense for the link and a very deadpan summary.

The cutting edge of state empowerment technology in 2024 is a system that can do the following:

1. Complete government surveillance of all electronic activity within a territory, and real-time 24/7 location data on all cell phones.

2. Use the data from #1 to assign every person in the territory a score.

3. Automatically kill them and their family when their score crosses a threshold.

4. Lower the threshold as desired, to use up a target quantity of munitions.