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Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse
- hdlothia 3y agoIt's nice to know this kind of stuff is hard for the experts too
- coliveira 3y agoIf the chief spy of a country doesn't understand the implications of publishing books from his personal account, then you cannot trust him whatsoever... The stupid are controlling the whole thing.
- hackerlight 3y agoEgo. What's the point of success and mastery if you can't convert it to what you really care about which is status, even if it's lived vicariously through a pen name. It's like organized crime people always having to buy cars with their money then the tax authority comes knocking. Beyond a certain point money is useless if you can't convert it to status and get those feel good chemicals flowing.
- speedylight 3y agoIf nothing else you can use money to help people. Money is never useless my friend. Money can be a burden though, like if you have it but can’t spend like someone else who has the same amount but legally I can agree to that.
- resource_waste 3y agoIve played at really high levels. I'd say 90-98% are really smart. That is the interesting part, a few people arent. They are there for some other reason. I know someone who was inspiring but a dolt, I know someone who had their parents money, I know someone who bandwagon a winning candidate. Who knows is this person is there on merit or not, but its pretty interesting how smart people get when you start moving up. Its the exceptions that are weird.
- coliveira 3y agoI know there are smart people there, the point is that the stupid are really in control. It is the same for most companies: you'll find a lot of smart people (that's why they're successful), but you'll find also a few stupid people who reach the top by other means and make the company a piece of hell for everyone.
- draugadrotten 3y agoBrilliant 4D chess move by Yossi Sariel: he's cleverly feigning a mistake, aiming to exit his role without formally resigning. This "mistake" provide his superiors with a pretext for his departure, all while sidestepping the events of October 7.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sebb767 3y agoGiven his position, is revealing his identity really that great of a move for an uneventful retirement? The reduction in personal security (given that many people might want revenge on him or extract information) seems like a bad trade.
- coldtea 3y agoHe already explicitly wanted to publish the book with his actual initials. It would have been quite easy for adversaries with just general public information to get from the initials to the person, right? So perhaps revealing the full name doesn't make much of a difference, which is why it could just as well have been "accidental" (quotes intented).
- lm2s 3y agoBut the book was released 3 years ago? He made this mistake on purpose 3 years ago to have some way of exiting his role without having to resign?
- timdiggerm 3y agoBut not until very recently did a publication suddenly "discover" this
- hgomersall 3y agoAh, but how do you know it was published 3 years ago? Did you buy a copy then, or are you just relying on Amazon telling you so?
- f38zf5vdt 3y ago"Making an entire book about my AI death machine is the best idea I ever had!" is the intelligence equivalent of The Simpsons "Videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had!" edit: Since this thread is getting turfed so hard that my other, serious comment is already gone. I would ask you to read this thread about said AI death machine and make your own thoughts about what is currently happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245
- lenerdenator 3y ago“Is you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy?"- Bibi, probably.
- jhallenworld 3y agoHere's the book: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Machine-Team-Artificial-Intelligence-Revolutionize-ebook/dp/B09472K2YZ/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Machine-Team-Artificial-Intelli...
- posix_monad 3y agoAuthor is listed as "Brigadier General Y.S" - hardly difficult to guess Yossi Sariel?
- notesinthefield 3y agoThe 'About the Author' doesnt really try to hold info back either > Brigadier General Y.S is an expert analyst, commander of an elite intelligence unit and technology manager with 20 years of experience working on national security issues and challenges threatening the State of Israel. His areas of expertise include cyber and data science. In 2018, he was awarded the prestigious Israel Defense Prize for a new artificial intelligence based anti-terrorism project. He wrote his most recent book, The Human Machine Team, during his year of studying for a Master’s Degree at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. Y.S also has written other books in Hebrew on the topics of intelligence, strategy, and Hezbollah. He holds a BA in Middle East Studies and another BA in Psychology and Sociology. He grew up in Haifa and currently lives with his family in the beautiful Galilee region of Israel.
- pksebben 3y agoI believe the revelation is that this particular Brigadier General is leading specifically unit 8200. I'm sure that the line > n expert analyst, commander of an elite intelligence unit and technology manager with 20 years of experience working on national security issues and challenges Fits neatly into quite a few punched-up resumes and 'about' pages.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoHow many matches do you think there are for "In 2018, he was awarded the prestigious Israel Defense Prize for a new artificial intelligence based anti-terrorism project"?
- politician 3y agoThe book was published three years ago. The timing of this revelation is convenient.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lukev 3y agoOpsec is hard. Also. No matter how bullish you are on the potential of AI, it's horrifying and categorically unethical to use them to decide who to kill. It creates the possibility of atrocity with no accountability. Although the fact that this guy was anonymous to start with definitely indicates that accountability isn't the goal here.
- roughly 3y agoThe Guardian reported more on the IDF’s use of AI a couple days back, and it’s grim: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai... Although in that article, most of the horrors are coming from the human operators - there’s what comes off as a pretty strong disinterest in finding reasons to distrust the machine.
- 082349872349872 3y agoThere must be a line somewhere between "pretty strong disinterest in finding reasons to distrust the machine" and "using the machine as plausible deniability for doing what you hoped to do anyway"; is there a relatively simple description of this line, or is it a fractal boundary?
- roughly 3y agoYeah, I phrased that as generously as possible because I didn’t really want to kick that particular hornets’ nest, but the article does a fine job making that point.
- aebtebeten 3y agoVery charitable of you! (do we need an emoticon for charity, like we have for sarcasm? symmetry would suggest yes.) Upon further reflection, it occurs to me that these situations are exactly why the Geneva Conventions[0] require combatants to have (a) uniforms, and (b) a command structure: (a) prevents someone low from disingenuously stopping the buck by claiming "tweren't no orders; I'm acting on my own" (b) prevents someone high from arguing as Uber does: "you see, we're not a traditional army that gives orders to our fighters — we just provide a service that matches attackers and targets online, and really, anything bad that allegedly happened was only between those two parties"[1] [0] if we're not doing these anymore, just go ahead and tell me "the future is now, old man", and I'll take my mutterings to the pétanque piste. [1] > "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun —TAL
- consumer451 3y agoPersonally, I don't care about his identity, but this article also discusses the contents of the book he published, which is much more interesting.
- colechristensen 3y agoOk but why did his identity need to be secret in the first place? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_the_National_Security_Agency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_the_National_Sec... Like hey look here’s the director of the NSA! Who cares?
- ceejayoz 3y agoThe NSA is probably a bad example, given its entire existence was denied for two decades by the US.
- eugenekolo 3y agoThere's some logic to hiding the identity... don't know who/who's family to hack/threaten? But, you can just target the 2nd, or 3rd in command it'll be just as effective really.... so I'm not sure what the point is, besides some sort of security theater coolness.
- axus 3y agoThe US has oceans on both sides, and the bureaucracy involved in getting airfare reimbursed for a bunch of agents is too much for most governments.
- toyg 3y agoIt's less the airfare than the fact that they would stand out. Fort Meade is a defence installation, people don't just "pass by". Most people in the area would have military connections and be wary of even-slightly-foreign-accented individuals suddenly popping up near critical areas or where heavily-protected personnel actually live.
- octopoc 3y agoThat's not really apples to apples though. If we start bombing Indian reservations and trying to exterminate Native Americans, I'm pretty sure they would quite deliberately become a threat to American equivalents of this guy. (...or perhaps I'm misreading you? not sure)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yread 3y ago> Sariel’s critics, the report said, believe Unit 8200’s prioritisation of “addictive and exciting” technology over more old-fashioned intelligence methods had led to the disaster. Do they also use Kubernetes and the latest frontend frameworks?
- copperx 3y agoKubernetes is old and crusty technology at this point. It would be more like firing the senior developers to hire junior ones with a ChatGPT subscription and expecting big improvements in development speed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bayindirh 3y agoNope, they moved to serverless. They compromise random computers in basements and send small functions to process in a distributed manner. Since the data is so small, it's not possible to construct what they are doing. SETI@HOME in Soviet Russia fashion. You process their data, even without knowing it. The only thing you can do is to format your system to get rid of the backdoor (hopefully).
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoI didn’t know reformatting disabled intelME!
- bayindirh 3y agoI hoped the person used a firewall and/or removed ME forcefully for the second round.
- solardev 3y agoDeep in the bowels of Mt. Sinai, a clandestine IDF bunker guards a terrible secret: a giant useEffect() loop that controls all the murderbots, individually, by their hardcoded names. They didn't have the budget to research memoization yet, so it runs a bit slow, but it was fine on powerful enough hardware. The ballistics were all calculated in WebGL, leading to a global GPU shortage the last few years. And sometimes they'd get the viewport size wrong, which is why there was collateral damage :( Having learned their lesson, Israel's next AI project will stick with the tried and true and be written entirely in CSS instead.
- john-radio 3y ago> The embarrassing security lapse is linked to a book he published on Amazon, which left a digital trail to a private Google account created in his name, along with his unique ID and links to the account’s maps and calendar profiles. I'm interested to know more about the nature of the lapse here. Is there a bug in Amazon where self-publishers expose their account email addresses? Or was it more like, he shared Google Map and Google Calendar content in the book, not realizing that those features exposed his real email?
- nolongerthere 3y ago[flagged]
- TrueDuality 3y agoFrom that line and a few others in the article Amazon doesn't seem to be involved at all. It seems like there was a Gmail account created to receive feedback, corrections, reviews, and media outreach that was also supposed to be relatively anonymous but was registered with his actual name which would be visible to anyone that he responded to at the very least, but may also show up through other account associations.
- dmix 3y ago
- paganel 3y ago> In one chapter of the book, he provides a template for how to construct an effective targets machine drawing on “big data” that a human brain could not process. “The machine needs enough data regarding the battlefield, the population, visual information, cellular data, social media connections, pictures, cellphone contacts,” he writes. “The more data and the more varied it is, the better.” They should hold more strategy-oriented courses at the Israel Military Academy, that is if they have a military academy worthy of that name and if this intelligence guy is a graduate of one. Because it looks like he can look no further than the tactical level ("how do we kill leader X of enemy group Y at time moment Z?"), which is a suicidal thing to have as your top-military commanders in the middle to long term (because, no, killing enemy leaders X1...Xn won't win you any wars in the middle to long term).
- mmsc 3y agoSo he published a book using his own private email. It doesn’t seem like he was really trying to keep it a real secret.
- ljf 3y agoNo - he included a different email address in the book to gather feedback from readers. This email address was then linked to his personal Google accounts (how, is not described - but I bet Krebs On Security would know how).
- snowwrestler 3y agoThe major challenge in fighting terrorists is distinguishing them from the general population. Killing innocent people is against international law and harms the country doing it. While killing terrorists is acceptable and even desirable to many people. If a targeting system is more intelligent, it should be better at reducing the loss of innocent life while still delivering the same kill rate of actual terrorists. Israel’s system, based on reporting, does the opposite. So we can see that their use of an AI system to do this targeting reflects an insight not into the operational benefits of AI, but the cultural benefits. By spending tons of money and time and calling it “artificial intelligence,” the targeting team has developed a far more flexible pretext for violence. “This incredibly advanced AI system said he’s a target” is now enough to go drop a bomb… even if the incredible AI system is simply set to have its filters wide open. This is what YS means by “A team consisting of machines and investigators can blast the bottleneck wide open.” The humans build the machines to be extremely credulous, and then tell everyone else that the machine ID’d each target as a legitimate target.
