Comment by malwrar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malwrar | Hacker News Reader

I’m as anti-monopoly as the next guy, but I don’t think the following are necessary good examples:

> Apple has repeatedly refused to allow law enforcement to access criminals’ devices

Creating a backdoor for government device access enables turnkey oppression against individuals and marginalized groups, from enemies both foreign and domestic. I can see why this rhetoric would be mildly convincing to a senator, but as for me I want my device to be as protected as the contents of my brain.

> Google abandoned a contract to deliver the Pentagon drone AI technology

I absolutely do not want AI in drones, I barely even want drones to exist at all. The US is flying these around the world attempting to dispassionately assassinate people, and they often get it wrong. AI, best case, just makes this more palatable than it already is.

> Microsoft has maintained “strategic partner” status with a Chinese drone and imaging technology firm

Oh really? I thought we liked AI in drones.

> Facebook enables and profits from the harassment of victims of horrific shootings and other violent crimes

This absolutely sucks, but like what do you expect them to do? Is this an argument that FB can’t handle moderation at scale, or are they realistically expected by the author to prevent all harassment (or just this specific arbitrary type)?

> Oh really? I thought we liked AI in drones.

I want the US to have good drone technology. I do not want China to.

why tho. you got about a zero percent chance of being drone bomb assassinated by either. both are definitely going to drone bomb assassinate people they shouldn't. what do you even see as the moral difference seriously.

The moral difference is that a human drone operator might not be a bloodthirsty psycho and there is a chance they would regret and even suffer from mistaken killing and attempt to avoid it, or make a policy change in the future. With an AI drone everyone can escape responsibility.

Sorry I probably should have been more clear, I didn't mean what's the difference between different kinds of drone weapon technology.

The person I was responding to seemed to be saying they were ok with it in the US's hands but not China's, which does not seem consistent to me at all.

$10 gets you $20 the person you were responding to was an US citizen. Doesn't really seem hard to see why "Murica! Fuck Yeah!" would think it is okay for the US but not for China.

I see your point but given the way the military already operates it seems a pretty minor distinction. A colleagues’ son flies military drones. To hear him tell it drone operators are basically tech support that murders people. If he has issues with it there is no shortage of fresh operators.

> why tho. you got about a zero percent chance of being drone bomb assassinated by either.

Indeed, I'm personally not in any real danger from China having drones. But I care about the rest of the world and not just myself, and the rest of the world is in way more danger from China having drones than from the US having them. Even if you don't think China would do something directly, remember that they're allied with, e.g., Russia and the Taliban, and are likely to give/sell/let them borrow them.

The data on US usage is something like an average of 50 collateral losses for one intended target eliminated. Those are frequently children and do not include any males aged 13-60 or so who are all assumed to be combatants. There is no good guy with drones.

Accepting that number for the sake of argument... Does China (or Russia, or the Taliban, ...) have a better track record than that? And even if they do, isn't that offset by China (or Russia, or the Taliban, ...)'s intentional targets being way more likely to be good guys?

China developed attack drones, but has not used them in any attacks yet themselves. They have sold drones to middle eastern states, where they were purportedly used against "terrorists" (i.e. the same people the US commonly drone strikes).

Given the US has made numerous drone-strikes that have been confirmed to kill quite a few civilians, and china has 0... yeah, China's track record is wildly better.

There's literally a full wikipedia page estimating civilian causalities from US drone strikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...

There's a reason that no such page exists for any other country with drones.

> isn't that offset by China targets being way more likely to be good guys?

That seems naive to me. Both the US and China are in the UN, are part of the "UN Security Council", and thus generally try to follow the military norms set out there.

In practice, the US and China can both flaunt the rule of international law some due to their size, though in practice I don't know of china violating it significantly in relation to war, while the invasion of iraq by the US was done in violation of UN policy/international law. I'll again reference a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War

To be clear on all this, I am not sympathetic to China. They've committed atrocities domestically and I'm not claiming they're a good country.

