6 ms·
"Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Other sources can be mistakes or intentional lies. What matters is the quality of the totali
by lupire 4y ago
"Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Other sources can be mistakes or intentional lies. What matters is the quality of the totality of the evidence, and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
- hammock 4y agoThis is assassination we are talking about, not ad serving
- nickff 4y agoUncertainty is (unfortunately) everywhere; for example, what probability is “beyond a reasonable doubt”? There are many who take issue with that question, but the answers I’ve seen range between 0.1% and 5%, with no general consensus.
- forgetfulness 4y agoWhat's the appeal process for being assassinated by the CIA like?
- darawk 4y agoPretty similar to the appeals process for being killed by the terrorist that the CIA chose not to assassinate.
- ivalm 4y agoHow many Americans died from terrorism? How many foreigners died from anti-terrorism drone strikes?
- devNoise 4y agoThe other question is how many terrorist did we create from drone strikes?
- darawk 4y agoThese are actually easy things to look up. 910-2,200 civilians killed by drone strikes[1]. More than that were killed on 9/11 alone [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
- idontpost 4y ago
- dwater 4y agoAnd if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.: "According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States." https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths_FactSheet_Oct2015.pdf https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...
- darawk 4y agoWhy would we exclude the largest terrorist attack in American history, the thing that the interventions in question were explicitly designed to prevent a recurrence of? And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans. Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.
- Banana699 4y agoWe should exterminate the entirety of humanity then, this is the only sure way to decrease terrorism to exactly 0. Although when you think about it, those single-celled bacteria look awefully suspicious and up to nothing good.
- littlestymaar 4y agoSo for you the CIA has the same moral requirements than terrorists groups? That line of reasoning ends up to the conclusion that CIA's assassination is just state sponsored terrorism, and I'm not sure that's the argument you are willing to make.
- darawk 4y agoI didn't say that, nor did I bring up the casualties comparison. The person I was responding to asked what the relative casualty counts were.
- nickff 4y agoAbout the same as that for being killed on a battlefield, and not much worse than that available to an indigent defendant.
- wombatpm 4y agoSimilar to gmail and youtube suspension process. It happens to you, you or someone makes your case on social media, someone in google may listen and modify the policy rules.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoThe CIA will torture any witnesses of you having had any life and then denies that you ever existed.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoBut there are also people that acknowledge the existence of uncertainty and draw conclusions from that. Countries without a death penalty for example. Uncertainty being a fact is not a free ticket.
- devteambravo 4y agoIncredibly chilling for you to have to type this! But yes indeed.
- bombcar 4y agoAd serving probably has less false-positives, because those cost the ad companies money.
- salawat 4y agoYou think that false positives requiring the staging/deployment of a multi-million dollar weapon system don't cost money?
- Banana699 4y agoIt's not about how much absolute money is spent per each false positive, it's about how much you can get away with wasting. If a decision maker in the CIA is not punished for each brain fart, why would they avoid mistakes ? You get the behaviour that you reinforce and tolerate.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoNot really, the US military practically has a blank check. I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money. Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.
- phkahler 4y ago>> "Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, and they are almost always better than low-grade intelligence obtained under pressure/influence (like the WMDs in Iraq). That is no justification.
- engineer_22 4y ago>> Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, You're probably right about this, in a sense, but it beckons a pretty interesting question: provide an example when "signatures" are better than first-hand information. Counter example: If your job is to find enemy subs, then sonar feedback off the hull of a Akula Class nuclear attack sub may be better than direct visual observation of the sub
- raxxorraxor 4y agoNobody complains too loudly if you fire a torpedo at a blue whale, but there would be dire consequences if you hit the wrong sub. I wouldn't call sonar contacts statistical evidence though, even if it is partially correct. The counter example doesn't fit. In you example the sub is hostile because it is Russian. Here the people are convicted to death by circumstantial evidence. Very, very bad circumstantial evidence. It is just "worth" it because there are little consequences for the murderers.
- ImHereToVote 4y agoI would prefer to be tried in a court of law, you?
- the_lonely_road 4y agoThat's a false equivalence though and not what the alternative option is here. The government was killing its enemies 100 years before the word digital was invented and will continue to do so as long as government exist. They will use every technology invented in the pursuit of doing so. Blaming metadata signature based approaches is no different than blaming their use of satellites, metallurgy, hell the wheel is a big part of their war machine. It has always been this way and it will continue to always be this way.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoIn 2010, an American citizen was killed in a drone strike by the US military, without a trial or any attempt to make an arrest. This was the first time in history that a US civilian was killed by the US military. Before 2010, we were doing just fine without executing citizens on suspect legal grounds. Edit: Edited to state that this was not fire of combatants in a combat zone.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- westmeal 4y agoWhich citizen was it? I've never heard about this before but I wouldn't put it past those war mongering fucks.
- mikece 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32583164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32583164
- ALittleLight 4y ago
- gffrd 4y agoThis is an excellent summary of how to make decisions, and to continually get better at making them. > and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice. This in particular. How did proceeding this way do in the past? What did we get when we decided to continue with a discrepancy? If the discrepancy did not result in an issue, why? was the information bad, our handling of it, or just chance? If it was an issue, can we avoid overriding it again, can we get better info, can we discard it altogether from consideration? (note: this comment doesn't relate to the content of the article at all, but about the decision-making process outlined above)
- raxxorraxor 4y agoIf you use the same statistic model to estimate how likely it is for people to be a danger to others for political reasons, also called terrorism in some cases, you very likely would need to shoot those that implemented these decisions.