Hmmmmmm shares a report from the Financial Times: China's strengths as a cyber power are being undermined by poor security and weak intelligence analysis, according to new research that predicts Beijing will be unable to match US cyber capabilities for at least a decade. The study, published on Monday by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, comes as a series of hacking campaigns have highlighted the growing threat of online espionage by hostile states.

IISS researchers ranked countries on a spectrum of cyber capabilities, from the strength of their digital economies and the maturity of their intelligence and security functions to how well cyber facilities were integrated with military operations. China, like Russia, has proved expertise in offensive cyber operations -- conducting online spying, intellectual property theft and disinformation campaigns against the US and its allies. But both countries were held back by comparatively loose cybersecurity compared with their competitors, according to the IISS. As a result, only the US is ranked as a "top tier" cyber power by the think tank, with China, Russia, the UK, Australia, Canada, France and Israel in the second tier. The third tier comprises India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, North Korea, Iran and Vietnam.

Greg Austin, an expert in cyber, space and future conflict at the IISS, said media reports focusing only on the positive sides of China's digital advances -- such as its aspirations to become a global leader in artificial intelligence -- had contributed to an "exaggerated" perception of its cyber prowess. "On every measure, the development of skills for cybersecurity in China is in a worse position than it is in many other countries," he said. What set the US apart in the first tier, according to the IISS, was its unparalleled digital-industrial base, its cryptographic expertise and the ability to execute "sophisticated, surgical" cyber strikes against adversaries. Unlike opponents such as China and Russia, the US also benefited from close alliances with other cyber powers, including its Five Eyes partners.

Contract drivers say algorithms terminate them by email -- even when they have done nothing wrong. From a report: Stephen Normandin spent almost four years racing around Phoenix delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon.com. Then one day, he received an automated email. The algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn't doing his job properly. The 63-year-old Army veteran was stunned. He'd been fired by a machine. Normandin says Amazon punished him for things beyond his control that prevented him from completing his deliveries, such as locked apartment complexes. He said he took the termination hard and, priding himself on a strong work ethic, recalled that during his military career he helped cook for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. "I'm an old-school kind of guy, and I give every job 110%," he said. "This really upset me because we're talking about my reputation. They say I didn't do the job when I know damn well I did." Normandin's experience is a twist on the decades-old prediction that robots will replace workers. At Amazon, machines are often the boss -- hiring, rating and firing millions of people with little or no human oversight.

Amazon became the world's largest online retailer in part by outsourcing its sprawling operations to algorithms -- sets of computer instructions designed to solve specific problems. For years, the company has used algorithms to manage the millions of third-party merchants on its online marketplace, drawing complaints that sellers have been booted off after being falsely accused of selling counterfeit goods and jacking up prices. Increasingly, the company is ceding its human-resources operation to machines as well, using software not only to manage workers in its warehouses but to oversee contract drivers, independent delivery companies and even the performance of its office workers. People familiar with the strategy say Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos believes machines make decisions more quickly and accurately than people, reducing costs and giving Amazon a competitive advantage.

Space.com reports: The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday.

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")

The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?

I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.

This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...

Remember when ProPublica said they'd obtained the tax returns of some of America's richest people?

Now they're reporting that Peter Thiel turned a small retirement account — the kind meant to help middle class investors — "into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank." Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned "confiscatory taxes." He's been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he's bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes. But Thiel doesn't need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall. To put that into perspective, here's how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108... What's more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions....

While most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country's richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system. One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year... Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.
ProPublica argues Thiel's move alone "deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions." But he's not the only multi-millionaire they found stashing vast sums into untaxed accounts:

• Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway had $264.4 million at the end of 2018.
• Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.
• Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich: $20.2 million
• Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer: $31.5 million

According to The New York Times, citing a highly anticipated UFO report released on Friday, "The government still has no explanation for nearly all of the scores of unidentified aerial phenomena reported over almost two decades and investigated by a Pentagon task force, [...] a result that is likely to fuel theories of otherworldly visitations." From the report: A total of 143 reports gathered since 2004 remain unexplained, the document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Of those, 21 reports of unknown phenomena, involving 18 episodes, possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations. But, the report said, more rigorous analysis of those episodes is needed. There is no evidence that any of the episodes involve secret American weapons programs, unknown technology from Russia or China or extraterrestrial visitations. But the government report did not rule out those explanations.

The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions, announcing that the available reporting is "largely inconclusive" and noting that limited and inconsistent data created a challenge in evaluating the phenomena. The report said the number of sightings was too limited for a detailed pattern analysis. While they clustered around military training or testing grounds, the report found that that could be the result of collection bias or the presence of cutting-edge sensors in those areas. Government officials outlined a plan to develop, if additional funding is available, a better program to observe and collect data on future unexplained phenomena. [...] The government intends to update Congress within 90 days on efforts to develop an improved collection strategy and what officials are calling a technical road map to develop technology to better observe the phenomena, senior government officials told reporters on Friday. Officials said they would provide lawmakers with periodical updates beyond that.

ABC News reports: A highly anticipated UFO report prepared by the U.S. intelligence community is expected to be presented to congressional committees on Friday, according to a U.S. official, but officials have told ABC News the report will not provide definitive explanations for the dozens of encounters reported by the U.S. military with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. And in a development certain to disappoint UFO enthusiasts who have hoped that the report may have found links to alien spacecraft, the report has not found any evidence to suggest any links to such theories, according to three officials. The report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was required by the Intelligence Authorization Act passed by Congress late last year. The U.S. intelligence community was given 180 days to prepare an unclassified and classified report on what the U.S. government knew about UAP's.

Amazon's cloud services giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting into the encrypted messaging business. From a report: The company has just announced that it has acquired secure communications service Wickr -- a messaging app that has geared itself towards providing services to government and military groups and enterprises. It claims to be the only "collaboration service" that meets security criteria set out by the NSA. AWS will continue operating Wickr as is, and offer its services to AWS customers, "effective immediately," notes a blog post from Stephen Schmidt, the VP and CISO for AWS, announcing the news. Financial terms were not disclosed in the short announcement. Wickr had raised just under $60 million in funding according to PitchBook data (it also notes a valuation of under $30 million but that seems to be a very old estimate).

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company's sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. MIT Technology Review reports: While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies -- even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for "complicity in acts of torture" for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stephane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt.

The charges were brought by brought by the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes unit of the court, but the case began 10 years ago when Amesys sold its system for listening in on internet traffic to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Six victims of the spying testified in France about being arrested and tortured by the regime, an experience that they say is a direct result of these spying tools. In 2014, the company sold surveillance software to Egyptian president Abdel al-Sisi shortly after he took control of the country in a military coup. The complaints, filed by the International Federation for Human Rights, or FIDH, and the French League for Human Rights, allege that the company did not have government permission to sell its technologies to Libya or Egypt because oversight was weak and at times nonexistent. The claims led to an independent judicial investigation against Amesys/Nexa, which is still ongoing. Next, the judges will decide whether to send the case to criminal court or dismiss it if there is not sufficient evidence -- but the indictment is a major step forward and points toward the prospect that the judges will view the evidence as potentially strong enough to support a criminal trial.

Anyone who's played Quake remembers the railgun weapon. The U.S. Navy spent $500 million to try to build a real one, according to Popular Mechanics, "using electricity and magnetism instead of gunpowder and chemical energy to accelerate a projectile down a pair of rails." But now they've apparently given up: The service is ending funding for the railgun without having sent a single weapon to sea, while pushing technology derived from the program into existing weapons. The weapon is a victim of a change in the Navy's direction toward faster, longer-range weapons that are capable of striking ships and land targets in a major war. The Navy's budget request includes no funding for the railgun in 2022, The Drive reports...

