Many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are the target of the Israeli military’s secret Blue Wolf facial recognition program, which collects images of people without their consent for general population surveillance, the New York Times reported. journalistic investigation.

This technology was originally intended to find Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas, News.ro quotes.

After the start of Israel’s bloody offensive in the Palestinian enclave, this program was used by the IDF to identify members of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.

The problem is that the algorithms sometimes used accused innocent people, who were then arrested and tortured, according to American journalists.

Before the start of the war in Gaza, there were no such efforts in the enclave.

On the other hand, the occupied West Bank has been suffering from this Blue Wolf surveillance program for several years now.

Using cameras or Israeli military smartphones, the program scans the faces of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints, which are then registered in a database.

GOOGLE IT

“The facial recognition program run by Israeli military intelligence, including Cyber ​​​​Intelligence Unit 8200, is based on Israeli Corsight technology. He also uses Google Photos,” four Israeli intelligence officers told the NYT.

Israel’s secret military intelligence unit 8200 quickly realized that the Corsight tool did not work well with pixelated images and partially obscured faces, increasing the number of false identifications.

The blue wolf, which was also used to identify the victims of the October 7 terrorist attacks, did not recognize the disfigured people.

Instead, Google recognizes anyone, even if only part of their face is visible.

“Uploading a database of famous people to Google Photos, Israeli officers used the service’s photo search feature to identify people,” the NYT reported.

Why invest in expensive tracking and spying tools or devices? It was enough for Google to ask them, NYT also reported, citing News.ro.

Photo: Dreamstime.com