Palantir’s AI machines need data for fuel—data in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians in the occupied territories. And for decades a key and highly secret source of that data for Israel has been the US National Security Agency, according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. After fleeing to Hong Kong in 2013 with a pocket full of flash drives containing some of the agency’s highest secrets, Snowden ended up in Moscow where, soon after he arrived, I met with him for Wired magazine. And in the interview, he told me that “one of the biggest abuses” he saw while at the agency was how the NSA secretly provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and e-mail communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories. Snowden was concerned that as a result of sharing those private conversations with Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be at great risk of being targeted for arrest or worse.”
“Now, with Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, critical information from NSA continues to be used by Unit 8200, according to a number of sources, to target tens of thousands of Palestinians for death—often with US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs and other weapons. And it is extremely powerful data-mining software, such as that from Palantir, that helps the IDF to select targets.
I mean, yes, that’s what gradual escalation doctrine means. Unfortunately that system is comprehensive, it works from the ground up this way, and any system modeled after it (which after the Cold War became most of the world) reinforces it and impedes the cure to it.
The cure would be not only many leftist ideologies, but also, for example, things like ancaps and sovcits. The problem is that all of these are so negatively perceived that even denying them voice is not seen as a problem for many people.
People think it’s normal, this gradual process. That it is democracy, waiting for your enemy to do vile shit like this and then argue it “by the law”, and never God forbid start first.
While the solution would be preventive rebellion, and none of popular philosophy substantiates that. Everyone thinks that’s something only terrorists, bad-bad fascists and bad-bad bolsheviks do. With plenty of history to support that viewpoint, of course, except millions of dead under colonial rule in Africa and from British blockades even in the two world wars were killed by neither bolsheviks nor fascists.
Getting back to the system, I mean culture of social interactions by that, which is beneficial for them in most of the world. As a reaction to other transgressions, maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact.