Anonymous book leads to Google ID
Israel’s intelligence chief exposes himself
April 6, 2024, 12:39 a.m
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Israel’s Unit 8200 monitors the Palestinian territories, but Hamas’s preparations for the October 7 massacre elude its agents. Now the commander experiences a new debacle: as the author of a book about AI in war, he reveals his true identity.
The commander of Israel’s Unit 8200 heads one of the most powerful surveillance agencies in the world, comparable to the American National Security Agency. Now the British “Guardian” reveals his closely guarded identity. The controversial spy chief is called Yossi Sariel. According to the report, it was he who revealed his identity online.
The embarrassing security breach is related to a book that Sariel published on Amazon. This left a digital trace to a private Google account set up in his name, along with his individual ID and links to the account’s card and calendar profiles, writes the Guardian. In it, the anonymous author of “The Human Machine Team” develops a radical vision of how artificial intelligence can change the relationship between the military and machines. The book thus provides a blueprint for the AI-powered systems that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) developed during the six-month war in the Gaza Strip.
An electronic version of the book contained an anonymous email address, which the Guardian traced to Sariel’s name and Google account. In its response to the report, the Israeli army called the publication of Sariel’s personal information in the book a “mistake.” The matter is being looked into to prevent similar cases from happening again in the future.
“I was defeated”
The security error is likely to put even more pressure on the spy chief. Once valued in Israel and beyond for its intelligence capabilities, Unit 8200 is said to have built a vast surveillance apparatus to closely monitor the Palestinian territories. However, the secret services neither foresaw nor prevented Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel on October 7th. In that attack, Palestinian terrorists killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 people in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attack, Unit 8200 has faced accusations that it exercised its “technological arrogance” at the expense of more conventional methods of gathering information.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv in February revealed an internal controversy within Unit 8200. Critics accused the then-unnamed chief of favoring “addictive and exciting” technologies over more old-fashioned intelligence methods that led to the disaster. Sariel is said to have told colleagues that October 7th would “haunt” him until his last day. “I take responsibility in the deepest sense of the word for what happened,” he said. “We were defeated. I was defeated.”