“We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things
darknetlive.com
darknetlive.com
Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
Edit: Edited to state that this was not fire of combatants in a combat zone.
The basics are that Al-Awlaki was (allegedly) a kind of pro-terrorist or pro extreme Muslim kind of preacher moving about the Middle East spreading his message. Possibly also hooked up with real terrorists / jihadis. A drone strike killed Awlaki and a second drone strike, a couple weeks later, killed his sixteen year old son. The US claimed killing his son was an accident - but that's pretty implausible. Years later, under Trump, a special forces team killed his eight year old daughter.
That seems incredibly unlikely. Friendly fire incidents have been a fact of war, pretty much forever.
Friendly fire, _by definition_, is not something the Army _actively plans_ to do.
First item on this list: https://www.military.com/military-life/6-times-military-was-...
> 1863: The New York City Draft Riots > the governor [...] had to call in U.S. Marines.
As with so many aspects of American governance, they "solved" an either-or problem by implementing both ideas.
Not close to the first time. Kent State is one famous example. Countless people shot for trespassing on bases
By the way, if you want to split hairs and bring up examples like Kent State, the elephant in the room is the self-defense justification in a lot of these examples. Find a killing that occurred when a soldier believed their life to be in danger.
Well, no; we just weren't doing it using the military. Or at least weren't doing it using the military in a way that we got caught. The US government (and, I expect, nearly every government since the dawn of governments) has been killing people outside of "the battlefield" forever.
This is to say nothing of the many, many times the Army was used to clear natives from lands claimed by the US. Presumably, in most of those incidents, they were not considered American citizens. However, they definitely were in the most recent incident I can think of, the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened in 1980. That was the 7th Cavalry, and they killed 250 Lakota, including women and children.
I'm sure that there were plenty of other times it happened, but, for a relativly well-know and documented incident in 1932, check out the Bonus Army[1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army#:~:text=The%20Bon....
And union busting police? And modern police, before and after 2020?
This will continue until (1) the courts eliminate Qualified Immunity and (2) police unions have to carry liability insurance for all its members.
It is easy to get outraged at the military, but the police is way more harmful here.
Citation needed. The current pattern of extrajudicial remote targeted killings outside of a Congressionally-declared battlefield is completely novel and only began in the Predator drone age, as far as I can see
Edit: some data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_by_the_...
In 1896, under circumstances not entirely clear, Sun was caught and detained for 13 days by the Chinese legation in London. It appears likely that Sun ran into a fellow Cantonese who worked for the legation and was found out and seized while visiting him under an alias. The legation planned to ship Sun back to China, but, before this could be done, Sun had converted a British employee at the legation to his side and got word through to James Cantlie, former dean of Hong Kong College of Medicine. The British Foreign Office intervened, and Sun was released from his captivity. The incident engendered great publicity and gave Sun’s career a powerful boost.
From the biography of Sun Yat Sen. They probably wanted to execute him in China for plotting against the throne.
Respectfully, I beg to differ.
I am not some sort of naive activist. I accept there is a price to be paid for the relative comfort I live in. That said, some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed.
For better or worse, most citizens seem to be getting regular reminders[1] that the rules, at best, are not applied evenly. The trust in institutions is already low. Some basic accountability has to apply even to the highest echelon. Scratch that, it especially needs to apply to it.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119185396/paul-pelosi-nancy-...
I guess one of those rules could be: Don't travel overseas to participate in a war against the US government. Yes, I understand, this is a hard rule to follow, especially if you're of the rebellious bent, but comfort requires compromise.
I am surprised that I even have to point it out, but you do not stop being an American by traveling outside the country. Hell, you do not stop being an American even if you send money to sanctioned entities.
There is a reason there is a process for those, who deviate from societal norms. It ensures people en masse do not take matters into their own hands. That process does not, or at least should not, include current regime deciding you get deaded behind closed doors. Deviation from it historically yielded very poor results.
If you are not sure why that is a bad idea, and a bad omen, for a republic supposedly governed by law, I am genuinely not sure I can help. I am just sad that some people explicitly believe this.
