The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn't a terrible idea. But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists. Maybe it's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels.
The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial.
And the more I read the details, the more alarmed I am. The 50% figure I used above may have been way too high. The base rate of terrorists way too low and they have very little data to begin with.
I don't think now that the beast has been unleashed it can be controlled or harnessed with peaceful means (the tools of democracy). It will take more than a couple of middle-class people with billboards handing out flyers. America is fuelling its own terrorism and creating hate so they can continue their war on terror. Every terrorist act in the West will further drive the hate and justify surveillance. Pretty sure this is a downward spiral which ultimately has only losers.
Which steps can the average Joe take which aren't considered radical by the system? Do you know any please share because I don't.
>The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. ... Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967)
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Do-We-Here-Community/dp/08070006...
-- Robert Bruce Thompson
-Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Adviser, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, March 14, 2007
Cultural side note:
"For Hindu thought there is no Problem of Evil" -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
There is great anxiety among the Western Judeo-Christian tradition about "Evil winning out over Good" that is not so much felt by far Eastern cultures (Hindu, Zen, Taoist etc.). For instance, the concept of Yin and Yang and how they define each other and rely on each other.
St. Thomas Aquinas actually paralleled this concept quite briefly in The Summa contra Gentiles, though such an idea is quite taboo among many fundamentalist Christian traditions today:
>There are in the world many good things which would have no place unless there were evils. Thus there would be no patience of the righteous, if there were no ill-will of the persecutors; nor would there be any place for a vindicating justice, were there no crimes; and even in the physical order there would be no generation of one thing, unless there were corruption of another. Consequently, if evil were entirely excluded from the universe by the divine providence, it would be necessary to less the great number of good things. This ought not to be, since good is more powerful in goodness than evil is in malice, as was shown above. Therefore evil should not be utterly excluded from things by the divine providence.
WW2
American Revolutionary War
The Roman-Carthaginian wars
Genocide of the Ainu in Japan
Genocide of the Neanderthals by Homo Sapiens in Europe (Maybe; it's theorized at least)
The Gombe Chimpanzee War
I'm sure I can come up with more if you like.
The primary reason Jews, Christians, and Muslims are having trouble solving their problems using violence is that they're not using enough violence.
Which led to the perpetuation of slavery for another 90 years (which the British were in the process of abolishing throughout their holdings), among other "issues."
The American Revolutionary War resolved the conflict between the two parties rather satisfactorily. I did not claim that it ended all violence.
Was the original question. The point is that while it solved one conflict, it deferred and prolonged another (quite major) one -- which might well had been resolved had the colonies not seceded from the Crown.
The execution of John Wayne Gacy.
The problem of those groups is that they can't prosper in peace. Violence is not a solution for that. Rather, violence is the essence of their problem.
Basically, if you want to be realistic there can never be "enough violence". Reasonable people prosper because they understand this and seek to solve their problems in a peaceful manner rather than to escalate the violence until one side perishes.
-John Adams
So yes, empires do rise and rule for a time but in the end they grow weak from over reliance on luxuries and having no real competition to fight. In the end these empires based on war always collapse.
But let's take WW2 for example. WW2 led immediately into the Cold War, and the Cold War led into the War on Terror. It is also worth noting the arbitrary national lines drawn along tribal boundaties after WW1 and WW2 and their direct contributions to the enflamed tensions in the middle east today.
>The primary reason Jews, Christians, and Muslims are having trouble solving their problems using violence is that they're not using enough violence.
That is M.A.D.
What exactly is the issue here, what is the end goal that is achieved through violence? It's survival, right?
If we are to ensure survival amidst such increasingly rapid technological proliferation, mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
[1]http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde2/view?id=PJA01d005
A drone strike typicall kills identified terrorists because they need to be able to say that. It's much better to be able to say "... and some collateral damage" than "We hit a wedding party."
The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and it's putting us in a terrible position.
The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military again.
US military culture drives people out.
Either by being surrounded by lazy or coasting individuals who think of the military as just a job (discouraging to more ideologically minded people).
Or by being hammered by the ugly, jingoistic rhetoric and motivations of some peers and leadership.
