指挥以色列轰炸加沙的人工智能机器 - “薰衣草”（二）

‘There was no “zero-error” policy’
B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.

“没有‘零错误’政策”
使用薰衣草的高级军官 B. 向媒体表示，在当前战争中，军官们不需要独立审查人工智能系统的评估，以节省时间并能够顺利地大规模生产人体目标。
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“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.

“一切都是统计数字，一切都井井有条——非常干巴巴的，”B. 说。他指出，尽管内部检查显示薰衣草的计算准确率只有 90%；换句话说，事先就知道 10% 的暗杀目标根本不是哈马斯军事部门的成员，但这种缺乏监督的做法是允许的。

For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.

例如，消息人士解释道，“薰衣草”机器有时会错误地标记出那些与已知哈马斯或巴基斯坦伊斯兰圣战组织成员有着相似沟通模式的个人，其中包括警察和民防工作人员、武装分子的亲属、姓名和昵称恰巧与成员相同的居民，以及使用曾属于哈马斯成员的设备的加沙人。

“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”

“一个人要和哈马斯有多亲密，才能被人工智能认为是该组织的附属机构？”一位批评薰衣草说法不准确的消息人士说道。“这是一个模糊的界限。一个不从哈马斯领取薪水，却在各种事情上帮助他们的人，是哈马斯特工吗？“如果一个人曾经在哈马斯工作，但现在已经不在那里了，那么他就是哈马斯特工吗？这些特征——机器会标记为可疑的特征——都是不准确的。”

Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families, give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely 100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which [phone] number belongs to whom.”

目标机器对被暗杀者所用手机的识别能力也存在类似问题。消息人士称：“在战争中，巴勒斯坦人经常更换手机。”“人们与家人失去联系，将手机交给朋友或妻子，甚至可能丢失。没有办法 100% 依赖自动机制来确定哪个 [电话] 号码属于谁。”

According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”

据消息人士称，军方知道，最低限度的人工监督无法发现这些错误。“没有‘零错误’政策。错误被统计处理，”一位使用薰衣草的消息人士说。“由于范围和规模，协议规定，即使你不确定机器是否正确，你也知道从统计上看它是没问题的。所以你还是去做吧。”

“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

“事实已经证明了这一点，”资深消息人士 B 说。“统计方法会给你设定一定的规范和标准。这次行动中发生的 [爆炸] 次数多得不合逻辑。在我的记忆中，这是前所未有的。我对统计机制的信任程度远高于两天前失去战友的士兵。包括我在内，那里的每个人都在 10 月 7 日失去了亲人。机器冷静地处理了这一切。这让一切变得更容易。”

Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”

另一位情报人士为依赖薰衣草生成的巴勒斯坦嫌疑人暗杀名单进行辩护，他认为，只有当目标是哈马斯的高级指挥官时，才值得情报人员花时间来核实信息。“但当涉及到初级武装分子时，你不想投入人力和时间，”他说。“在战争中，没有时间去指控每一个目标。所以你愿意冒着使用人工智能的误差幅度，冒着附带损害和平民死亡的风险，冒着误击的风险，并接受它。”

B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”

B. 表示，这种自动化的原因是为了不断产生更多暗杀目标。“在没有目标（其特征评级足以授权打击）的一天里，我们以较低的门槛发动攻击。我们不断受到压力：‘给我们带来更多目标。’他们真的对我们大喊大叫。我们很快就完成了（杀死）目标。”

He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

他解释说，降低薰衣草的评级门槛，会将更多人标记为打击目标。“在巅峰时期，该系统成功生成了 37000 人作为潜在人体目标，”B 说。“但数字一直在变化，因为这取决于你对哈马斯行动人员的设定标准。曾经有一段时间，哈马斯特工的定义更为宽泛，然后机器开始给我们带来各种民防人员、警察，在他们身上浪费炸弹是一种耻辱。他们帮助哈马斯政府，但实际上不会危及士兵。”
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One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.

一位曾与培训薰衣草的军事数据科学团队合作过的消息人士表示，从哈马斯控制的内政部雇员那里收集的数据也被输入了这台机器，但他不认为这些雇员是武装分子。他说：“我对这样的事实感到困扰：在对薰衣草进行培训时，他们随意使用了‘哈马斯特工’一词，并在培训数据集中包括了民防工作者。”
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The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to sext civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”

消息人士补充说，即使有人认为这些人应该被杀，但根据他们的沟通资料对系统进行训练，使得薰衣草在将其算法应用于普通人群时更有可能错误地选择平民。“由于这是一个无需人工操作的自动系统，因此这一决定的意义重大：这意味着你将许多具有平民通信资料的人列为潜在目标。”

‘We only checked that the target was a man’
The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case, an independent examination by an [intelligence] analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law.”

