Short Wave - How Israel Is Using Facial Recognition In Gaza

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

After the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 triggered Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began fleeing from the North of Gaza to the South. As they fled, many Palestinians reported passing through checkpoints with cameras. Israel had previously used facial recognition software in the West Bank, and some Palestinians reached out to The New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel to investigate whether the same was happening in Gaza. Science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel talks to Frenkel about how Israel launched this facial recognition system in Gaza late last year with the help of private companies and Google photos. Read Frenkel's full article.Want to hear us cover more stories about AI? Email us at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. I'm your host today, science correspondent Jeff Brumfield. Earlier this year, I went to Israel to cover the ongoing war that began after the Hamas attack of October 7th. And I found myself on a grassy hill overlooking the city of Hebron. Hebron is in the occupied West Bank. It's home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, but also living there are some militant Israeli settlers. It's a tense place full of soldiers and checkpoints and high-powered security cameras. Even here, you can see there's cameras.

There's cameras sticking out from the rooftops, sort of peeping out of the corners of houses. And yeah, I mean, it does feel like you're surveilled pretty much everywhere you go here. These cameras are doing more than just watching people. They're identifying them, thanks to facial recognition. Issa Umro is a Palestinian activist and longtime resident. of Hebron. He says the cameras know him. They have our own data. It's connected to the camera with facial recognition. This is what they say, facial recognition. I think it's more than that.

It's body, its eyes, it's your shapes. So it's more than that, okay? And the cameras tell Israeli soldiers patrolling the city everything about him. Before he even shows them his ID, they've got his life story. I am human rights defender. I was in jail many times. They tell me about that I'm divorced. How many times I passed a checkpoint? They know that.

Where I've been, you know, in certain hours? They just tell me all of that. For a few years now, Hebron has been a laboratory for Israeli security forces and private companies to test out their latest facial recognition software. But then came the Hamas attack and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began fleeing on foot from the north of Gaza to the south. Under the watch of Israeli soldiers, desperate Gaza and civilians, all families fleeing their homes.

And as they fled, many reported passing through checkpoints with cameras. Some of them contacted New York Times tech reporter Schererankel. I had previously been a Middle East reporter for 10 years, and so they knew me from my time there. and they knew that I now covered technology. And so they essentially just reached out and said, we think something's going on here. We think this might be a camera system. Maybe it's like the facial recognition program Israel uses in the West Bank.

Can you start to look into this? She decided she is going to try and find out what was going on. I went about sort of getting in touch with various contacts in Israel's defense ministry, Israeli soldiers who were serving in the Gaza Strip, who had left, who could potentially tell me what was going on, and just trying to report out whether they had, in fact, launched a facial recognition program in Gaza. And she discovered that the Israeli military was trying to set up a new facial recognition system

with the help of private Israeli companies and, believe it or not, Google Photos. So today on the show, Shira and I are going to talk about how Israel's government is using facial recognition and AI to track Palestinians and why people in every single country on Earth should be paying close attention to what they're up to. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. So first things first, you're a tech reporter, I'm a science reporter. We should probably talk briefly about how modern facial recognition works because it's quite closely related to the sort of AI revolution we're living in right now, right? Yes, very much.

It's part of this new wave of technology that's coming out and AI-backed, which is really changing the capabilities of what we knew technology was able to do until now. Right. And these facial recognition programs are neural networks, right? They are similar to sort of chat GPT or cousins of those models. Exactly. I mean, the way I like to think of it because I'm actually not a very technical person, they're creating maps of your face. These programs are taking your image and they're mapping every element of your face

and then storing that as sort of data as ones and zeros. And then when another image is uploaded, it scans that image and it says, are there matches here? Do we think these two faces actually belong to the same person? And just like these AI models, they're shown huge. databases and they learn to identify different faces by training on those databases. Exactly. And like any AI system, they're only as good as the training that goes into them. So the more data you give them, the more examples you give it of these two people are in fact the same, the more they learn to recognize, in fact, what makes up a human face and how they can,

with some degree of confidence, say, we believe these two faces belong to the same individual. So the tech itself has gotten very good, assuming the algorithm is properly trained. But, you know, it's just as good as the system you're plugged into. So when you're at the airport, you know, there are facial recognition technologies being used more and more now. I've come across them recently. And that's a situation. It's a very controlled environment. You have a photo ID.

You are staring straight at a camera. You know you're being logged by a facial recognition system. But the Israelis have been using it in different ways in the West Bank and elsewhere, right? Sure. I mean, I think the way to think about it is in the airport, you're making a choice. to be scanned by facial recognition software, you're deciding to allow that system to scan your face. And, you know, a lot of people prefer it. It makes their time at the airport go faster. They don't have to pull out a passport every time in some airports, at least they use these systems.

You can just have your face scanned. So it's seen as time saving and people basically see it as a service. The difference between that and governments, including the Israeli government that used facial recognition, is that in the West Bank, for instance, Palestinians who need to move between two ears, areas because they work in one or because they just need to visit a hospital or get, you know, literally cross a road. They're not choosing to be scanned by that facial recognition software. There's no opt-in, opt-out system. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things I heard while I was in Hebron is that they don't always even know when they're being scanned, right? Like they have high-powered cameras that

aren't at the checkpoints that at least people like Yissa Amro think can pick up their face just walking through the city. Right. And again, so there's the checkpoints themselves, which the cameras are very visible. They know they're being scanned. And then there are a number of cameras that are just scattered through cities. And we'll get to the soon, I think. But in Gaza, there are drones that fly above head. There are entire systems that are in place that nobody in Gaza has an opt into. They are just living their lives in Gaza. And their faces are being scanned. So turning to Gaza, what's going on there? How is it different from the West Bank? So Israel has not had military presence themselves in Gaza since 2005, which is when Israel announced it was going to go through a process called the disengagement. It was going to withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip. So any kind of surveillance, including facial recognition software that's done in Gaza, is done from afar. It's done literally from the physical border

