FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Such systems are purpose-built, and officials must remember that even in emergency circumstances, they must proceed with caution when expanding the frequency or reach of a computer tool. The hoped-for operational benefits are not guaranteed, and as the disaster in Gaza shows, the strategic and moral costs can be significant.
An investigative article published by Israeli media outlet Local Call (and its English version, +972 Magazine) shows that the Israeli military has created a mass killing program of unprecedented proportions, mixing algorithmic targeting with a high tolerance for death and injury. of passers-by, reports 'Foreign Policy'.
The investigation reveals a major expansion of Israel's previous practices of targeted killing, and it goes a long way toward explaining how and why the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can kill so many Palestinians while still claiming to be law abiding. international humanitarian. It also represents a dangerous new horizon in human-machine interaction in conflict—a trend that is not limited to Israel.
Israel has a long history of using targeted killings. During the violent years of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), it was institutionalized as a military technique, but operations were very rare and the special practices of special munitions aimed only at persons in vehicles to harm bystanders.
But since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the IDF has shifted gears. It has discarded the old process of carefully selecting targets for middle and high-ranking militant commanders. Instead, it has made about the same progress in artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including finding targets. The new system automatically analyzes large amounts of raw material for potential targets and borrows the names of human analysts to do what they want - and in these cases, apparently, those human analysts. recommend an air strike.
The new process, according to an investigation by Local Call and +972 Magazine, works like this: A system run by AI Lavender has tracked the names of every person in Gaza and combined a wide range of intelligence with video and intercepted chat messages to social media data - to also find an individual who may be a fighter for Hamas or a Palestinian militant group. The IDF was told that it was important and necessary to tolerate in its target that it had from Lavender, and for most of the war, this threshold was apparently 10 percent.
Targets that met or exceeded that threshold would be passed on to operations teams after a human analyst spent about 20 seconds reviewing them. Often this involved just checking whether a given name was that of a man (assuming that women are not warriors). Hitting 10 percent of false positives — involving, for example, people with names similar to Hamas members or those who share phones with family members identified as Hamas members — was considered an acceptable error under the conditions of the time. of the war.
A second system, called Where's Dad, determines whether targets are in their homes. Local Call reported that the IDF prefers to hit targets in their homes because it is much easier to find them there than when they engage the IDF in battle. The families and neighbors of these potential Hamas members are seen as insignificant collateral damage, and many of these attacks so far have been directed at what one Israeli intelligence officer interviewed called "insignificant people."
Young members of Hamas are seen as legitimate targets because they are fighters but not of great strategic importance. This appears to have been particularly the case during the early crescendo of bombing at the beginning of the war, after which the focus shifted to somewhat higher "not to lose bombs" objectives.
One lesson from this revelation addresses the question of whether Israel's tactics in Gaza are genocidal. Genocidal acts can include attempts to bring about mass death through deliberately inflicted starvation or the wholesale destruction of infrastructure necessary to support the future life of the community, and some observers have claimed that both are evident in Gaza. But the clearest example of genocidal behavior is opening fire on civilians with the intention of exterminating them en masse. Despite the apparent incitement to genocide by Israeli officials not connected to the IDF chain of command, how the IDF selected and struck targets has remained obscure.
Local Call and +972 Magazine have shown that the IDF can be criminally negligent in its willingness to strike targets when the risk of bystander death is too high, but because the targets chosen by Lavender are ostensibly combatants, the airstrikes of The IDF does not intend to annihilate a civilian population. They have followed the so-called operational logic of targeted killing, even if their execution has resembled saturation bombing in its effects.
This matters to experts in international law and military ethics because of the doctrine of double effect, which allows for foreseeable but unintended harm if the intended action does not depend on that harm occurring, as in the case of an air strike against a legitimate objective that would occur whether or not there were bystanders. But in the case of the Israel-Hamas war, most jurists—and apparently a number of IDF officers—see these attacks as failing to meet any reasonable standard of proportionality, while stretching the notion of discrimination beyond interpretations. reasonable. In other words, they may still be war crimes.
Researchers have discussed "human-machine fusion" as a way to conceptualize the growing centrality of interaction between AI-powered systems and their operators during military operations. Instead of autonomous "killer robots," human-machine fusion envisions the next generation of warfighters to be systems that distribute agency between human and machine decision makers. What emerges is not the Terminator, but a constellation of tools brought together by algorithms and placed in the hands of humans who still exercise judgment about their use.
The appeal of human-machine teams and algorithmic systems is often claimed to be efficiency—but these systems cannot scale indefinitely without generating counter-normative and counter-productive outcomes. Lavender was not intended to be the sole arbiter of target legitimacy, and the targets it recommends could be subjected to exhaustive scrutiny if its operators so desired. But under immense pressure, IDF intelligence analysts reportedly devoted almost no resources to double-checking targets, nor to double-checking the locations of bystanders, once they were given the names of the targets.
Such systems are purpose-built, and officials must remember that even in emergency circumstances, they must proceed with caution when expanding the frequency or reach of a computer tool. The hoped-for operational benefits are not guaranteed, and as the disaster in Gaza shows, the strategic and moral costs can be significant.
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