“我们只确认目标是一名男性”
以色列军方断然否认了这些说法。以色列国防军发言人在向当地媒体发表的声明中否认使用人工智能来定罪目标，称这些只是“协助警官定罪的辅助工具”。声明继续说道：“无论如何，都需要由情报分析员进行独立审查，以验证所确定的目标是否为合法的攻击目标，符合以色列国防军指令和国际法规定的条件。”

However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-sexted target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.

不过，消息人士称，在轰炸被“薰衣草”标记的疑似“初级”武装分子的房屋之前，唯一的人工监督协议是进行一项检查：确保人工智能选择的目标是男性而不是女性。军队的假设是，如果目标是一名女性，那么机器很可能犯了一个错误，因为哈马斯和巴基斯坦伊斯兰圣战者组织的军事部门中没有女性。

“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” B. said, explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was “getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.”

“人类只需花几秒钟 [确认目标]，”B. 说道，他解释说，在意识到薰衣草系统大多数时候都“正确无误”后，这成为了惯例。“起初，我们进行了检查，以确保机器不会混淆。但有时我们会依赖自动系统，我们只检查 [目标] 是男性 — — 这就足够了。不需要很长时间就能分辨出某人的声音是男性还是女性。”

To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”

为了进行男女检查，B. 声称在目前的战争中，“在这个阶段，我会为每个目标投入 20 秒，每天做几十次。除了作为批准标志之外，我作为人类没有任何附加价值。这节省了很多时间。如果 [特工] 出现在自动装置中，我检查出他是男性，就会允许轰炸他，但要经过附带损害检查。”
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In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake. According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone] to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.

实际上，消息人士称，这意味着对于被薰衣草错误标记的平民，没有监督机制来发现错误。据 B. 称，一个常见的错误是“如果 [哈马斯] 目标将 [他的手机] 交给他的儿子、哥哥或随便一个男人。这个人将和家人一起在家中被炸。这种情况经常发生。这些是薰衣草造成的大多数错误，”B. 说。

STEP 2: lixiNG TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES
‘Most of the people you killed were women and children’
The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.

第 2 步：将目标与家庭住所联系起来
“你们杀害的大多数人都是妇女和儿童”
以色列军队暗杀程序的下一个阶段是确定在哪里攻击“薰衣草”生成的目标。

In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”

以色列国防军发言人在向当地媒体发表的声明中回应了这篇文章，声称“哈马斯将其人员和军事资产安置在平民区中心，系统地使用平民作为人盾，并在平民建筑内进行战斗，包括医院、清真寺、学校和联合国设施等敏感地点。以色列国防军受国际法约束并依据国际法行事，其攻击对象只是军事目标和军事人员。”

The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’ extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for inflicting the casualties.

我们采访的六个消息来源在某种程度上也表达了同样的意见，他们表示，哈马斯庞大的隧道系统故意从医院和学校地下穿过；哈马斯武装分子使用救护车出行；无数军事资产被安置在平民建筑附近。消息人士称，由于哈马斯的这些策略，以色列的许多袭击都造成平民死亡。人权组织警告说，这种说法逃避了以色列对造成人员伤亡的责任。

However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.

然而，与以色列军队的官方声明相反，消息人士解释说，以色列此次轰炸造成前所未有的死亡人数的一个主要原因是，以色列军队系统地袭击目标的私人住宅，包括他们的家人——部分原因是从情报角度来看，使用自动化系统标记家庭住宅更容易。

Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.

事实上，多个消息来源强调指出，与哈马斯分子多次在平民区从事军事活动的情况不同，在系统性暗杀袭击的情况下，军队经常主动选择在没有发生军事活动的平民家中轰炸嫌疑分子。他们表示，这一选择反映了以色列在加沙实施大规模监视系统的方式。

The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily and automatically “lix” individuals to family houses. In order to identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alx to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”

消息人士告诉当地媒体，由于加沙每个人都拥有一所可以联系到的私人住宅，因此军队的监视系统可以轻松自动地将个人与家庭住宅“联系起来”。为了实时识别特工进入房屋的时间，已经开发了各种额外的自动软件。这些程序可以同时跟踪数千人，识别他们何时在家，并向目标警官发送自动警报，然后目标警官会标记房屋以进行轰炸。其中一种跟踪软件首次公开，名为“爸爸在哪里？”

“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”

一位了解该系统的消息人士表示：“你把数百个目标放入系统，然后等着看谁能被杀。这叫做广泛追捕：你从目标系统生成的列表中复制粘贴。”

Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further suggesting the prominence of this policy.

数据也清楚地证明了这一政策：根据联合国的数据，在战争的第一个月，超过一半的死亡人数（6120人）来自1340个家庭，其中许多家庭是在家中被彻底消灭的。在当前战争中，整个家庭在家中遭到轰炸的比例远远高于2014年以色列在加沙的行动（这是此前以色列在加沙地带最致命的战争），进一步表明了这一政策的重要性。

Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking officers in the military hierarchy.