So how is this different from rules forced by ISIS?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...
"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...
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.
[0] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathTol...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009846329/military-suicides-...
So let's not speak with too much certainty. Drone operators have harrowing stories of false positives that were never reported as such. A false positive is a strike on civilians.
The Unseen Scars of Those Who Kill Via Remote Control https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd...
Although when you think about it, those single-celled bacteria look awefully suspicious and up to nothing good.
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.
You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized.
None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-positive "costs money".
Ad companies don't get to hide their books from the public.
Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.
> 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)
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.
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
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.
Same and seconded. That includes presidents too; take every living president and have them stand for these crimes. There's no reason that being president should be carte blanche for murder.
Well not with that attitude. ;-)
The last president who seemingly took issue with these powers was conveniently assassinated. His successor (and the successor's allies) wasted no time in appeasing those powers by beginning lots of wars that killed and destroyed the lives of many people. I too doubt anything will happen.
At the risk of starting a Chomsky flame war and for anyone curious about what happened in those wars, and why nothing will happen: read "Manufacturing Consent".
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki Thank you Jaywalk for the correct link
A US citizen who was executed by a drone strike ordered by Obama himself.
A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?
Not enough for my taste, but it at least caused a hiccup in the meat grinder. And it diminishes Obama's legacy in an objective way that can be repeated ad nauseam, legitimately. He lives on past the bullets as a bullet-point in presentations, discussions, debates and speeches.
Salutations, fellow United States citizen Mr. Al-Awlaki.
Nobody, including the President, has the right to do that. It was blatantly unconstitutional.
Here’s a mental experiment for you: what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.
> what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.
Well, that depends - is the US government a failed state incapable of enforcing its own laws? Or did the US government give permission for this to happen? Then sure, go right ahead Russia. The Yemeni government gave the greenlight for the US to drone strike al-Awlaki.
Essentially, you’re assuming US are always the good guys. And the easiest way to explain this is the foundation of all US politics: racism.
Having said that, US _arr_ the good guys at the moment, and let’s hope it stays that way.
If Russia executed people that were waging war against Russia from within the US, that the US had already convicted of making war on Russia, was the US also trying to capture or kill at the same time?
I'd expect the US government to say "thank you".
The due process afforded in the constitution. With, you know, trials and juries and such.
> A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?
I would say that an operation specifically to assassinate that person without a trial should be viewed as unconstitutional.
And just going to through out there that Anwar al-Awlaki isn't accused of taking up arms, just publishing political speech that the US government didn't approve of.
A drone strike feels like a pretty active situation no?
I'm not being pedantic, just pointing out that there is a ton of grey area that your statement doesn't account for, and we'd need to dive into the details of this situation to determine whether the assassination was justified or not. Even then, it would mostly be a qualitative judgement.
For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?
What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?
I'm not saying the gov was wrong or right with Anwar, just that the arguments presented here fail to account for real world complexity.
Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed.
No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation.
> For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?
> What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?
The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.
Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.
My point was that you haven't defined what an "active situation" is. I could say "we should only kill people when we have to" and that'd be accurate, but that'd be useless for the point of this conversation, which at this point seems to be defining "have to".
> The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.
Indeed, however, such things happen and people are forced to act during them. I also highly doubt the playbook the military uses is "do we have at least a modicum of evidence? then kill them."
>Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.
I am ignoring no such thing as I made no comment on his situation other than to say I do not have enough information to make a judgement.
Source?
Should the US conducted the formality of convicting him of treason in absentia? Sure.
None of this remotely excuses killing his children.
Once again - you’re assuming US was the good guys there. Which is quite an absurd assumption if you look at the numbers instead of propaganda.
I'm not for drone strikes, but it seems to me if your dad is an armed militant working against the US and killed in a US military operation, and then you go around associating with even more armed militants working against the US, you're asking a lot of your US citizenship to protect you from getting droned.
Maybe in a hundred years we will also talk about the current era as dark times (as long as we are the top dog or maybe number 2). But at that point we will have something else to be ashamed of (but that will not be talked of at that time).
