How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza

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. While the company does not disclose operational details, some indications of the power and speed of its AI can be understood by examining its activities on behalf of another client at war: Ukraine. Palantir is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to Karp. “From the moment the algorithms set to work detecting their targets [i.e., people] until these targets are prosecuted [i.e., killed]—a term of art in the field—no more than two or three minutes elapse,” noted Bruno Macaes, a former senior Portuguese official who was given a tour of Palantir’s London headquarters last year. “In the old world, the process might take six hours.”

The company is currently developing an even more powerful AI targeting system called TITAN (for “Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node”). According to Palantir, TITAN is a “next-generation Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance ground station enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to process data received from Space, High Altitude, Aerial and Terrestrial layers.” Although designed for use by the US Army, it’s possible that the company could test prototypes against Palestinians in Gaza. “How precise and accurate can you know a system is going to be unless it’s already been trained and tested on people?” said Catherine Connolly of the Stop Killer Robot coalition, which includes Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.