另一名消息人士称，每次暗杀速度减缓，就会有更多目标被添加到“爸爸在哪里？”等系统中，以定位进入家中并可能被轰炸的个人。他说，将谁放入追踪系统的决定可以由军方级别相对较低的军官做出。
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“One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said. “That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high levels.”

“有一天，我完全自愿地在 [跟踪] 系统中添加了大约 1200 个新目标，因为 [我们进行的] 攻击次数减少了，”消息人士说。“这对我来说很有意义。回想起来，这似乎是我做出的一个严肃的决定。而且这样的决定不是由高层做出的。”

The sources said that in the first two weeks of the war, “several thousand” targets were initially inputted into locating programs like Where’s Daddy?. These included all the members of Hamas’ elite special forces unit the Nukhba, all of Hamas’ anti-tank operatives, and anyone who entered Israel on October 7. But before long, the kill list was drastically expanded.

消息人士称，在战争开始后的前两周，有“数千名”目标被输入到类似“爸爸在哪里？”这样的定位程序中。其中包括哈马斯精锐特种部队 Nukhba 的所有成员、哈马斯的所有反坦克人员以及 10 月 7 日进入以色列的任何人。但不久之后，杀戮名单就大幅扩大了。

“In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens of thousands. This happened a few weeks later, when the [Israeli] brigades entered Gaza, and there were already fewer uninvolved people [i.e. civilians] in the northern areas.” According to this source, even some minors were marked by Lavender as targets for bombing. “Normally, operatives are over the age of 17, but that was not a condition.”

“最后，所有人都被‘薰衣草’标记了，”一位消息人士解释道。“有数万人。几周后，当以色列军队进入加沙时，北部地区的无关人员（即平民）已经很少了。”据该消息人士透露，薰衣草甚至将一些未成年人列为轰炸目标。“通常情况下，行动人员年龄都在 17 岁以上，但这并不是一个条件。”

Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.

消息人士称，薰衣草和“爸爸在哪里？”等系统结合在一起，产生了致命的效果，导致整个家庭丧命。通过将薰衣草生成的列表中的姓名添加到“爸爸在哪里？”A. 解释说，有了家庭跟踪系统，被标记的人将受到持续监视，并且一旦他们踏入家门就可能受到攻击，导致房子倒塌，压垮家里的所有人。

“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

“假设你计算出 [ 有一名 ] 哈马斯 [ 特工 ] 加上 10 名 [ 房子里的平民 ]，” A. 说。“通常，这 10 人都是妇女和儿童。荒谬的是，事实证明你杀死的大多数人都是妇女和儿童。”

STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON
‘We usually carried out the attacks with “dumb bombs”’
Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.

步骤 3：选择武器
“我们通常使用‘哑弹’进行袭击。”
一旦薰衣草标记了暗杀目标，军方人员确认他们是男性，并且跟踪软件已将目标定位在家中，下一步就是选择用来轰炸他们的弹药。

In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates, about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were “dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs. In response to the CNN report, an army spokesperson quoted in the article said: “As a military committed to international law and a moral code of conduct, we are devoting vast resources to minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas has forced into the role of human shields. Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza.”

2023年12月，美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）报道称，根据美国情报部门的估计，以色列空军在加沙使用的弹药中约有45%是“哑弹”，众所周知，这种炸弹比制导炸弹造成的附带伤害更大。针对 CNN 的报道，文章中引用了一位军方发言人的话：“作为一支恪守国际法和道德行为准则的军队，我们正投入大量资源，尽量减少被哈马斯强行充当人盾的平民所受的伤害。我们的战争是针对哈马斯，而不是针对加沙人民。”

Three intelligence sources, however, told +972 and Local Call that junior operatives marked by Lavender were assassinated only with dumb bombs, in the interest of saving more expensive armaments. The implication, one source explained, was that the army would not strike a junior target if they lived in a high-rise building, because the army did not want to spend a more precise and expensive “floor bomb” (with more limited collateral effect) to kill him. But if a junior target lived in a building with only a few floors, the army was authorized to kill him and everyone in the building with a dumb bomb.

然而，三名情报人员告诉当地媒体，为了节省更昂贵的武器，被薰衣草标记的初级特工只被哑弹暗杀。一位消息人士解释道，这意味着如果初级目标住在高层建筑中，军队就不会袭击他，因为军队不想花费更精确、更昂贵（附带效应更有限）的“地板炸弹”来杀死他。但如果一个初级目标住在一栋只有几层的大楼里，军队就被授权用一枚哑弹杀死他和大楼里的所有人。

“It was like that with all the junior targets,” testified C., who used various automated programs in the current war. “The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”

“所有初级目标都是这样，”在当前战争中使用过各种自动化程序的 C. 作证说。“唯一的问题是，能否以附带损害的形式袭击建筑物？因为我们通常使用哑弹进行袭击，这意味着摧毁整座房屋，包括里面的人。但即使避免了一次袭击，你也不在乎——你会立即转向下一个目标。由于这个系统，目标永远不会结束。还有 36000 个目标在等着你。”