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You may of course be right, I would find it surprising in the extreme if people were killed based purely on output of an algorithm. However we have no assurance

• pavelrub 11y ago
  > However we have no assurance that this tool was not used to generate kill targets without any human input. That's absurd. We also have no assurance that the NSA isn't communicating with aliens to generate kill lists of people who will oppose the alien invasion of 2021, though we do have common sense to filter out such absurd scenarios. "We have no assurance that this isn't so" isn't an argument.
  • titzer 11y ago
    I'll bite. The difference is that communicating with aliens requires positing the existence of aliens, whereas simply generating a kill list is already something we know they do, though we don't know how it works. It isn't "common sense" to filter out entirely obvious actions the NSA would take, and given the scale of disclosures from the Snowden files you ought to have already expanded your imagination away from "they'd never do that" to "yes, they already have the technical capability and have done similar things in the past, lied to Congress about it, dismantled oversight, lobbied against oversight, and otherwise deceived every mechanism of oversight put in place." The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not. We're arguing about with each other about bullshit. Focus.
    • nl 11y ago
      The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not. We're arguing about with each other about bullshit. I'm incredibly appalled by that. That's why stories like this are dreadful. They overreach in their conclusions, and will be easily denied by people involved in the programs who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to: identify terrorist couriers. That denial and evidence will then discredit all the sensible arguments about the drone strike program. Don't believe it? There's a discussion down-thread where someone is equating this list with the US Terrorism Watch Lists. Their clearly not the same thing at all (once glace at the slides shows you that), but they demand evidence. Of course, I can't show evidence that will convince them, but at some point an agency will, and they'll show exactly how the ist in this article (or some other list) is very accurate (I'm sure there is some list that is) and that will discredit the whole argument against the watch lists.
      • mike_hearn 11y ago
        * who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to* No they won't, because they've been challenged to do such things repeatedly in the past and always failed. These people live in a foreign country and it's not like the US Govt dispatches a bunch of detectives and lawyers based on the results of this ML model. Get real. The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes. This is all incredibly well documented. There is simply no mathematical way the program described in the article can be accurate, that's what the entire article is about. So I don't see why you have such profound faith in them. It's quite clear they're a bunch of maths geeks who have a single hammer and will use it to hammer any US foreign policy problem regardless of how much it resembles a nail or not.
        • pc86 11y ago
          > The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes. > This is all incredibly well documented. Then feel free to submit at least one source (or better yet, several) for this "well documented" fact that (a) the NSA does not due any due diligence into suspected terrorists after they get picked up by this meta data process; (b) the NSA does not indicate in any way to the CIA how the list was generated; (c) the CIA uses this information without performing any of its own due diligence on the targets; (d) the CIA then goes and kills everyone on the list without any further approval from DNI, SECDEF, POTUS, etc. I'm no drone program apologist but let's get real here to suggest that there's no intelligence or due diligence into these operations is willfully disingenuous at best.
• SEJeff 11y ago
  The thing is that the NSA doesn't kill people. The CIA and DoD run the drone program, and they both do their own due dilligence (how good is another conversation altogether) before carrying out their strikes. Also, most strikes have to be authorized from the top, up to and including the secretary of defense and the president.