A little-discussed detail in the
Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [
1] as a suspected militant [
2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it?
Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [
3] - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy").
One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect.
But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a "private" social network, including "end-to-end" encryption of messages.
Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of "pre-crime" targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's
publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in "pre-crime".
It's important to note that already Meta is taking extensive part in the Israeli-led and US-backed genocide, including
significant and well-reported suppression of content supporting Palestinian freedom, as well a new anti-"anti-zionist" policy that is used to shut down dissent of Israel's crimes [
4].
Why is Meta doing this? Why is Meta so happy to share metadata about group membership with Israel – a run-around the idea of a "private" social network – and to be complicit in the genocide?
Let's look at their leadership, in particular the three most senior leaders who have close ties to Israel.
Their Chief Information Security Officer, Guy Rosen, is their most senior policy decision maker. He is Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv [5], and was in the Israeli military in Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is the Israeli NSA and is the department that built and runs Lavender. Insiders tell me that Rosen is the person most associated with the
anti-"anti-zionism" [
4] policies, and is also responsible for the
suppression of Palestinian content.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO has also been a significant supporter of Israel's propaganda. Zuckerberg gave $125k to Zaka, one of the groups that created and continues to spread much of the
original Oct 7 false atrocity propaganda, including the discredited "Oct 7 mass rape" hoax [
6].
Meanwhile former COO and current Meta board member, Sheryl Sandberg, has been on tour spreading the same discredited propaganda [
6]. Claiming her advocacy is for victims of sexual violence, she somehow ignores the
long history of Israeli rape of Palestinians,
especially in Israeli jails, where thousands of prisoners are held on "
administrative detention" for months without trial or legal representation. Combined, these demonstrate that Sandberg's tour is about spreading Israeli propaganda which has been used to kill over 33,000 Palestinians, and is not about protecting women [
7].
This allyship with Israel from the most senior parts of Meta's governance – CISO, CEO, and board member – sheds light on why Israel's military is able to get this information from WhatsApp, a supposedly "private" app.