Technology

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Since the start of the war in October 2023, Israel has been using AI tools to conduct its massive bombing campaign in Gaza. The Israeli military’s “directorate of targets” relies on soldiers with decoding, cyber and research capabilities to produce targets on a large scale. Pegasus is used to locate and collect data on individuals. This data is then fed to automated targeting platforms like Where’s Daddy, Gospel and Lavender, which utilize facial recognition, geolocating and cloud computing to generate targets at rapid rates. The spyware can also record and manipulate actions to manufacture fake digital evidence to retroactively justify the execution of civilians.

With the application of these new technologies, Gaza remains Israel’s premier testing ground for advances in the automation of war. These advances can then be marketed and exported on a global scale.

From Pegasus to Gaza

Pegasus is the most malicious spyware on the market.

Unlike other types of malware, which work by deceiving people into clicking a link that then infects their device, Pegasus has a zero-click capacity. The technology can be installed remotely without any interaction from the user, making it nearly impossible to detect. Attackers can take control of a phone’s camera and microphone, effectively transforming it into a live tracking and recording device; they can extract all data, including messages, emails, photos, recordings, browsing histories, calendars and locations; and they can use Pegasus to plant falsified and incriminating evidence on a target’s mobile device. Pegasus can spread like a virus through communication networks.

Citizen Lab, a Canadian digital watchdog organization based at the University of Toronto, began publishing damning and revealing reports about Pegasus in 2016. In 2019, two Israeli spies posing as investors requested meetings with Citizen Lab’s research team in Toronto. Senior researcher John Scott-Railton suspected their request was a ruse to gather information about the Lab’s investigative work and methodology. He took a lunch meeting with a man who described himself as a wealthy Parisian named Michel Lambert. During their conversation the investor pressed for information about the Lab’s reports on NSO Group. As they were eating dessert, a reporter and a photographer from the Associated Press, who had been tipped off about the set-up by Scott-Railton, approached the table. The visitor scrambled to flee the restaurant, taking along two other spies who had been recording the lunch meeting. Lambert was later exposed to be Aharon Almog-Assoulin, a retired Israeli security official.

The Forbidden Stories Consortium, a Paris-based international network of journalists dedicated to protecting reporters, discovered that over 50,000 people had been targeted by government customers of NSO Group.

In 2020, thanks to a massive data leak, the scale of Pegasus’s use became clear. The Forbidden Stories Consortium, a Paris-based international network of journalists dedicated to protecting reporters, discovered that over 50,000 people had been targeted by government customers of NSO Group. The targets included journalists, human rights defenders, academics, diplomats, union leaders, politicians and several heads of state. In the wake of the leak and working in coordination with Amnesty International’s Security Lab and Citizen Lab, Forbidden Stories met with victims to conduct forensic analyses of their devices. The Pegasus Project is their investigation into cyber-spying with the aim of countering high-tech threats to journalists and human rights defenders.

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