- zer8k 3y ago> Killing innocent people is against international law and harms the country doing it. While killing terrorists is acceptable and even desirable to many people. Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning and that _can_ include people aiding and abetting the enemy. Thus, "actual terrorist" is a fairly nebulous term along with "innocent people". War is hell for a reason. Except for in obvious cases like Mai Lai it is never clear whether to call a person "innocent" for allowing an enemy combatant to seek shelter in their home - for example. But you have to make a snap decision: is the woman carrying what looks like an oddly shaped baby actually carrying bomb? Groceries? Why is she walking so close to the convoy? Did we issue a warning? Did she heed it? A bad decision will cost you many more lives than taking one. War is hell. > the targeting team has developed a far more flexible pretext for violence Doubt. The kill order chain is most likely AI flags target -> fed to human operator -> operator confirms -> kill order. Of course, your counter argument is that the human is given pretext ("this is a target") and thus assesses it with the assumption but in theory it's actually a better situation. 80% accuracy is still better than previous generations warfare. You dont want to end up on the thermals of an apache carrying a tube you need to replace your broken sewage system. The news is polluted with pro-Palestinian nonsense. It's very clear absolutely no one on social media has any idea what hamas does, or what the people of palestine have done to aid and abet the terrorists. This is not to justify just dropping bombs on people without cause but I would be pretty satisfied with a best-effort approach to the loss of civilian life given how deeply embedded hamas is.
- paradoxyl 3y agoGiven how unreliable LLM is in general usage with its tendency to "hallucinate" -- a grossly anthropomorphic term, when it's just an alogrithm with no sense of what's "actual" or "fictional" -- to use this in government and law is irresponsible and criminaly negligent. To use it in war is abhorrent.
- barbazoo 3y agoDoes it say anywhere that they were using LLM?
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoUS LEO like to say The bad guys only need to slip up once to get found out. This seems to be true.
- dewey 3y ago> An electronic version of the book included an anonymous email address that can easily be traced to Sariel’s name and Google account. Contacted by the Guardian, an IDF spokesperson said the email address was not Sariel’s personal one, but “dedicated specifically for issues to do with the book itself”. So it doesn't sound like his "real" email was leaked somehow through the book publishing workflow but more like there was a contact email listed (Maybe even in the book itself) in the book and it was not sufficiently private. Could be as easy as leaking some letters or a profile picture through the password reset workflow.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoOpsec is hard. 99999 times done everything right. 1 time making a mistake and you're done.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y agoIs it really OpSec if you're putting your initials on a self-published Amazon book?
- philip1209 3y ago> The security blunder is likely to place further pressure on Sariel, who is said to “live and breathe” intelligence but whose tenure running the IDF’s elite cyber intelligence division has become mired in controversy. It seems weird to me that the news outlet that ousted Sariel is foreshadowing that the disclosure could put pressure on him. If they say "we try to oust Sariel," and also "ousting Sariel will put pressure on him", then through the transitive property I interpret it as "we are trying to put pressure on him." And, that seems like politics instead of journalism.
- myth_drannon 3y agoIn the subject article there is a link to Maariv article (In hebrew) https://www.maariv.co.il/journalists/Article-1078519 https://www.maariv.co.il/journalists/Article-1078519. Basically the guy drunk "Startup Nation" kool-aid and thought he was running a startup. 8200 built this data lake with billions of data points and started to rely on it, decreasing the importance of intelligence analysts. So they were getting signals but couldn't act upon them, something that senior analysts would have helped. That's why they ignored the senior analyst "V" alarms and called her delusional. And on that damned early morning when they started to get "low significance" signals from the system and the chief of staff, Mossad and the intelligence head decided not to do anything significant. At the same time, an analyst could have connected the dots. This guy will be out and the rest as well.
- archsurface 3y ago"Published in 2021 using a pen name composed of his initials, Brigadier General YS" - Really? Misdirection?
- negus 3y agoNice try, book promoters.
- jokoon 3y agoIt doesn't really matter if his identity gets leaked, when you are a director, you always become more visible no matter what you do. You cannot hide if you are a director. In military matters, high ranking officers don't protect their identity, because they represent the military. Although it is obviously true that lower and medium ranking soldiers and personnel ALWAYS need to protect their identity, because they should not be identified since they are the ones who carry orders and take the real risks. Of course it would have been better for him to not have his identity disclosed, since it would expose him to assassins if he would travel, but honestly this is a non-story, this will just generate hate comments in anti-israel crowds.