If we spiral out of control or break up, then the story (in hindsight) will be even more amazing.
But then I look at other countries and apart from some good European socialism which is quite recent, there ain't much to be proud of, when you look at any country, of any era.
This is true of any group of people, particularly a tolerant one, because actions deemed necessary by some will always be abhorrent to others.
Maybe "ashamed" is too strong a word, but thinking smaller scale, if you look back at the way you handled things when you were younger, don't you think you could have done anything better?
Isn't this how we learn and progress as a person? Seems likely to be true for a society as well.
And the "other countries are genocidal maniacs as well" caveat only works if the person who is pointing out that the USA is a genocidal maniac is fond of another country, but there is no mention of any country to praise in this thread, just condemnation of USA's actions against individuals. All countries are genocidal maniacs, but only one controls the US military.
Read that Osama bin Laden was verified by people on ground masquerading as health workers.
Please cite a source for this claim.
But here you go anyway: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/05/obamas-most-dangerous-d...
> “Signature strikes have resulted in large numbers of bystander casualties in Pakistan and Yemen,” Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Foreign Policy.
That would by psychotic though, so I'm surely misinterpreting what your actual point is. Care to clarify?
Have you voted against all of your elected representatives that authorized it?
The only way things like this will change is if the people force them to change by making it clear to politicians that they will not be elected or re-elected if they support them.
Each person needs to held individually accountable for their crimes. State secrets should be declassified and released. Each person's individual actions should be documented. And they should be tried in court and serve sentences commensurate with their level of participation.
This does not secure the country. This creates enemies and makes the situation worse.
If we lived in a just world ever single one of these people would be serving a lifetime in jail. This includes the politicians that approved funding for it as well as any lawyers and judges that rubber stamped it.
There is war and then there is what the Federal government is doing. They are not the same thing.
It is unacceptable. It is global tyranny.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
Reminds me of the Vietnam war (or American war as it was referred to by the locals) where the US couldn’t say they were winning based on the amount of territory they held (because they couldn’t actually capture and hold much territory for very long). Instead, the “quantitative measurements” of McNamara’s computer systems could only show that they were “winning” the war based on the number of enemy combatants killed – with the result that any Vietnamese killed by US forces were retroactively recorded as Vietcong. Most of us are familiar with Goodhart's law regarding measures becoming targets so I’d be curious to know how much it applied to the Vietnam war.
I was too young and dumb and propagandized to know what I was getting myself into, signing up to go fight "those evil terrorists", but it didnt take long for me to realize something wasnt right. I spent the vast majority of my life since I got out of the Corps trying to understand the why of it all, starting with the small picture view from an infantrymans perspective, working my way up piece by piece until I was at the 30k ft view at the global scale.
You can't solve the war on terror or the turning on of the totalitarian surveillance state without solving 9/11, the justification that enabled those things. The story as told by government and their operation mockingbird 2.0 lackeys in media just isn't true.
What I realized, that still terrifies me, is that all these tools and techniques we used "over there", are going to end up being used against us (and other countries) domestically.
never let a good crisis goto waste! As soon as the first plane hit i bet the lights started getting turned on and the servers booted up.
There is no "just" metadata. Metadata is a relative classification of one piece of data compared to another piece of data, not an absolute classification.
Data on the other hand is a "serious" word that we can make decisions on.
If the title were “We kill people based on data,” then the knee jerk response might be “… obviously.”
Relative classification of data and metadata is a separate category of data.
But I think the distinction the various three-letter agencies make is between "metadata" and "content" for most data they process. So in terms of a phone call, an actual voice recording would be "content" while when the call was made and between which two numbers would be "metadata".
With "content" + "metadata" they could verify that the target is actually who they think it is, based on voice. With just "metadata", the chances are higher that it might not actually be who they think it is.
There's obviously a difference between metadata and other data, that's why we have a word for it.
What are you trying to say exactly?
> There's obviously a difference between metadata and other data,
No. Your metadata is my data; that's the point. "Meta" is an additional contextual characteristic of some (I'd say most) data.
That is a cop out. If you listen to a call or read an email, you have context for innocence/guilt and punishment (however extra-judicial that might be.)