Railguns are theoretically safer than conventional guns, since they reduce the amount of volatile powder a ship stores deep within its bowels in the ammunition magazine. The projectiles are also faster. But despite those advantages, there are reasons why the Navy is canning the railgun, which has been in development since 2005. For one, there are currently only three ships the Navy could conceivably fit the railgun to... The railgun concept itself is also out of step with the Navy's reorientation toward great power conflict, particularly a possible war with China or Russia. As an offensive weapon, the railgun's range of 50 to 100 miles is relatively short, placing a railgun-equipped ship within range of longer-range weapons, including China's DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile.

And while the railgun also has defensive potential since it can shoot down incoming aircraft, missiles, and drones, the Navy already has plenty of existing missiles and guns to deal with those threats.

For the next three months, three Chinese astronauts will live on a cylinder-shaped module measuring 16.6 metres by 4.2 metres (54 feet by 13.7 feet) while carrying out further construction work for China's orbiting space station.

It's the first time in five years China has sent humans into space, reports NBC News. : Shenzhou-12, or "Divine Vessel," is one of 11 planned missions to complete construction of China's 70-ton Tiangong or Harmony of the Heavens space station that is set to be up and running by next year... China has long been frozen out of the International Space Station, or ISS, a project launched 20 years ago that has served as the ultimate expression of post-Cold War reconciliation between Russia and the United States. American concerns over the Chinese space program's secrecy and connections to its military were largely responsible for that. But the aging ISS that hosted astronauts from the U.S., Russia and a number of other countries is set to be decommissioned after 2024. As broader U.S.-Russia relations deteriorate, Moscow has hinted that it may withdraw from ISS cooperation in 2025, meaning China could be the only country with a functioning space station.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, also signed an agreement in March with the Chinese National Space Administration to build a base on or around the Moon, which they will call the International Scientific Lunar Station.

"All the firsts that the U.S. and the USSR did in the Cold War, China is just ticking them off," said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Now they're at the point where they're starting to think, 'OK, we're not just copying the West anymore, we're going to start doing our own thing'. And that's going to be very interesting to watch."

The Polish government said that a recent wave of cyberattacks that have targeted the email accounts of local political figures originated from Russia. From a report: The attacks have targeted some of the most important Polish officials, ministers, and deputies from various political parties, said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's deputy prime minister, citing sources from the Polish Internal Security Agency and the Military Counterintelligence Service. "The analysis of our services and the special services of our allies allows for a clear statement that the cyber attack was carried out from the territory of the Russian Federation," Kaczynski said in a press release today. "Its scale and range are wide," the Polish official said. The announcement today comes after Polish local news outlets reported last week hackers broke into the email inbox of Michal Dworczyk, head of the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister's. Throughout the course of the last week, the hackers leaked emails and documents from Dworczyk's inbox on a Telegram channel, according to Polish online news outlet Onet. Other documents were also leaked through the Facebook account of Dworczyk's wife.

SpaceX successfully launched an advanced GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force on Thursday (June 17), marking the 19th launch of the year here on the Space Coast. From a report: One of the company's two-stage Falcon 9 rockets blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here at 12:09 p.m. EST (1409 GMT), carrying the GPS III SV05 navigation satellite to orbit. Nine minutes later, the rocket's first stage touched down on the deck of "Just Read the Instructions," one of SpaceX's two drone ships. "What a beautiful view of the first stage landing," Youmei Zhou, a SpaceX propulsion engineer, said during the company's live launch commentary.

The GPS III SV05 satellite mission is the second to launch so far this month for SpaceX, following the launch of a broadband satellite for Sirius XM on June 6. It was nothing but blue skies over the launch pad, and onlookers were treated to a gorgeous view as the rocket climbed to orbit. Today's flight marks the fourth GPS satellite delivery by SpaceX for the U.S. military. Three previous advanced GPS III missions also launched on Falcon 9 rockets, including two missions last year. Another of the satellites launched in August 2019 on the United Launch Alliance's final flight of the Delta IV Medium rocket. "If you've ever used your phone's mapping service or retrieved a location via a pin drop, you've used a satellite in this system," Zhou said.