that Gaza shares with Israel. There are a number of cameras that are set up along that fence. It's done via drones. And it's done via online surveillance. The Facebook pages, the Instagram, the YouTube, all the social media of Palestinians who live in Gaza is very closely monitored by Israel. And this is all being done by this specific part of military intelligence called Unit 8200, or at least they have a central role in what you found out what's going on. Right. So Unit 8200, which is, in fact, one of the largest units in the Israeli military, does their digital surveillance, their online surveillance. So Unit 8200 had, for a long time, had a very sort of basic facial recognition program running in Gaza.

It wasn't nearly as broad as what they had in the West Bank because they didn't have the same system of cameras and soldiers on the ground. But they had been keeping track of people that they believed to be members of Hamas. They had been keeping trap of people who they thought were relatives of those who were in Hamas or other extremist Islamist groups in Gaza. And that included their images. After October 7th, they really, you know, they stepped up that. program is the best way I can think of it. They immediately went through the videos that had been

filmed on October 7th and any individual who had taken part in coming across the border. They had tried to identify by name and also get multiple images of them, sometimes pulling from their social media. And then they had very quickly said, well, look, we are definitely sending soldiers in. Let's talk about how we're going to launch a broader facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip. And so they ended up partnering with this Israeli company called Korsight. Right. Korsight is one of the largest and most prominent facial recognition companies based in Israel. And this is a company that for years has kind of touted its ability to recognize faces, even from photos that only showed a very small part of the face. And so this was very attractive for the Israel military because they had a lot of images from October 7th in which only, you know, a very small part of a person's face were shown.

And I got to say when I read your article that did raise my eyebrows because, like, facial recognition, as we discussed, it's very good when you're standing in front of a camera, but at high angles with faces partially obscured, maybe with low resolution or at night. Like, you know, all of this really degrades the software's ability to identify faces, right? Right. And I mean, I think as anyone who has ever, you know, seeing PR claims of a company knows, there's a big gulf between what a company says it can do and what it can actually do. And Korsight's claims about being able to recognize people's faces that were like, you know, almost fully covered by masks or bandanas or balaclavas or whatever.

They were pretty extraordinary. And I think the Israeli military really saw an opportunity to test that. What did they find, I guess, when they tried this out? Well, they actually discovered that there was quite a high failure rate, an error rate of faces being misidentified. This became especially clear to them because it wasn't just being used to identify members of Hamas and other militant groups. But it was also being used to identify Israelis who had been taken hostage and taken into the Gaza Strip. Israel wanted to be able to look through video footage and say, okay, this individual was taken from their home and can we spot them anywhere else in Gaza? One thing that became interesting to me is I did this reporting and I spoke to quite a few members of Unit 8200 is that they weren't as bothered when they misidentified Palestinians because they kind of had this attitude of like, oh, well, you know, we'll take the wrong person in for questioning and that's okay because in questioning we'll figure out they're the wrong person.

One of the other things I found really wild about your story is like because in part it seemed like Quarsight's. system wasn't working that well. I guess unit A-200 was also like using Google Photos. Can you talk a little about that? So what they discovered, and this really came up specifically with the hostages, was that Google Photos, which is the same Google Photos you or I can have on our phone, where you upload a bunch of photos and then you can identify in my case. I'll say, okay, this is my child, this is my cat. And then you can then search your photos and say, please find me other photos of my child or of my cat. Google Photos is really, really good at this because they're really developing the same kind of AI technology to match faces, to map faces that other companies are. And the Israeli Army discovered that Google's technology

on this was actually so good that it was better than this custom-built software for Corsight, that Corsight had made for them. And so they started increasingly using Google photos to identify specifically hostages that had been taken on that day. And they found that even with only a very small part of the face visible in a photo or in a video, Google's technology was excellent at identifying those faces. So they were just basically building photo albums like with a Google account? Exactly. They were just uploading photos into a photo album and then asking Google to find the faces that were the same. I will note here that this is the free off-the-shelf technology that anybody can use. And so Google didn't know that its technology was being used in this way until I got in touch with

them and said, I'm hearing from multiple people in unit 8,200, multiple intelligence officers that they're using your technology. And I think they were pretty surprised that they were being used by the Israeli army. You know, my phone unlocks with face ID, Google photo ID, airports. I mean, it's everywhere now, right, Shira? Like, I just wonder kind of how you're thinking about facial recognition, both being in Silicon Valley and seeing it everywhere and then going to Israel and seeing these really extreme cases of how it's being used in a place like Gaza? You know, much like AI or social media, which is something else I cover a lot of, I sort of just accept that technology is here. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

No government that runs facial recognition programs is going to step back that facial recognition program. And I think what we need to think about as individuals is how much of our consent is going into this and how much surveillance are we willing to accept in our everyday lives. so often we en masse kind of accept this technology into our lives because it makes our life so much easier. It really helps us connect to other people or it helps us go through airport lines faster or whatever it is. And then it's only years later that we kind of sit up and go, oh man, I gave up so much of my privacy. I had no idea I was consenting to all that. And so like really much like any other new type of technology, I just think it's a really important moment for people to say, like, okay, well, what kind of consent is being given?

And how much do I know about what types of privacy I'm giving up when I opt into this? Well, Shira, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by me and Rachel. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.

I'm Jeff Brumfield. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.