Or by being too smart and standing too tall, upsetting the boat. The US military, large portions at least, strongly discourage some aspects of intellectualism and, certainly, individualism. Smart people suffer in this environment if they're not power-motivated, and the good ones usually aren't.
Intellectualism is absent in military? Some of the best lectures I watched are from Naval War College. TOR comes from that part of the woods.
You do not have individualism in any armed forces, this is absolutely lunatic. Its like preaching individualism in Basketball team and telling Allen Iverson he is oh so special and do it all ( which he did and spectacularly failed). US Military just like other military is Socialist both in its creed and organization. That is no surprise and PG actually credit to Post-War equality in America to be by-product of Military service and GI bill.
Re Individualism: You're taking the extreme position of individualism which is not what I intended. I meant those people who generally don't suffer from groupthink.
An example of groupthink, second-hand tale: During the second Iraq War, my father was responsible for a lot of CSAR mission planning for the USAF. He would not send helicopters into bad weather conditions (primarily sandstorms) that he knew (after 20+ years of experience) they couldn't handle. The Army CSAR guys would send in their own birds and crews. The USAF CSAR crews would then have two rescue missions once the weather cleared. There was a pressure to ignore reality and press forward despite the odds and regardless of the cost that put more personnel and materiel at risk than necessary. In some sense it's honorable, in another it's just stupid. A degree of individuality, the ability and willingness to risk saying "no" when everyone else is hell bent on something, is the sort of individualism that's needed.
Sometimes in combat situations like the above, but the majority of the time not. See the drone programs, surveillance programs, acquisitions programs, that are either unethical, ill-conceived, or just wasteful. Groupthink allows them to persist. Generals who let it slide because they know they're getting promoted in 18-24 months and it'll be someone else's problem allow them to persist.
Some degree of individualism is necessary in both the officer and enlisted corps to step in and alter the culture.
A squad of all individuals unable to act as a team, yeah, that'd be fucking stupid. Obviously that's not what I was talking about. If you thought it was, you took the worst possible interpretation of my words and ran with it. Great.
But an officer corps of all yes-men drones is useless, too. They need people that can break out of the mold at every rank, not just the top.
EDIT: And because it's not clear. Sometimes, the willingness to say "yes" when everyone else is saying no is also useful. The story above was about being more risk-averse than the group, and it being the better option. But sometimes the group is too risk-averse and someone willing to step in and risk failure is what's needed - see the example of the generals who let shit stand instead of changing them. The real leaders will step in and risk their career when something is broken but unchanging because of fear or cargo cult behavior or whatever else.
How we got from there to over a third of the total world military spending, well, it's a long story, and I don't know what to do, but I don't think encouraging more smart people to join up will help the most.
-James Madison, Constitutional Convention (1787-06-29)
that is the kind of talk that left US exposed in 1812 War and the West Point, Naval academy were a product of realities post-1812 war. You can quote all Madison you want, but the need for professional army was evident through out the world and worked like a charm in 1845 When US wrested massive land from Mexico.
The Madison quote was meant to indicate the historic precedent for over extending oneself on the war front and the ways it has left the civil front critically vulnerable.
However, today, in the electric age, there is no distinction between civil and military fronts.
What has happened isnt that hippy academia is jacking up the military, but rather that the military has been kicking out the kind of people who arent afraid to tell truth to power, and are increasingly making choices and then only hiring people who tell them those choices are good and what they want to hear.
I have spent the majority of my free time since I got out trying to understand what the fuck is going on here, and the reality is that our generals failed our military by allowing the neocons to push us into wars for dubious reasons. Thats even counting the real reasons no one talks about, such as upcoming resource wars and a return to a tripolar world.
No, the real problem is that we have barely had a real president since the new world order bunch assassinated JFK (and RFK), because that was a very clear message to any POTUS willing to actually stand up. (Dont get me wrong, JFK was far from perfect...)
We now have institutional corruption from the top down in every single branch of government, including the famed fourth estate which has been turned into stenographers weekly. Corruption and incompetence are running rampant, and are acting as a cover for the malicious string pullers (Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy!)
So no, its not that the goddamn hippies have fucked up the military, its much closer to the military and its propoganda programs have so far infiltrated academia that its a lifeless shell of what it could and should be in this internet age.
