Israel deploys expansive facial recognition program in Gaza | Hacker News Reader

Israel deploys expansive facial recognition program in Gaza

nytimes.com

70 pointsmhb144 comments

This reminded me of the forced photographs that Marc Garanger took of Berber (Kabyle) woman for identification cards for France during the Algerian Revolution [1]. My ancestral village in Kabylie was similarly emptied out with forced relocation and napalmed when my dad was a kid, so it's always wild to see these photographs.

[1] https://time.com/69351/women-unveiled-marc-garangers-contest...

That is terrible to hear. I haven't connected that war to the Vietnam war really. But essentially it is the same thing but without the US coming in afterwards?

Did he say the village was burned down (by hand), or that the French air force fire bombed it?

Oh yeah, there are actually a lot of connections between Vietnam and the Algerian Revolution. Many Algerians (and other groups colonized by France in Africa) were brought to fight the Viet Minh, and when captured, were spared and asked why they weren't also fighting their colonizers. There was often anti-colonial re-education that happened. [1][2]

In terms of our exact village, I don't recall if it happened by air or hand (or both), but he definitely has talked about the French air force dropping napalm and helicopters landing on the football field they played on as kids when accessing the mountains. I'll ask him. He was already living in Bejaia at the time (he was 5), and one day 10 or so family members showed up to live with them (in their ~1000 sqft house, much of which is a courtyard), saying the village was emptied out and destroyed. I go to the land where the village was whenever I'm visiting and really there's just an old two room stone mosque still standing, a tapped well for water, and a couple off grid homes that some hermits live in.

[1] https://caukieucollective.com/remembering-the-algerian-war-f...

[2] https://vvaveteran.org/37-6/37-6_algeria.html

The allies did something similar in Iraq and Afghanistan[1]. Biometrics make the most sense if you need to track people and there is no stable/reliable government.

[1]https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2021-06...

And then the Talibans now have it all.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/30/new-evidence-biometric-d...

And why do you need to track people ? Why is there no stable/reliable government ? Is this helping ?

> And why do you need to track people

They're looking for specific hamas commanders who are believed to be hiding in the civilian population.

And they will record everything just like Google, Facebook, etc. Fingerprinting everything.

Given how accurate these systems usually are… they are looking for some rando with a beard, and a way to spend some money on defense contracts sold by a friend.

Are biometric systems not accurate? The whole point of this is so that they aren't "looking for some rando with a beard."

> Are biometric systems not accurate?

They are very inaccurate, especially face recognition on dark people, which palestinians are, is going to be a crapshot.

I responded below about how they're probably training on photos of locals, but it's also worth noting that Palestinians, Israelis, and Lebanese people are all quite similar looking on average and have quite a bit of phenotype diversity. A well known Palestinian activist (Ahed Tamimi) in the West Bank famously has red hair, light skin, and freckles. Former congressman Justin Amash is half Palestinian and just looks like a Midwestern guy with a tan.

Several israeli are eastern europeans, I'd expect that palestinians are much darker than all the israeli that moved there during USSR times.

The ashkenazi population is about 30% of Israeli Jews, and Arab Israelis are about 21% of the population.

Palestinians have a fair amount of Anatolian, Lebanese, Armenian, and Iranian ancestry. So again there’s quite a bit of phenotypic variation. There’s also a high degree of genetic relatedness to even the Ashkenazi Jews.

In practice if you lined up 100 random Israelis and Palestinians you aren’t going to reliably determine who is who based on appearances.

Don’t confuse high profile false positives for overall efficacy

Face recognition on dark people is well known to be inaccurate.

This has definitely been the case with commercial offerings do to limitations in the training data, but the application here is obviously using photos of people in the population they're trying to do recognition in for training. It's probably better than off the shelf tools for this application.

If they'd have the person they are looking for, to take a picture… they wouldn't need face recognition.

Their problem is that they don't.

Plus, training takes so much time. I doubt they will actually do what you are suggesting.

Stating the impossibility of successfully using facial recognition on Mediterranean people is a weird claim to make in a technical form. Do you have any citations showing that Mediterranean and Near Eastern people present particular problems for facial recognition?

It seems a lot more certain than using cell signals, and can present some opportunities to make arrests without endangering a lot of civilians. I'd normally be against facial recognition for general purpose law enforcement, but but trying to be precise in an urban war is always a worthwhile goal.

You would certainly want to track people if you were fighting a war where military leaders of the opposition tried to blend into a densely populated civilian neighborhood

I think many Westerners take stable / reliable governance for granted and are clueless as to the 'typical' state of humanity.

Gaza was under complete blockade from Israel (after it was occupied by it). That's not an environment you can create reliable governance since it wasn't allowed to be a sovereign state.

https://archive.is/DH1EI

When I served in Afghanistan we used things like BATs and HIIDEs.

https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/23/ansi-...

