Using WhatsApp helps the Israeli army pick targets in Gaza
In April 2024, +972 Magazine (
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/) journalist Yuval Abraham revealed the existence of Lavender AI: a system that automatically picks bombing targets. Lavender collects information on most of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses the likelihood that each particular person is active in Hamas or PIJ, giving almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100.
The article said that the current commander of Unit 8200 wrote in a guide book for Lavender AI that the features being used to select targets include “being in a WhatsApp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.”
“The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender.” Israel has deployed additional automated systems, e.g., ‘Where's Daddy’ signals when a target has entered his family home.
Last week, The Intercept (
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/22/wha ... palestine/) wrote that many WhatsApp employees fear that Israel has been using a vulnerability based on traffic analysis. According to their assessment: “[Deep Packet] Inspection and analysis of network traffic is completely invisible to us, yet it reveals the connections between our users: who is in a group together, who is messaging who, and (hardest to hide) who is calling who”... [A typical threat is due to peer-to-peer calls between users, which can be disabled on Telegram since many years ago but on WhatsApp only since Nov 8 (
https://engineering.fb.com/2023/11/08/s ... -security/), 2023 !]
And worse
...It is possible that WhatsApp's parent company is collaborating with Israel to help it fight ‘terrorism’.
In his blog (
https://blog.paulbiggar.com/meta-and-lavender/), Paul Biggar, founder of Tech For Palestine, asks “whether [the Israeli forces] get this information from Meta” directly? “Why has Meta not released their transparency report for the 2nd half of 2023? [...] Will Meta immediately rescind access to any WhatsApp information from the Israeli government, army, and law enforcement?”
He recalls that Meta's “Chief Information Security Officer, Guy Rosen, is their most senior policy decision maker. He is Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv, and was in Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is the Israeli NSA and is the department that built and runs Lavender. Insiders tell me that Rosen is the person most associated with the anti-‘anti-zionism’ policies, and is also responsible for the suppression of Palestinian content.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO, has been a “significant supporter of Israel's propaganda”. For example, he donated $125k to ZAKA - one of the groups that created Oct 7 false atrocity propaganda.
On a separate note, WhatsApp's servers store user metadata: social graphs and connection data, this could be tapped by U.S. intelligence under the FISA/PRISM programs, and part of it shared with Israel.
https://t.me/FaithFrontline/363
ΥΓ. Επ ουδενί ο λόγος που παραθέτω τα παραπάνω δεν σχετίζεται με το ότι είναι υποθετικά οι ισραηλινοί που κάνουν χρήση αυτής της τεχνολογίας. Μπορεί κάλλιστα να αντικατασταθεί το όνομα της χώρας με οποιαδήποτε άλλη έχει τη δυνατότητα να το κάνει