Keep in mind though, its the military who has pushed this though. While the three letters have carried out operations similar to mockingbird (thank you church comittee), its the globalist new world order group who have pushed it on their controlled government puppets. (Read up on what Norman Dodd found during the Reese Committee for more info)
Yes, you are correct we need a smarter military, but just having "smart people" join up wont do it. You need change from the POTUS down, because beleive you me, we have turned mental deconstruction and reconstruction into an art form.
If there is a world order, it was never very powerful or orderly.
First, you have to look at who the original runners were: Jeb and Hillary. Jeb is connected to the action arm of the dark arts, through his father, brother, and his time in Florida, and Hillary is connected to the Rhodesian group for Anglo-Saxon dominance through her Oxford husband.
My prediction was that they would drop the dirt on Hillary mid-late cycle, while dropping the GOP forerunner (right now Trump) and suddenly shifting his votes into Bush. Suddenly we have a potential Bush vs Sanders/Hillary election, and the reason the world order group are fighting so hard to get Hillary the nomination is because Sanders is a wildcard in their plans. If they keep Hillary in, it's a globalist in office either way.
Incompetence is rampant, it's true, but don't let it smokescreen the hidden machinations, or else you will never be able to grasp the bigger geopolitical picture.
It seems to me that it was some group other than neocons that got us inveigled in war in Libya and Syria - thereby creating the fertile spawning ground for ISIS.
The "fertile ground" that allows moderates to become radicalized eventually boils down to polarization. It doesn't really matter whether the rhetoric is coming from Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Turkey, Indonesia, Libya, Israel, Europe or the US; as long as the discourse goes in terms of "us vs them", many people will identify (and act) as victims.
But anyway, that wasn't the main point. The real point was to show that it wasn't a neocon that started our wars in Libya and Syria - it was today's iconic Progressive who did that, and without any sort of Congressional approval at all. Those wars can't be attributed to neocons, they are the Progressives' to own.
The group now calling itself "the Islamic State" was a comparatively minor Islamist group in Saddam's Iraq that hit the big time with the US invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, when it leveraged the disruption of that invasion and the currency of the al-Qaeda brand to rebrand itself as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" -- it was so successful -- seizing weapons and territory and becoming a substantial force that, particularly with the rest of the global al-Qaeda brand in decline, that it found it best to rebrand itself subsequently as "the Islamic State in Iraq".
Sure, when the Syrian Civil War escalated, it sent fighters there, who eventually remerged with ISI leading to its next rebrand as what is usually translated by official sources "the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant" (but(alternatively translated as "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", which is where the "ISIS" label comes from), and the group later rebranded to simply "the Islamic State".
But it was the invasion of Iraq -- not the conflict in Syria -- that formed the "fertile spawning ground" which catapulted the previously-minor group to become a significant threat.
note: too late to edit original comment, but I meant to say "it's not the military", eg the military is being played in this global chessboard by other entities.
The conspiratorial view of the world is the correct one. Your attitude is one of sticking ones head in the sand and pretending these things don't exist.
Not when said conspiracies are dumped, explanation-free, into the middle of a post without any backing what so ever.
Buzzwords like "new world order" are both loaded and uninteresting, and that goes double when most people who've have examined the "evidence" have found it wanting. If globalization is meant, say "globalization".
Also, are you even in the same thread as me? Theres plenty of context, within my comment and out, thats gives an indicator about why such a comment is relevant to the discussion.
What you have done is perform a knee jerk reaction and now you are backpedalling.
I have yet to see a single thing in this thread that suggests my initial read was incorrect, or indeed anything to indicate your rant contributed anything to the conversation. (Hence: uninteresting)
Like a single link to support your assertions, for instance.
-Beyond Vietnam, Dr. King, speech given exactly 1 year before assasination
How has that country failed in its duty to the citizenry?
When http://www.coha.org/costa-rica-an-army-less-nation-in-a-prob... says "Without a formal military force, Costa Rica had no need to regularly invest in naval vessels, warplanes, or tanks, which typically make up the heavy equipment of any traditional armed forces." and "It is important to consider that a state that has no military is by nature nonviolent.", that makes me think it has no military.
The same with http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/15/opinion/la-oe-barash... which says "Henceforth, Costa Rica would take the almost unheard-of step of renouncing its military."
I don't understand why I should believe it has a military. At best we have different ideas of what a "military" means.
You mention "gendarmarie and other paramilitary forces" as a type of military. SWAT team are paramilitary forces, no? Would it be fair to say that Los Angeles has its own military? What about paramilitary support for anti-poaching and other conservation efforts?
The essay at https://medium.com/war-is-boring/costa-rica-doesnt-have-a-mi... attempts to convince me that the UEI is a "small military force in all but name", and that "the distinction between police and military work in Central America is a lot fuzzier than it might seem". I am not convinced by their comparison of how the police in Costa Rica have a drug interdiction role which is done by the military in other Central American countries - after all, in the US there is both military and police involvement in the same role.
Perhaps I can resolve the topic with two questions: 1) did Costa Rica have a military in 1990 (which is before the gendarmarie and the UEI)? and 2) what would Costa Rica need to abolish in order to say it doesn't have a military? Just the 70 people in the UEI?
It is even worse than that. Due to the base rate fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy) the 'machine' is going to have a huge false positive rate, so without that additional surveillance, most will not be guilty of what they are accused. But that surveillance takes money and resources, just the thing the 'machine' system is designed to save...
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/effective-c...
This appears to be what they do?
The National Security Agency reportedly tracked phone calls between the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's relatives in the Persian Gulf to all numbers in Pakistan, and NSA surveillance eventually tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's location in Pakistan via one such phone call.... In August 2010 they tracked al-Kuwaiti as he drove from Peshawar to a residence in Abbottabad – and as analysts inventoried the compound's striking security features they became convinced that it housed a high-level al-Qaeda figure... In September 2010, the CIA concluded that the compound was "custom built to hide someone of significance" and that it was very likely that Osama bin Laden was residing there[1]
As it turned out, that was where bin Laden was killed, so that process seemed to have worked.
I'd note that the arstechnica article gives no evidence at all that this particular program is used to generate kill lists. As you note, identifying possible couriers and just killing them without further investigation is a dumb idea. Fortunately I don't see any evidence in this or other articles that this is what happens.
Also there's no way the CIA drone program can sustain the kind of long term kill rates they've been having without routinely killing innocent people. Terrorists just aren't that common (although if you define anyone who tries to seek revenge thanks to an errant drone strike as a terrorist, that "problem" can eventually solve itself).
/s
Single or double blind that process.
We created societies, because we need to eat, reproduce, survive, without reverting to base violence. We created medicine, technology to improve our quality of life and reduce the chances that biological evolutionary pressure destroys us. The black plague came close to killing 60% of the European population. It is now eradicated.
What is the next step in our evolution as a species? Right now the biggest danger to the survival of humankind is... humankind itself. If we are to survive, not for a hundred years, but for a hundred thousand years into the future, we must learn how to cooperate without annihilating each other in the process.
Violence isn't a vice that could be eliminated if only people had more virtue. It serves a practical function. It's the ultimate dispute resolution mechanism for people who either have too little in common or too much at stake to resolve their issues in any other way. Prosperity, abundance, and homogeneity makes it less necessary over time, but so long as conflict is possible between people, violence will be the final resort for resolving it.
Personally, yes. Taking time out to eat so I don't die takes me away from other things I was enjoying doing.
I enjoy the taste of many foods, but not as much as I was enjoying the thing I was likely doing before it.
Don't get me wrong, I love eating as well as cooking, but I have to agree that a stupid amount of time is spent on doing those things. If I could switch to a solution where I take a pill and it provides my body with all possible nutrition then I would in an instant.
He would spend three or four hours in the kitchen each night and sometimes all day on Saturdays and Sundays.
It baffled me to no end to spend that much time just to sate hunger.
Clearly he wasn't trying to sate hunger. Cooking is as much of a hobby as hacking or being a "maker." Plus eating food is way more than just satiating hunger. I don't like cooking but I loving eating and drinking.
Which seems to be exactly the case. Ahmad Zaidan, for example, wasn't assassinated. In fact even if the algorithm was 100% correct - it makes no sense to assassinate people solely based on whether they are terrorists or not. A lot more can be gained from surveilling some of them, etc'.
