Palantir Technologies – the surveillance company co-founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel – has secured at least 24 contracts across key UK public institutions, and is now working with both the Israeli…

Palantir’s AI machines need data for fuel—data in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians in the occupied territories. And for decades a key and highly secret source of that data for Israel has been the US National Security Agency, according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. After fleeing to Hong Kong in 2013 with a pocket full of flash drives containing some of the agency’s highest secrets, Snowden ended up in Moscow where, soon after he arrived, I met with him for Wired magazine. And in the interview, he told me that “one of the biggest abuses” he saw while at the agency was how the NSA secretly provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and e-mail communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories. Snowden was concerned that as a result of sharing those private conversations with Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be at great risk of being targeted for arrest or worse.”

“Now, with Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, critical information from NSA continues to be used by Unit 8200, according to a number of sources, to target tens of thousands of Palestinians for death—often with US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs and other weapons. And it is extremely powerful data-mining software, such as that from Palantir, that helps the IDF to select targets.

  • Basic Glitch@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    12·
    3 months ago

    Lavender was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence division, Unit 8200. One officer was quoted as saying: “This is unparalleled, in my memory. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.” Another said: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

    Just as Palestinians are dehumanised by the rhetoric around the conflict, the technology furthers this dehumanisation. People become ‘targets’ and the technology is seen as simply a mechanism for efficiency and time-saving in the process of killing.

    Technology didn’t kill those people. It might make that guy sleep a little easier to pretend he’s just a “stamp of approval,” but thats because he’s deluding himself.

    If Alex Karp and Peter Thiel had created a deadly biological weapon in a lab, then sold it around the world for profit knowing it would be used to commit mass murder, nobody would be pretending they weren’t responsible for those deaths their weapon caused.

    They created this monster, and the U.S. helped it flourish by feeding it the data it needed. And now they’re just pillaging hoards of data from the entire world. And we’re just letting them. As if they have no responsibility for what they’re doing, and we have no way to stop them.

    They refused and still refuse to regulate it. It’s not that they can’t, it’s because nobody forced them to. Why not? The technology isn’t to blame for this, they are. They created a technological weapon of mass destruction, and for some reason, we’re all just going along with the idea that what they’ve done is somehow different than unleashing a deadly disease on humanity. As if they’re somehow removed from responsibility once it’s in the buyer’s hands because it’s a different category of weapon.

    I remember a year ago or so, I was reading about NATO and concerns over A.I. use triggering article 5. I didn’t understand what tf they meant, but it’s pretty obvious now. So why are we pretending these guys aren’t war criminals just like the people who purchased and used their weapon against other humans?