Thanks for sharing. Didn't know about this and I really think the Geneva conventions need an update to include this kind of thing.

Why? Tell me a better way to fight an enemy that uses civilians as camouflage.

I don't know a lot about this. But my first thought is better undercover, intelligence work? Follow through on citizenship deals for locals that cooperate with intelligence programs, grow & nurture those efforts.

The biometric stuff just seems too dangerous to me, and unlike e.g. Nuclear arsenals, there's no peaceful game-theoretical equilibrium at MAD, I just see an extremely effective tool for the eradication of groups of people, and I don't trust human beings not to misuse that, especially with machine intelligence getting so powerful so fast.

It all feels frighteningly unstable to me.

edit: A perhaps more lucid way to explain what I mean: I am afraid of a world where the cost of eliminating a group of people is low enough that it outweighs the incentive to adapt & negotiate peaceful coexistence, even without what I see as an innate human bias towards destroying groups we don't like. Do violent, authoritarian regimes begin to gain an edge over peaceful, democratic ones?

I've met a NATO (non USA) soldier who has been doing intelligence work in Afghanistan.

He said that the USA method is to go to some village, kill the head and say "now you have democracy, elect a new leader", and chaos ensues.

While our way is "we build you a well and a road, let us know if someone comes to recruit young people".

Of course since the USA soldiers are the most, their way is the one that happens more often.

I've never seen this in any of the villages that I've been to, nor have I heard of this from people that I know.

Why does it matter when every male adult killed in a drone strike is by definition a combatant?

At this point you can just shoot at anyone and say "terrorist".

Israel deciding Gazans right to privacy, or how little, is absurd.

I think they have bigger things to worry about. Like not starving to death.

Perhaps they have a distribution problem instead https://twitter.com/DanLinnaeus/status/1769048206225076573

the right to privacy is a civil right, not a natural one.

If so, then this is a case of an occupier deciding which civil rights their occupied peoples have. Which makes this an apartheid practice. Which does not make this look better.

Well yeah that's how occupations work. No it's not apartheid, sorry.

It does not. Iraqi citizens were not stripped of their civil rights during eight years of American occupation*. An occupying power has responsibility to the civilian population which they occupy, and does not grant rights on dictating which civil rights they have. That is for their own government to decide.

I know this is not a case of apartheid, btw. I was only rebutting your claim that if this were a civil right issue, then it would somehow be OK. But if you were right that it was just a civil right issue, then it wouldn’t. You can’t occupy a state, and strip them of rights which your own citizens have. That is apartheid.

But what is going on here is not apartheid, it is a war crime. Israel isn’t merely stripping occupied citizens of their rights. Israel is a annulling any distinction between a civilian and combatants, and treating the entire civilian population as combatants, including by employing dubious mass surveillance tactics.

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* Edit, to clarify. Many Iraqi citizens were indeed stripped of their civil rights (as we know from documents leaked by Chelsea Manning). However those cases constituted war crimes and in some cases the criminals were even prosecuted and found guilty.

> Israel is a annulling any distinction between a civilian and combatants, and treating the entire civilian population as combatants, including by employing dubious mass surveillance tactics.

By dressing soldiers in civilian clothes, Hamas forces Israel to guess who is or isn't a combatant. Given that Israel has to make such calls, shouldn't they collect all available information to make them as accurately as they can? Shouldn't we be more concerned about mistakes (leading to civilians deaths) than about privacy?

Like I said elsewhere, this logic justifies Oct. 7.

But also, no. The purpose obviously isn’t to find combatants. If it is it is very poor one obviously. No they are doing this to justify mass targeting of civilians.

In reality this does not only strip Palestinians of their privacy, it also creates potential targets out of any Palestinian.

By targeting civilians, do you mean killing them? If that was Israel's goal, why would they need facial recognition? Facial recognition suggests selective targeting; if the goal was to kill civilians wouldn't they just carpet bomb without worrying about any particular targets?

Your guess is as good as mine, but I guess they use it to justify their targeting. What the AI tells them to target, they target. If the AI is inaccurate—which it probably is—even better, the results are the same. Whole neighborhoods are carpet bombed, massive civilian casualty rate, but the optics are better. And hopefully they don’t get charged at the Hague.

There are no natural rights. There is nothing natural or inherent about the rights that wee have fought so hard for

A year ago, I would have discounted all of the recent events as bad fiction.

It is a great sadness that plays in the "theater of the absurd."

The story mentioned at the beginning of the article about Mr. Abu Toha is a story that goes back to last year in november (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mosab-a...), the article make it look like it was happening recently..

What about GDPR?

EU doesn't reach that far.

except for football https://apnews.com/article/uefa-israel-european-soccer-dd890...

GDPR applies to people living in the EU. Gaza is not part of the EU. They would also have a very tough time trying to join the EU for many reasons.

id say this falls under “legitimate interest” and is in the interest of reducing civilian deaths

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