I do think the evidence isn't so black and white as to say that China is likely to "target good guys" or any such thing.

> China [...] has not used them in any attacks yet themselves.

> China's track record is wildly better.

Consider a new driver who just got his license, versus someone who's been driving for 20 years and has been at fault in one fender bender. Would you consider the former to be the safer driver of the two?

Or consider an 18-year-old who has no credit history yet (and so no late payments), vs. a 50-year-old with a well-established credit history who made a credit card payment a few days late once 5 years ago. Which one of them has better credit?

> Consider a new driver who just got his license, versus [..] one fender bender.

The baseline here should be zero civilian casualties though. You could just as easily say "consider a new driver who got a car, and hasn't used it yet, vs someone who has killed an innocent bystander over 50% of the several hundred drives they've been on". I'd obviously rather take the new driver since the expected outcome in driving is closer to an accident every 20 years or so.

We don't have information from more than just one country, so we don't actually have a good accepted baseline to say a "new drone-having country" is good or bad... other than the fact I feel very comfortable saying that drones simply should not be used unless there can be greater than a 99.9% chance of killing zero civilians.

> The baseline here should be zero civilian casualties though.

But there have always been civilian casualties in war. Why do drones need to be perfect in this regard, when nothing else in war ever has been? This feels like using airliner reliability as the standard that self-driving cars need to meet, instead of accepting that they're a net benefit as soon as they're safer than cars driven by humans.

> Consider a new driver who just got his license, versus [..] one fender bender.

More like a new driver versus a quintuple-DUI alcoholic who just got shitfaced again and mowed over a dozen members of a wedding party.

This number is nonsense. You can legitimately argue against the ethics of drone warfare (and likely win) without quoting completely false numbers.

Here's the wiki cohort estimate [1]. You can argue that it's off by multiples if you really want, but it's still not even in the same order of magnitude as your fake estimate:

> Taken together, independent estimates from the non-governmental organizations New America and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggest that civilians made up between 7.27% to 15.47% of deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia from 2009–2016, with a broadly similar rate from 2017–2019.[6] Civilian casualties as a percentage of overall deaths were highest in Yemen and lowest in Somalia.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...

>I want my device to be as protected as the contents of my brain

No offense but that's not really relevant to the question at hand. The article debates whether the American tech sector is conducive to American national security, not whether your phone is sufficiently libertarian.

the points raised are perfectly valid. The tech sector is out of alignment with law enforcement, out of alignment with the American military sector, potentially more in alignment with foreign governments, and social media companies may be destabilizing society at a cultural level.

So in short the American tech sector is a competing power center that sidelines the interests of the state and the nation. Funnily enough China which is mentioned multiple times ,despite popular perception in the US, actually does have the same problem. Which is why they did exactly what the article demanded, which is pursue anti-trust measures and bring the hammer down on big tech.

I generally agree that tech monopolies are potentially bad for, not just national security, but general human wellbeing.

> The tech sector is out of alignment with law enforcement

In this particular case, I'd say that's a good thing. Law enforcement, and certain three letter agencies, have a terrible track record here. If big tech is making it a little harder for them to bypass basic privacy rights, I'm ok with that.

> No offense but that's not really relevant to the question at hand

A backdoor that can be used by law enforcement is one that can potentially (probably) be misused by law enforcement, privileged parties, foreign governments, parties with leverage over the implementer or intermediate agents, plain old hackers, etc. My concern is unauthorized, inappropriate, or overzealous use of a backdoor by any one of these, which I believe to be a threat to national security.

Perhaps some random citizen being compromised isn’t necessarily a national security threat, but large groups being compromised or particular key individuals (industrial leaders, government officials, etc) certainly could be. I agree this sidelines law enforcement to some extent, but then again by design so do many rights US citizens possess. Thus my explicit use of “foreign and domestic”.

Yeah this article takes some strange positions

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