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

An unmanned aircraft successfully refueled a U.S. fighter jet in midair for the first time, officials said Monday. CBS News reports: A Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and a Boeing-made drone were briefly connected by a hose as the drone transferred jet fuel to the aircraft in the skies over the Midwest during Friday's test flight. During the flight, the Super Hornet approached the drone, known as a MQ-25 Stingray, from behind and were as close as 20 feet from each other, Boeing said. The hose extended from the drone, and the Super Hornet connected with the drogue at the end of the hose to receive the fuel. The Navy posted video of the test flight to Twitter.

The U.S. Air Force wants to invest $38 million next year in projects under the heading "Rocket Cargo." Ars Technica reports that Air Force is already spending $9.7 million on the projects, "but seeks to increase that total for the coming year as it moves into the test phase of the program. The funds will have to be approved by Congress as part of its budget deliberation process this summer and fall."

The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."

Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.

A heroic rat named Magawa is retiring from sniffing out dozens of land mines in Cambodia for the last five years. NPR reports: Magawa is a Tanzanian-born African giant pouched rat who was trained by APOPO to sniff out explosives. With careful training, he and his rat colleagues learn to identify land mines and alert their human handlers, so the mines can be safely removed. Even among his skilled cohorts working in Cambodia, Magawa is a standout sniffer: In four years he has helped to clear more than 2.4 million square feet of land. In the process, he has found 71 land mines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance. Last year, Magawa received one of Britain's highest animal honors.

Magawa is part of a cohort of rats bred by APOPO for this purpose. He was born in Tanzania in 2014, socialized and moved to Siem Reap, Cambodia, in 2016 to begin his bomb-sniffing career. APOPO uses positive reinforcement methods that give the rats food rewards for accomplishing tasks such as finding a target or walking across a surface. Then they're trained in scent discrimination: choosing explosive smells over something else to get a food reward. Though they have terrible eyesight, the rats are ideal for such work, with their extraordinary sense of smell and their size -- they are too light to trigger the mines. When they detect a mine, they lightly scratch atop it, signaling to their handler what they've found. Their reward: a banana. [T]he rats hone their skills in a training field and are only cleared to begin work once they have perfect accuracy over an 8,600-square-foot area with various stages of complexity.

Amazon's massive cloud-computing unit is aggressively recruiting U.S. government officials as it pushes to make itself essential to branches such as the military and the intelligence community, POLITICO reported Friday. From the report: Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That's a small portion of AWS' tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

That's on top of more than 600 hires of government officials across all of Amazon during the same time -- itself a mark of the company's expanding footprint in the D.C. region. Amazon employs more than 1 million people overall, after adding 500,000 new jobs last year alone. The hiring spree highlights how tech companies are becoming more entrenched in the operations of the government itself -- and indispensable to Cabinet agencies and national security operations -- even as politicians shout about the danger of letting them get too powerful.

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Thursday that bans U.S. entities from investing in dozens of Chinese companies with alleged ties to defense or surveillance technology sectors. From a report: The move, which his administration says expands the scope of a legally flawed Trump-era order, drew anger from Beijing. The Treasury Department will enforce and update on a "rolling basis" the new list of about 59 companies, which bars buying or selling publicly traded securities in target companies, and replaces an earlier list from the Department of Defense, senior administration officials told reporters. The order prevents U.S. investment from supporting the Chinese military-industrial complex, as well as military, intelligence, and security research and development programs, Biden said in the order. "In addition, I find that the use of Chinese surveillance technology outside the PRC and the development or use of Chinese surveillance technology to facilitate repression or serious human rights abuse constitute unusual and extraordinary threats," Biden said, using the acronym for the People's Republic of China.

The American Forces Network is a U.S. government TV and radio broadcast service provided by the military for overseas personnel. But there's an interesting quirk. As an official Department of Defense product, it's not allowed to run ads or even mention commercial products, according to Stars and Stripes. "Instead, it lets commanders put out messages about force protection, weather, current events and base services."