So there is really nothing at all to suggest that those algorithms alone are used to create kill lists.
The first line of the article actually suggests this: 'In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata."'
Also, even if something does not make sense does not mean that it does not seem to make sense to a particular person or organization.
Those drones are going to be tasked no matter what. If the quality of the input intelligence is crap, well, good thing it's all top secret right!
God fucking damnit, why the fuck does our government think killing should be cheaper and easier than healing!? We put new medical treatments through decades of difficult scientific tests, but have none at all for strictly invalid ways to kill people?
Barely perceptible changes to an image cause it to be misclassified by neural networks which never saw the image before (this is important, because it rules out simple overfitting). As a non-expert, this suggests to me that, at least for some algorithms, the reasoning "statistical algorithm estimates 99.999% probability of guilt" implies "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is unreliable at best.
There is great potential here for safe, effective government if machine learning output is only ever input for humans with common sense, life experience and the ability to interact with the world.
Myth: Deep learning is more vulnerable to adversarial examples than other kind of machine learning.
Fact: So far we have been able to generate adversarial examples for every model we have tested, including simple traditional machine learning models like nearest neighbor. Deep learning with adversarial training is the most resistant technique we have studied so far.
They're clearly not implementing a minimum-error rate classifier. Which isn't to defend their choice of loss function (it's not 0-1, but beyond that I have no idea); just to point out the inanity of some of the comments claiming the NSA isn't aware of base rates.
For something around a ten of thousand people, at a minimum 80% of them will be innocent, just by sheer lack of actual terrorists to fill that many slots. And that's assuming a perfect fitting algorithm, with absolutely no false positives.
Just wait until the next leak confirms that the system has learned to fly the drones autonomously.
"We love you, Skynet! We just need to do some routine maintenance."
Stay classy.
You can't test it, the NSA surely can and almost certainly can and did.
That is in no way a reasonable thing to do if you're only 50% confident in your results. A reasonable thing to do would be scrap the whole system and make something more reliable than a coin flip.
Now, of course we don't know how good the rate is or what other evidence they already have or what exactly a terrorist is for that matter. But in principle, you'd be throwing out a huge amount of evidence if got rid of a system that changed a target's chance from 1 in a million to 1 in 2.
- whistleblowers
- minority groups (e.g. gay people, particular religious beliefs, political affiliation)
- political dissidents
- journalists whose behaviour changes
- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)
Think what authoritarian governments could (and are) doing with this capability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
And that's what it is used for. Australian gov. used their abilities to mark people who say against coal energy as anti-government, all they did was support renewable sources of energy. https://overland.org.au/2014/07/surveillance-of-activists-is...
and Canada: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/14/canada-en...
- minority groups
FBI was spying on black-rights activists, since ever. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
- whistleblowers
No example needed.
- journalists whose behaviour changes
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/duncan-campbell/gch...
Campbell in '70s discovered ECHELON, NSA admitted he was their personal target since then.
- personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
Even the partisan sources you've linked don't support that particular assertion AFAICS. It appears that gov.au placed a group of activists with the potential intent to disrupt energy supplies under surveillance.
'Green' activists suffer from a bad case of noble cause corruption which prevents them from understanding that things they think are wonderful and necessary - like disrupting power grids - are well within the scope of what other people would consider to be terrorism.
There is also no suggestion that any ML or mass surveillance was used in targeting them. Targeted, intrusive surveillance was authorised against them.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/ja...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-...
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/afp-spies-targeting-green-...
I find it strange that nobody seems to identify this. It is almost as if, because it is done on a big computer and no human is involved in the processing, suddenly it is not discriminating anymore.
But humans programmed these computers in the first place.
[1] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.617280
[2] http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/gay-palestinians-are-being-bl...
Let's imagine: 1. citizens have right to fair trial 2. terrorist hunting is not done by police, but by military intelligence organization that cannot arrest, attack or sue anybody, just gather data and inform police/military or prosecutor 3. that military organization is supervized by democratically elected guy (president) 4. Law that defines clearly when such information can be used, and defensive attorneys are not excluded from using it.
