06.06, 12:15–12:30 (Europe/Zurich), Aquädukt
The Lavender system of the Israeli military shows how the notion of "AI-enabled targeted killing" is completely misleading and conceals the actual goal of such systems: producing civillian harm. This phenomenon is in line with other blurry AI narratives derailing actually useful societal discourses.
Publication coming soon: Rainer Rehak and Taylor Kate Woodcock. 2026. Automating civilian harm: On Israel’s use of the AI-enabled targeting system Lavender in Gaza and International Humanitarian Law. In The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26). https://doi.org/10.1145/3805689.3812357
Rainer Rehak is part of the research group “Digitalization, Sustainability, and Participation” at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, he is an associated researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and has completed his PhD on systemic IT security and societal data protection at the TU Berlin.
He studied computer science and philosophy in Berlin and Hong Kong and has been working on the implications of the computerization of society for over 15 years. His research fields include technology impact assessment, collective data protection, systemic IT security, state hacking, computer science and ethics, fictions of technology, digitization and sustainability, convivial and democratic digital technology, epistemics of automation, digital (de-)colonialism, and the implications and limits of AI systems.
He also publishes regularly in non-scientific outlets and is an expert witness for parliaments (e.g., the German Bundestag) and courts (e.g., the German Constitutional Court). Together with other digital policy and environmental organizations, he initiated the “Bits & Bäume” conference series for digitalisation and sustainability. Rainer Rehak is co-chair of the Forum Computer professionals for peace and societal responsibility (FIfF).