Israel has deployed a massive facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent. technology/israel-facial-recognition-gaza.html”>The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7 attacks, uses technology from Google Photos, as well as a custom tool created by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight, to identify people affiliated with Hamas.
The facial recognition program was created in conjunction with Israel's military offensive in Gaza, according to the Times report. After the October 7 attacks, officers from the Israeli army's Unit 8200, the main intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces, identified potential targets by looking at security camera footage and videos that Hamas had posted on social media. . Soldiers also asked Palestinian prisoners to identify people from their Hamas-affiliated communities.
Corsight, which has boasted that its technology can accurately identify people even if less than 50 percent of their face is visible, used these photographs to build a facial recognition tool that Israeli officers could use in Gaza. To further expand its database (and identify potential targets), the Israeli military installed checkpoints equipped with facial recognition cameras along the main roads that Palestinians used to flee south. The target, an officer told Timeswas to create a “target list” of people who participated in the October 7 attack.
In some cases, Corsight's tool misidentified people as connected to Hamas.
The soldiers told the Times Corsight's technology was not always accurate, particularly when relying on grainy images or photographs in which people's faces were obscured. In some cases, Corsight's tool misidentified people as connected to Hamas. One such case involved Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was taken from an Israeli military checkpoint on Gaza's central highway in mid-November while attempting to leave Gaza for Egypt with his family. The system had marked Abu Toha as being on an Israeli wanted list. Israeli officials held Abu Toha in a detention center, where he was beaten and interrogated for two days before being returned to Gaza without explanation.
The Israeli military has supplemented Corsight's technology with Google Photos, which, unlike Corsight, is free to use, soldiers told the Times. Intelligence agents uploaded databases of “known people” to Google Photos and used the photo search function to better identify people. An officer told Times that Google Photos could identify people even when only a small part of their face was visible, making it better than other tools, including Corsight.
Corsight executives and financiers have openly expressed their desire to help the Israeli military in its ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. in an october opinion article for The Jerusalem Post, Aaron Ashkenazi, founder and managing partner of Canadian fund Awz Ventures, which led Corsight's $5 million funding round in 2020, wrote that Awz was providing Israel “the technological tools to stop these evil terrorists in their tracks.” . Most of the companies in Awz's portfolio are in the artificial intelligence and cybersecurity sectors.
In October, some hospitals in Israel began using Corsight's technology to identify patients. Forbes reported At the time. According to the Forbes According to the report, Corsight's technology was able to take images of people “whose features had been affected by physical trauma and find a match among photos submitted by concerned family members.”
Corsight primarily focuses on government, law enforcement, and military uses. In 2020, the year-old company said its technology tech-masked/”>could identify masked faces. Two years later, Corsight claimed to be developing a tool that could create a model of a person's face based on their DNA. Last year, Corsight worked with the metropolitan police of Bogotá, Colombia, to ai-Helped-Bogot%C3%A1-Police-Recognize-and-Arrest-Murder-and-Theft-Suspects-Using-Facial-Recognition”>locate murder and robbery suspects in the public transportation system.
Corsight did not respond to a request for comment.