That organization being part of military is inportant. If it's actually clandestine organization with priority of defence, it should be unwilling to reveal it's capability to foreign players. Unless it's actually matter of national security. This is probably happening already with multitude of military forces and we never hear about it. Shit only starts when police starts doing same stuff while disregarding fair trial. SS-troops and KGB we're pretty good at fucking up people even prior to mass surveillance and big data analysis.
So there was this infamous incident of a Netflix machine learning competition for movie recommendations ...
Guess what somebody was able to do.
I'm sorry. No fan of the NSA, but the premise behind it is completely ridiculous.
There is zero evidence of the repeatably asserted idea that the list this tool generates is any kind of kill list.
It's a tool that generates indicators of people that may be worth looking at when trying to find couriers. That's a very specific subgroup of terrorists, and I find it entirely unsurprising that a journalist would be falsely flagged as journalists have statistically unusual travel habits (Clearly labeling him as "member of Al Qaida" is unjustified by this evidence though).
Also, criticizing the NSA on their knowledge of statistics seems unwise. The NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.
Read the information yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
Surely this would also apply to NASA, but then you go and read Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster and it doesn't seem at all the case.
I think the really unwise thing would be to ascribe abilities to an organization based on the abilities of individual members as politics starts to take over.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's the same fallacy as being overly paranoid about the safety of self-driving vehicles, the system doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to suck less than what it replaced, how did the CIA/NSA come up with such lists before the advent of computer analysis?
I agree, and with the pedigree of cryptology that has come from the NSA (and with alumni like Knuth), that's very well established.
But non-technical people tend to have a habit of taking technically brilliant (and often specific) things and using them in a way that they were never designed or intended.
To the best of my knowledge, Knuth never worked for the NSA. (He did briefly work for the IDA CRD -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Defense_Analyses... -- which in turn did some work for the NSA, but that's not the same thing.)
References please.
Police don't let criminals know when they are being watched, and that is generally seen as reasonable.
Abuse is a problem. Not sure what the solution is, but I'm not sure making this type of list public is the solution.
> How can we review these lists/tools and reach our own conclusions?
Previous poster was referencing your charge that critics review the information.
The solution will involve some sort of cleared-but-not-invested ombudsman groups, whose job it is to be specifically critical of technology tools, who are given authority equal or greater than the organizations they review, and who are rewarded for performance opposite or conversely somehow to the groups they review.
These groups would have to care about personal liberty, have the authority to actually halt intelligence gathering organizations when necessary, and be rewarded/incentivized for discovering and stopping poor practices.
Congress or maybe the Executive branch has the authority to enact something like this, though it'd take some strong wills to do it.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/war...
WHAT!? That is so wrong! This stinks and we're making fuss about mathematics. Just read that sentence again.
In which freaking world are assassinations without due process legal or even desirable? The mere fact that we are debating whether someone was or wasn't assassinated is a perversion in itself.
Arrest them and try them in a court of justice. End of story.
However, your statement:
Arrest them and try them in a court of justice. End of story.
Is not at all easy to accomplish. The government of Pakistan doesn't control a significant part of the country.
Add to that the corruption at all levels, and it would be difficult to pursue an arrest warrant effectively. If you try to negotiate your way into the areas where the suspects are, it will take a while (and likely a lot of bribes) and they will hear of it and go into hiding. If you want to ignore all the formalities, and just rush in and grab the suspect, you're effectively mounting a small invasion, which the central government AND the tribal leaders will oppose. So you're back to shooting people again.
Again, I'm not saying what the USA is doing is a good solution, I'm just saying I'm not aware of a good and effective solution at all.
Share information about terrorism suspects, arrest them, bring them to justice. Don't go all Rambo, shooting first, asking questions later. That only perpetuates terrorism - "you killed my innocent parents, I'm shall take my revenge" - and the circle of violence continues.
(Plus, it's already been proven that anyone shot is marked as an "Enemy Killed in Action" posthumously, just to cover the perpetrators asses.)
This story goes to the core of ethics in engineering.
It's all of 9 hours old and has 341 points -- yet it's already off of the front page where nobody will see it. You could check HN literally every day and still easily miss this story.
Meanwhile, the front page is full of unimportant links to obscure tech trivia, many of which have less than 20 points.
We know that HN automatically penalizes submissions containing certain words, including "NSA", in the title. Certain prolific HN users have also said that they "automatically flag" submissions they consider "political".