And that's where things get creative...

Killer vending machines, security-conscious hamsters and a roommate who devolves into a caveman. These are some of the memorable features of Garry Terrell's vast collection of military-grade videos from the American Forces Network and its predecessor, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. The son of a former U.S. soldier, Terrell is trying to preserve "all things AFN/AFRTS," and boasts over 3,600 videos on the YouTube channel AFRTSfan. He began his collection nearly three decades ago, after learning that little had been done to save the many AFN spots that serve as a touchstone for troops and military families who've lived overseas.

The military-made productions fill what would normally be ad time in broadcasts back home... Because they're broadcast across various theaters, the ads served as "kind of like this bonding thing" for kids' friend groups frequently reshaped by duty station changes, said Sabine Brown, an airman's daughter who grew up in Germany in the 80s and 90s. For Terrell, whose mother is German, "it was just my local TV and radio provider" growing up on the bases where his father served as a career U.S. soldier in the 70s and 80s. He took it for granted until the early 90s Base Realignment and Closure process threatened to shutter bases he'd grown up on.

"Fearing that AFN might also go away, I decided to try and collect some AFN radio and TV items to add to my ever-growing memory book of Germany," he said in an email. "I felt like I was in a race against time."

He began contacting and befriending AFN staff and alumni, growing his collection through contributions from his expanding network of AFN insiders and "superfans." He started sharing this burgeoning library on YouTube over a decade ago, creating something of a time capsule, with spots that run the gamut from cringe-inducing, silly or lame to fun, brilliant and truly memorable.
The article notes that the videos once were even affectionately lampooned in a duet by two folk-singing Air Force pilots — which apparently remembers, among other things, the AFN ad illustrating the importance of the power-of-attorney by re-dubbing an old Hercules movie.

"For the first time, artificial intelligence was a key component and power multiplier in fighting the enemy," says a senior officer in the intelligence corps of the Israeli military, describing the technology's use in 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Strip.

They're quoted in a Jerusalem Post article on "the world's first AI war": Soldiers in Unit 8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led to several new programs called "Alchemist," "Gospel" and "Depth of Wisdom," which were developed and used during the fighting. Collecting data using signal intelligence, visual intelligence, human intelligence , geographical intelligence, and more, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has mountains of raw data that must be combed through to find the key pieces necessary to carry out a strike. "Gospel" used AI to generate recommendations for troops in the research division of Military Intelligence, which used them to produce quality targets and then passed them on to the IAF to strike...

While the IDF had gathered thousands of targets in the densely populated coastal enclave over the past two years, hundreds were gathered in real time, including missile launchers that were aimed at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The military believes using AI helped shorten the length of the fighting, having been effective and quick in gathering targets using super-cognition. The IDF carried out hundreds of strikes against Hamas and PIJ, including rocket launchers, rocket manufacturing, production and storage sites, military intelligence offices, drones, commanders' residences and Hamas's naval commando unit. Israel has destroyed most of the naval commando unit's infrastructure and weaponry, including several autonomous GPS-guided submarines that can carry 30 kg. of explosives.

IDF Unit 9900's satellites have gathered geographical intelligence over the years. They were able to automatically detect changes in terrain in real time so that during the operation, the military was able to detect launching positions and hit them after firing. For example, Unit 9900 troops using satellite imagery were able to detect 14 rocket launchers that were located next to a school... One strike, against senior Hamas operative Bassem Issa, was carried out with no civilian casualties despite being in a tunnel under a high-rise building surrounded by six schools and a medical clinic... Hamas's underground "Metro" tunnel network was also heavily damaged over the course of several nights of airstrikes. Military sources said they were able to map the network, consisting of hundreds of kilometers under residential areas, to a degree where they knew almost everything about them.

The mapping of Hamas's underground network was done by a massive intelligence-gathering process that was helped by the technological developments and use of Big Data to fuse all the intelligence.