+972 Magazine and Local Call have reported that Israel is using a data processing system called ‘Lavender’ to generate human targets in Gaza. While the Lavender system (like the Habsora target recommendation system) is not an autonomous weapons system, with the actual decision as to whether or not to strike a recommended target made and carried out separately by a human and not by a machine, this and similar target recommendation systems (also known as decision support systems) raise serious legal, moral, ethical, and humanitarian concerns.
As Automated Decision Research’s Sai Bourothu commented to Al Jazeera, the use of these systems and their rapid generation of targets ‘brings into question compliance with international humanitarian law, particularly the principles of distinction and proportionality, and raises serious ethical concerns around responsibility and accountability for the use of force’, as well as accelerating digital dehumanisation in war.
The Lavender system reportedly ‘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’, with the machine giving ‘almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant’. The system ‘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.’
See Stop Killer Robots’ comment on the Lavender system here.
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