But I really think HN would be a better place if the front page cycled out a little slower, if stories like this were not suppressed, if they got at least one day's worth of attention and discussion.
This is the definition of evil.
How and why is the Pakistani government allowing this program to operate within their territories?
Pakistan gets significant military aid from the US to help put down an insurgency by groups that would overthrow the state. On a realpolitik level they also get to blame the US when a strike goes wrong whereas if they were dropping their own bombs they would have to put up with the blame. Mistakes always happen in war, I'd suggest however that a drone strike has significantly more time to conduct pre-launch checks than an F16 pilot does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_North-West_Pakistan
The US gets to debug and optimize their assassination program "on brown people that noone cares about".
Pakistan and US also get to claim that they are "fighting terrorism". This breeds resentment and new generations of terrorists to be "fought" in the future (divide and conquer 101).
Plus, who knows when and where the droid program might come in handy in the future...
"The United States today provides extensive economic, scientific, and military assistance to Pakistan... and is Pakistan's most generous donor of foreign aid"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan%E2%80%93United_States...
More often not.
There was a period from the 1970s when Pakistan was embargoed because of its nuclear power + weapons programmes, mainly in cooperation with France. This pushed Pakistan into the Chinese camp for arms supplies where they have remained firmly lodged ever since.
During the 1980s the USA did supply some silver-bullet assets like F-16s, mainly to atagonise the Soviets in Afghanistan, but later deliveries were again embargoed and the USA only recently reimbursed their purchase fees.
The USA-Pakistan relationship is one of the text-book examples of realpolitik.
Because it's a powerless country, and as always those are at the mercy of the top dogs.
At best they can ask for some bargains (foreign aid, some favorable diplomatic stance, etc).
So the Pakistani government 'allows' it to at least appear in control.
They're supposedly developing longer-range capability capable of hitting some of Europe[1], but right now they might be able to hit some US military bases in the middle-east[2].
I'm not saying Pakistan isn't corrupt, but pretending that they could simply switch from their current US-friendly policy to a strategy that's openly adversarial to US-interests seems to blatantly ignore the realpolitik of the situation.
Apparently these tools only gives operators some clues and save their time. If it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it. Of course, obtaining the information is a different story.
In my opinion it is most likely that, the people using this software send the output of this algorithm as a recommendation up the chain and some idiot decides to be 'safe' and recommends execution. because they don't have any accountability. I don't think you would be this relaxed in your opinion if these f-ing drones fly over your head - it is just that most people in the US do not care what happens to some idiot in Pakistan.
from the reports disseminated by the state department they are not even sure how many people they killed ? it is reported as between 2500 and 4000. Isn't this insane ? I have no idea in my mind that US is killing people indiscriminately using drones - and the word is not probably - it should be 'definitely'. i'm sure drones are turning people into terrorists more than they are killing terrorists.
don't tell me this is a bs assertion before US can give the name of every body they killed with a drone and the justification of it.
Organisations that do this so frequently there's jargon for it are absolutely not going to be slowed down by requiring human intelligence (which is itself full of false positives and duplicity, see how random people were sold to US soldiers as "terrorists" to collect the reward money).
And how do they know it's a false positive?
Indeed, if they really knew that, then they would have some more training data.
I mean after all, they do human intelligence checks, right? So you'd be safe.
It seems a little silly to write this whole article based on a few powerpoint slides from years ago. Even as an amateur practitioner, I can see several obvious things that could be changed about the presented methods. I'm sure what the NSA is doing now in this regard is much further along than what was portrayed in those documents. Whether or not they should be doing it is a discussion for others to have. But it is interesting to learn a little more about the details of truly high stakes machine learning.
> Have you ever had to kill a man, Max? Have you? To pull that trigger, you have to be sure. Yes, you investigate, analyze, assess, target. And then you have to look him in the eye. And you make the call. And all the drones, bugs, cameras, transcripts, all the surveillance in the world can't tell you what to do next.
I get increasingly annoyed by these kinds of euphemisms in articles discussing US actions. As if it was something humorous.
Should be something like: ... possibly resulting in them getting assassinated by US military.
Just imagine if someone decided to do this to us. How does Pakistan feel about all this?
