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ACCORDING TO LIZ - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was established in 1978, ostensibly to limit and codify Executive Branch-authorized surveillance in the wake of revelations by the Church Commission of gross abuses by the CIA and Hoover’s FBI, and expanded as increasingly complex technologies were adopted by individuals and foreign powers threatening the United States and agencies of the Federal government.
Section 702 of FISA was added in 2008 in wake of the George W. Bush administration’s gross and continued flaunting of FISA following the fall of the Twin Towers 24 years ago today, moving mainstream America to more of a police state and engendered the acceleration of political violence. It contains a sunset clause that requires its re-authorization every two years, and changes can and have been added since.
Section 702 allows the government to collect communications of non-Americans located abroad without a warrant but in reality, surveillance of the online activities of foreigners scoops up huge tranches of data on American citizens in the process.
The alphabet agencies, the Pentagon, right wing authoritarian politicians, and think tanks keep pushing to expand surveillance and covert operations both outside and within the country, sensationalizing threats to Americans in order to fan fears and capitalize on bloodlust against “others” to further augment their powers.
Many civil liberties groups support restoration of broader American rights to privacy, and the curtailment of the creeping Big Brother aspects of the government. What is certain is that the current president and his allies will be pushing to eviscerate what restrictions remain when Section 702 comes up for renewal in April of 2026.
Before the midterms.
To further eradicate the increasingly thin veneer of civilized behavior by this government and continue the demonization of immigrants and all those who oppose an autocracy.
Meanwhile, a month after the IDF commenced “retributive justice” operations for the October 7 attack by Hamas, the online English-language Israeli news publication +972 Magazine and its Hebrew-language partner Local Call published a joint report calling out IDF targeting operations using a technologically advanced program called Gospel to run a “mass assassination factory.”
Gospel employs A.I. in compiling and cross-referencing massive amounts of data, automatically generating lists of military objectives at which to aim their murderous missiles.
Target-rich environments including private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives might live. With their children.
“Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through heavy shelling of these residential homes.”
Israel claims detailed reviews of Gospel’s datasets are made pursuant to international law prior to any action but, in the pressure to produce results and the emotional distancing of remote warfare, decisions are too often made in the abstract.
As HUMINT (human-based intelligence) shifted to the more conjectural technical interception and analysis of SIGINT and TECHINT, metrics of body counts more and more superseded proof and accuracy.
“A.I. is increasing the tempo of operations and expanding the pool of potential targets, making target verification and other precautionary obligations much harder to fulfill, increasing the risk that civilians will be misidentified and mistakenly targeted.”
At least ten for each pinpointed military target. With one IDF officer quoted as saying “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
As a result of Israel’s terrorist activities, this collateral damage has served to move undecided Gazans and their allies to support Hamas.
In April of 2024 President Biden signed legislation reauthorizing Section 702 of FISA for two years.
Earlier that month +972 published a detailed report on Israel’s use of a new iteration of A.I.-enhanced targeting known as “Lavender” built on American Palantir technology as part of a “strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry to supply technology to help the country’s war effort.”
Lavender assigns a numerical score, from 1 to 100, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses yet another automated system, known as Where’s Daddy?
Where’s Daddy tracking puts the homes of such suspects under constant drone surveillance, with an airstrike launched once one is determined to be at home.
And Western media muses over why so many women and children have died in Gaza?
Lavender already had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad when Israel commenced operations against Gaza in the wake of the October 7 attack.
The +972 report also quoted sources saying, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists” and that the military was to accept every A.I.-generated name “as if it were a human decision” with no requirement to thoroughly check why or how A.I. determined such targets or examine the underlying intelligence and raw data.
The speed with which Lavender generates targets allows barely 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even knowing that the Lavender system has at least 10% rate of inaccurate identifications, and the collateral damage is unacceptable under the rules of war.
Other sources said the Israeli army made decisions during the first weeks of the current conflict that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians” and “the army on several occasions authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
Much of the intelligence infrastructure that supports IDF attacks, can be used in a manner that violates the law of armed conflict which governs military targeting. These are relatively straightforward although their application IRL can be a tad complex.
* One, only military objectives, combatants, members of organized armed groups, and direct participants in hostilities may be attacked.
* Two, precautions must be undertaken in attacks to minimize harm to civilian objects or injury or death to civilians i.e. collateral damage.
* Three, any collateral damage must be proportional and may not be excessive relative to the attack’s anticipated concrete and direct military advantage.
Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said if details in the report prove to be true, “many Israeli strikes in Gaza would constitute the war crimes of launching disproportionate attacks.”
Kill lists such as Lavender have a long history in the U.S. including its name. The Lavender Scare was the little brother of McCarthyism which led to the purging of homosexual and transgender people from government service in the 1950s.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA spirited Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen who had generated many of Hitler’s kill lists away to America and put him to work in the same capacity against the Soviet sphere.
The Allen Dulles regime at the CIA vastly expanded on the technology used to create kill lists from abetting its early coups in Iran and Guatemala through to its Machiavellian interference in regime change and conflicts on foreign soil around the world.
Other CIA contributions to political and ethnic cleansings include General Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., father of the Desert Storm Commander, training Iran’s SAVAK intelligence service in the use of kill lists and torture to purge that country’s government and military of anti-Shah opposition.
The CIA-fomented coup in Guatemala culminated in U.S. special forces joining in a scorched-earth campaign, killing 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. CIA-trained death squads abducted, tortured, and killed Guatemalan Labor Party members, and a CIA-compiled database led to the genocide and “disappearance” of at least 200,000 Indigenous people.
The U.S. Embassy provided a list of 5,000 communists to Suharto’s death squads, ultimately leading to the murders of between a quarter of a million and a million Indonesians.
Close to 100,000 Vietnamese were murdered, incarcerated, or “persuaded” to defect as a result of the CIA-driven Phoenix Program, many killed “in error.”
As Navy SEAL Elton Manzione once told author Douglas Valentine: “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”
CIA support for Augusto Pinochet’s bloodthirsty coup in Chile in 1973 led to its proactive backing of Operation Condor, where an unholy alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia targeted, tortured, “disappeared” and murdered tens of thousands of dissidents and political opponents.
To date, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation pka the CIA’s U.S. School of the Americas has trained tens of thousands of Latin American officers in the promulgation of torture and death squads.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal oversaw the development of a database system mining numbers from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes. At least some of which were presumably friends and family.
As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets led to an equal increase in collateral damage. And the capture and killing of innocents fueled further fierce resistance to the occupation, ultimately driving the American forces out in ignominy.
Obama’s “Terror Tuesdays” which employed a computerized “disposition matrix” to select targets for drones to murder in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia was equally indiscriminate, with as many as 90% of the murdered later identified as civilian casualties.
“Israel is currently trying to sell these tools [Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy] to foreign entities, to governments that are looking to what Israel’s doing in Gaza, not with disgust, but actually with admiration,” wrote Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein.
Other Palantir security technologies include A.I. predictive policing and surveillance, much coveted by the Trump administration for its militarization of the United States. And, presumably, Charlie Kirk’s assassination will be another red flag joining criminal illegal aliens to justify such seizure of dictatorial power.
There are huge economic benefits to war profiteers in continued bombing and the greasing of the military machine as well as the rise of authoritarianism, but even worse is America’s more dramatic moral race to the bottom.
Iran-Contra, Twin Towers, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, Gaza – when will it all end?
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
