Digital Rights Weekly Update: 24 - 30 July 2026

Policy Insight:

This week offers a critical look into one of the emerging frontiers of digital influence: LLM poisoning. As artificial intelligence systems increasingly become gateways to knowledge and public understanding, actors are now attempting to manipulate these systems by flooding the web with strategically crafted content designed to shape AI-generated answers. Reports of Israel-funded influence operations targeting tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others demonstrate how information warfare is evolving beyond social media into the very systems people increasingly trust for answers.

Understanding these tactics is essential. From the AI Kill Chain to the manipulation of digital archives and humanitarian data, the challenge ahead is not only identifying technological harms, but building the safeguards, transparency, and accountability mechanisms needed to ensure AI serves truth and human rights rather than becoming another tool for domination.

News Digest

Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.

Drop Site

Since October, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has been quietly overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel. One article, titled “The Reality Behind Gaza’s ‘Journalists’: Terror Ties, Propaganda, and the Laws of War,” asserts that a majority of journalists in Gaza were linked to terrorist organizations. Another casts doubt on the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024. The key intended audience of these sites is not concerned Americans, it’s not even humans—most of the sites average a few hundred unique visitors each month. Instead, Parscale and his firm, Clock Tower X, created them as part of a $46.5 million contract with the Israeli government to try and influence artificial intelligence-powered chatbots, tools like Claude or ChatGPT. 

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Votes to Divest from Palantir Technologies and GE Aerospace, Recognize the Genocide in Gaza, and Call for an Arms Embargo and Boycott of Israeli Products

The PJN

The 227th General Assembly (GA) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted unanimously this week to divest from Palantir Technologies and GE Aerospace. The denomination is the first institution to successfully target these companies for divestment.  The Presbyterian Board of Pensions and Presbyterian Foundation will sell off its holdings in these two companies at some point in the near future. Neither entity responded to inquiries about the total value of the stock held in Palantir or GE Aerospace. The GA voted Tuesday night in favor of an overture that will have the church identify the Israeli war in Gaza as a genocide, lobby Congress for an arms embargo against Israel, and encourage Presbyterians to boycott Israeli products that contribute to the genocide. The vote tally was 454-15. Commissioners also voted in favor of a commissioners’ resolution to affirm Kairos Palestine II: A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, a November 2025 statement from Palestine’s Christian community, which calls for intensified international boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. 447 commissioners voted in favor of that overture, 21 voted against.

Interactive: Anatomy Of An AI Kill Chain

AirWars AINow

AI warfare is much discussed, but often little understood. Rather than a single overarching programme, military AI today consists of overlapping machine learning algorithms rapidly automating tasks previously carried out by humans. In turn, human oversight and accountability are steadily disappearing. This story portrays a fictional, and simplified, account of an AI-enabled attack. To demystify military AI, we construct an abstract kill chain that reflects an AI targeting cycle. Rather than copying a formal kill chain framework used by a specific state, our schema instead illustrates the tactical activities and decisions involving the use of AI systems through six stages: 1 Sensor and Data , 2 Surveillance , 3 Intelligence and Identification , 4 Selection , 5 Strike , and 6 Post-strike Assessment. Throughout, tech explainers dissect AI technologies, their limitations, and how their breakneck adoption risks deadly errors. While the story is fictional, the technology is not. The AI described here is in use by advanced militaries today, including in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.

WFP restarts Gaza aid registration app, but cyber-attack questions linger

The New Humantirian

The World Food Programme is re-opening its self-registration app for Gaza aid recipients, more than two months after a cyber-attack exposed sensitive personal information belonging to what appears to be almost the entire population of the enclave. In a message sent to partner organisations working on responses in Gaza and shared widely this week, WFP announced that the self-registration app, offline since the 14 May cyber-attack, was restarting after the agency had made “improvements to strengthen the security of the system and better protect household information”. WFP also informed recipients in Gaza in a series of posts on Telegram, the instant messaging app. “Coming soon!!” read a 25 July message, which touted a “comprehensive update of security and privacy procedures”. But WFP continues to provide little information about the cyber-attack, the vulnerabilities behind it, or the risk the breach poses to people in Gaza, according to aid workers, donors, and rights groups who spoke to The New Humanitarian. The Israeli military has used data in advanced weapons systems to target and kill in its onslaught on Gaza – part of what the world’s leading genocide scholars say amounts to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against Palestinians.