Israeli Spy Chief Accidentally Blows Cover with Amazon Self-Publishing

With social media, location services, tracking cookies, and all kinds of personal identifiers on the internet these days, it can be hard to protect your privacy. But you’d think a national security professional would know better. As it turns out, one of Israel’s top spy chiefs does not.

Yossi Sariel has accidentally revealed himself as the commander of Israel’s Unit 8200, one of the most sensitive roles in the country’s military, heading up a powerful surveillance agency. He left his identity exposed online thanks to publishing a book on Amazon, The Guardian reported.

When publishing the book, Sariel accidentally tied it to a private Google account in his name. The Google account came with a unique ID, as well as links to calendar profiles and maps.

In its report, The Guardian was able to confirm with multiple sources that Sariel wrote The Human Machine Team, which is about the use of artificial intelligence in military operations. Sariel had published the book using the pen name “Brigadier General YS.”

The book, released in 2021, discusses the A.I. systems currently in use by the Israel Defense Forces in their brutal war in Gaza. The system was described in November by one former intelligence officer as creating a “mass assassination factory,” and a more recent report detailed a lack of oversight and lax protections against casualties.

It’s more bad news of late for Unit 8200, which has been compared to Britain’s GCHQ and America’s National Security Agency. The organization was criticized for failing to predict and thwart Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and led to 240 hostages being taken. Since then, Israel has conducted a full-scale massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, killing more than 33,000 people, including 13,000 children, and has come under recent criticism for its bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers.