Nomos takes part in Investigating Kill Cloud Conference: Information Warfare, Automation & AI at Disruption Network Institute, Berlin

Automated Surveillance & Targeted Killing in Gaza With Matt Mahmoudi (Researcher & Advisor on AI & Human Rights at Amnesty Tech/Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at Uni. of Cambridge, DK/IR/UK), Sophia Goodfriend (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, Journalist, +972 Magazine, IL), Khalil Dewan (PhD Nomos Fellow in Law at SOAS University of London, UK). Moderated by Matthias Monroy (Editor of the German civil rights journal Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and nd.Der Tag, DE).

On November 17, 2023, amid Israel’s military assault on Gaza, reports began to surface of Palestinians being held en masse between two large structures on Salah al-Din Road, the main north–south thoroughfare in Gaza. Israeli authorities had announced the opening of an evacuation corridor to allow Palestinians fleeing bombardment of their homes and neighborhoods in the north to move to Israeli-designated safe zones in the south. Before the military would allow Palestinian families to pass, however, they were forced to have their faces scanned. With airstrikes and shelling ongoing – which have killed over 39,000 at the time of writing – the Israeli occupying army required Palestinians, already the world’s most heavily surveilled community, to submit to the extraction of their biometric information as a condition of their being allowed to reach safety.

In his presentation, Matt Mahmoudi describes how Gaza has gone from being the world’s largest open-air prison to an open-air exposition for technologies of violence. Since Israel imposed a near complete siege on Gaza in October 2023, it has been using artificial intelligence to further streamline its campaign of killing, destruction, and violence in Gaza. Occupied Palestine has long been home to vast architectures of surveillance and control. This talk outlines some of the key algorithmic practices undergirding Israel’s system of oppression, in particular movement restrictions, against Palestinians. Under Israel’s deepening occupation over the Palestinian territories in more recent years, Israeli technologies developed an “international brand” (particularly resonant against the backdrop of the War on Terror), allowing Israel to become a vanguard for practices of racialised surveillance, warfare, policing, and control with impact far beyond the region. The infrastructures of violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and their logics constitute the modus operandi for the proliferation of “smart” interventions elsewhere, under a veneer of greater convenience and safety, but to profoundly devastating effect.

Sophia Goodfriend unpacks the genesis and impact of Israel’s AI powered targeting in Gaza. Drawing on first hand testimonies from Israeli intelligence veterans and statements offered by Israeli military officials, she will outline how systems like Lavender, Where’s Daddy, and the Gospel rely on a vast, unlawful, and increasingly automated surveillance infrastructure built up across Palestine over the last two decades. Originally billed as humane solutions to regional conflict, her talk reveals how these systems have abetted the imperatives of successive right-wing Israeli governments by papering over lethal operations with a veneer of algorithmic rationality. In recent years, military heads have encouraged an overreliance on automated systems in a bid to drive up death tolls while promising such systems make their operations efficient and precise. Returning to testimonies offered by Israeli whistleblowers and published in +972s investigations, her talk underscores the violence enabled by the unrestrained deployment of such systems as well as the dangerous precedent they offer for the rest of the world.

Khalil Dewan’s presentation explores Israel's targeting practices through the perspectives of those subjected to targeted killings, illuminating the often-hidden realities of state lethality. By examining the interplay of future warfare, lawfare, and emerging technologies, the discussion will reveal how advancements in AI and autonomy are redefining the kill chain and expanding the roles of private actors in lethal operations beyond traditional battlefields.

Key themes include the individualisation and privatisation of warfare, raising critical questions about accountability and the shifting parameters of who can be legitimately targeted in resistance. Investigating the Kill Cloud https://www.disruptionlab.org/investi... #DNL34 #KillCloud