- octodog 3y agoYour last paragraph is a weird take. It's a story because he was ostensibly trying to hide his identity and failed pretty miserably.
- bdcp 3y ago> Published in 2021 using a pen name composed of his initials, Brigadier General YS Also it doesn't seem like he was REALLY trying to hide his identity
- jason-phillips 3y agoAdjacent for some time to those participating in the secret squirrel pantomime, I find this all so terribly tiresome. Drawing a veil under the pretense that revealing what's behind would harm the country, the reality is that those participating are engaged in rather mundane drudgery and would simply prefer to not be made available to uninformed speculation by the peanut gallery.
- bornfreddy 3y ago> However, it has been criticised over its failure to foresee and prevent Hamas’s deadly 7 October assault last year on southern Israel, in which... Does anyone believe that they didn't know about it?
- snapcaster 3y agoI do, I think a lot of times massive fuckups get the "it was secretely a 4d chess move" thing but it's pretty believable (to me at least) that Israeli capabilities have degraded significantly over the decades as the IDF shifted from a war fighting army to prison guards
- bornfreddy 3y agoIt's possible, of course, it just doesn't sound likely.
- avidphantasm 3y agoAnother 27-year-old brigadier general?
- readthenotes1 3y agoHuman: There are hundreds of Hamas hiding in Al Shifa hospital. AI: Go in and kill them -- Is that why the picture of "destruction near Al Shifa Hospital" is in there, to lead us to believe it was the heartless software that led to the raid? (https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-03-26-24/h_106e282fb5a83867a568ec11c9d720f0 https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-wa..., as if you can believe anything coming out of there)
- stef25 3y agoEmail account aside, he - Published a book using his real initials - Was one of four recipients of an IDF prize in 2018 - Did a Master’s Degree at the National Defense University in Washington when writing the book This is either a blunder like no other or there is no Yossi Sariel. His last name being an anagram for Israel and the fact there's zero traces online for someone who's been in the IDF his entire life, this seems like the most likely explanation. EDIT "Sariel" is actually the name of an angel from a Judaic tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sariel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sariel
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago>"One section of the book heralds the concept of an AI-powered “targets machine”" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSQ5EsbT4cE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSQ5EsbT4cE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
- weinzierl 3y agoI see no lapse here. Some people publish under a pseudonym to disguise their true identity, others to separate their public persona from their private one. This is pretty clearly the later case. He published the book under his initials in combination with a hint to his job. That he did not take a serious effort to hide his email is just consequential. This is as exciting as had they reported they'd found out the real name of JJ Lehto. EDIT: Thinking about it, it is simultaneously a nom de guerre and a nom de plume.
- yakito 3y agofinally, I was waiting for this comment.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cafard 3y agoIn the 1950s or 1960s, the American journalist Steward Alsop printed the name of the head of the British MI-5 (or maybe MI-6). He told someone that the man (Menzies) was somewhat placated because Alsop had referred to him as "legendary".
- jolj 3y agoStatistical models are used for at least 80 years to calculate the size of bombs when hitting targets and to factor in civilian casualties. Today's statistical models have much better PR but it is not much different. Also war is bad, but sometimes it is a necessity when the alternative is worse. It is always quite easy to cast yourself as a neutral moral judge on the sidelines, but we all saw what happened to the USA in the early 2000s when faced with a lesser threat than Israel. With the way the world is heading what we are hearing are simply echoes of the pre-ww2 appeasement attitudes which of course are a great way to prevent future deaths and war
- hilux 3y agoI don't run any secret military units (that I'm willing to admit to), but I do leave occasional product reviews on Amazon under a pen name. I discovered that I was doxxed by creating a Goodreads account from the same email address, now that Amazon owns Goodreads.
- thefz 3y agoWhere is the "Mossad Is going to burn your house down" copypasta now? Just for laughs.