This is approaching Auschwitz levels of evil.
The power of their use of "only" metadata in Pakistan is frightening..
Now, we learn that the executive has excused themselves from following this process (which applies to Americans, some of which these victims may be, even when they are not in America).
The farther open we pull the NSA lid, the more revolting discoveries we find.
The individuals behind these decisions should be identified, and tried in the court of law.
There is no indication in the slides that the feature calculations are done on the smaller subgraph. The above comment doesn't hold if the calculations are done on the entire graph and then the 100k are sampled for training.
Are you sure? https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/
This kind of technology necessitates mass surveillance, and offers you little more beyond the faint possibility that crime can be predicted. This is bogus science.
If you let your mind entertain the idea you can predict crime, then you are already at the thresh hold of a stifling surveillance state. And why are we even assassinating people. What happens to due process? One by one all these fundamental principles are set aside, massive and dubious mass surveillance infrastructures are being built, doublespeak is comically rampant.
One can begin to understand Snowden's urgent need to act, but what about the moral compass of all the people in the NSA and who support the US and UK security apparatus? People need to act. Surely they cannot suddenly subscribe to values we have aggressively demonized for more than 100 years.
Who would have thought that the US and UK are now the rogue states and other countries who are far more secure and sure about their politics need to begin to isolate themselves from these dangerous totalitarian instincts.
Behavior-based Analytics: - Low [cell phone] use, incoming calls only - Frequent handset changes - Frequent detach / power-down
Visits to other countries - overnight trips - permanent move
I guess that makes me an extremist militant, also.
Edit: this is a genuine question about the practicality of a concept (the "nation-state") that was invented during the Gutenberg era of the printing press, and how such a concept has become impractical in the age of instantaneous international interconnectivity and economic globalization.
Downvoters: How are arbitrary divisions drawn on a map anything but counterproductive to synergy and efficiency in the age of globalization?
Having a single state would mean that the US couldn't afford to have a significantly higher standard of living compared to the rest of the world. In fact, 1st world countries would have to meet 3rd world countries somewhere in the middle.
(Assuming you are living in the states) Would you be willing to live on a wage of $5000 a year?
Edit: see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no...
Over the long term, breaking down these legacy barriers to trade and freedom of movement would necessarily uplift everyone economically by principle of synergy.
Synergy: the interaction of elements that when combined produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements, contributions, etc.
>I'm going to give you an important kind of a picture. I hear a lot of people say "I don't like machinery and technology, it's making a lot of trouble." So we're going to take all the machinery away from all the countries of the world, all machinery, all the tracks and the wires, and the works and we're going to dump it all in the ocean. And you will discover that within 6 months, 2 billion people will die of starvation having gone through great pain. So we say "That's not a very good idea lets put all the machinery back where it was." Then, we're going to take all the politicians from all the countries around the world and we're going to send them on a trip around the sun, and you'll find we keep right on eating. And the political barriers now... scientists say very clear you could make the world work and take care of 100% of the people at a higher standard of living that anyone has ever known despite the increasing population, but you can't do it with the barriers, any more than you can try run a human organism with a wall between the ear, the eye, and the stomach. It is an organic whole, it is total industrialization.
-Buckminster Fuller
>Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
And they have the additional rhetorical impact of appeal to authority. While this does nothing to establish the validity of facts, it works wonders with garnering emotional support from your audience.
Don't fall into the trap of arguing with rhetoric. That's bringing a knife to a gunfight. The Internet is not a formal debate forum. The audience is filled with humans, not robots. Sometimes, if your goal is to sway people to a particular point of view, or even just to force them to acknowledge that other points of view exist, it is easier to take rhetorical shortcuts. Saying "that's cheating" doesn't help. We all know it's cheating. We just don't care, because it allowed the point to be expressed in a quicker, more entertaining way.
Edit:
"The argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ad verecundiam) also appeal to authority, is a common argument form which can be fallacious, such as when an authority is cited on a topic outside their area of expertise, when the authority cited is not a true expert."
Please do tell who might be a true expert on science and technology as it relates to societal organization, if not Fuller or Sagan.
The GP never stated that B must be true. Simply quoting somebody is not in itself a fallacy.