privacy

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Tapping a massive pool of data about the Strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants, Lavender algorithmically assigns “almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant,” the report states, citing six Israeli intelligence officers.

The report indicated WhatsApp usage is among the multitude of personal characteristics and digital behaviors the Israeli military uses to mark Palestinians for death, citing a book on AI targeting written by the current commander of Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the NSA.

It was only after the publication of the Lavender exposé and subsequent writing on the topic that a wider swath of Meta staff discovered the March WhatsApp threat assessment, said the four company sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation by their employer.

The internal warning notes that these attacks require all members of a WhatsApp group or both sides of a conversation to be on the same network and within the same country or “treaty jurisdiction,” a possible reference to the Five Eyes spy alliance between the U.S., Australia, Canada, U.K., and New Zealand.

Asked what steps the company has taken to shore up the app against traffic analysis, Meta’s spokesperson told The Intercept, “We have a proven track record addressing issues we identify and have worked to hold bad actors accountable.

The report warns that adding an artificial delay to messages to throw off attempts to geolocate the sender and receiver of data, for instance, will make the app feel slower to all 2 billion users — most of whom will never have to worry about the snooping of intelligence agencies.

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