If you have "just" metadata, you just know two people spoke. Perhaps to order a pizza. Perhaps to arrange for a babysitter. No one knows. Killing based on that seems insane to me.
The only consolation is that many of those people, the so-called "jackals", will eventually be taken out by their own. The diplomatic disasters they could cause should their conscience ever make them talk is too great of a risk -- all loose ends are eventually dealt with.
It was a change from the previous branding I saw from them, one where they would whitewash themselves by showcasing their most charismatic employees, showing that they were a friendly tech company for cool people (look, we have a handsome black dude who plays the guitar!), regardless of, you know, the blood money.
Now their website only talks about power and disruption, while showing pictures of heavy industry, infrastructure, and war.
Hypocritically people bitch about intrusive data collection from governments and yet simultaneously give away the same data, and encourage others to do the same, and more to private companies knowing that data will be weaponized against them. As such it’s almost impossible to take any opinion promoting commercial violations of privacy seriously.
Assuming all private companies are bent is pointless. People should be allowed the choice to keep their data private and give it whomever they please. This is a 'free market' after all.
Some people have a non-commercial precommitment to privacy and finding the companies that honor it and relate to it is the choice we want.
If you want to force the discussion about privacy into regulation and non-market forces, then okay? Why would people legally and politically consent to a fully transparent world? The regulation will only end up going one way in the end and for all the split hairs along the way, it won't be in favour of ending privacy...
I don't have a Google account. I don't have a Facebook account. I don't take commercial genealogy tests, I'm not an Amazon Prime member. I would prefer to not have the government use the ubiquity of this kinds of behavior as a lever to usurp more information.
I agree that people that bitch about corporate overreach should just not interact with bad actors instead of bitching to the government to somehow safeguard themselves from contracts they sign. At this point, it's not even an information asymmetry situation. Lots of people know Facebook and Google are untrustworthy stewards of this kind of information, but to them the ends justify the means... and that's their market decision I guess.
They have shadow profiles of you.
I'm not saying I avoid the bot net completely -- no one does and it's only getting harder to do so. This is a result of people I know installing LinkedIn on their phones with my number in their contacts. It's still a consumer-first problem and awareness is lacking. Every dollar, click and eyeball you give to some product is one you're divesting from another and we should consider our market engagements endorsements of corporate behavior because that's what they are.
How much awareness will get people to reconsider though? People are paying out of pocket to install microphones in their own homes and cameras on their front doors. Even if dumb TVs were on offer for 2X the price, statistically no one would buy them. Privacy is only a concern if it's novel and studies show generations born into surveillance are numb to it. I feel like people need to be more aware AND more discerning in their consumption; awareness alone isn't enough. We should discriminate with our wallet more on these issues today while we still have some alternatives available.
Legislative privacy protections make it impossible for you to sign certain things away contractually and/or make it impossible for someone else to ask you to do so contractually. The right to sell certain data to certain people at certain times, even if you have consent from the user, for example, can render a contract void. Of course legally limiting the things you can agree to in this way would limit the effect of these contracts. Don't sign shitty contracts though and you can get all of this today.
The government isn't bound by optional contracts though and as long as congress grants the government jurisdiction over everything not constitutionally interpreted to be covered by the fourth, government snooping is completely legal.
I agree with you. Congress should limit the government's data mining jurisdiction, but it seems hellbent on doing the opposite with things like PATRIOT, PRISM and wiretapping legislation. I think users should also stop being flagrant idiots with their data if they supposedly care about it so much. Users can effect change in the market by deciding not to do business with bad business practices. Meta says it's going to mix WhatsApp data with Facebook data and people boycotted, Meta backtracked (for awhile)... more of that, we can do both.
> Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
Privacy from whom? The fourth sets a bar for "unreasonable" searches of an individual by requiring a warrant for public access to "persons, houses, papers, and effects". The government can still ask you for information without a warrant and definitely will ask Google for information about you, which does not itself need to demand a warrant on your behalf. As stated above, everything that isn't explicitly enumerated as protected is fair game as well.
The constitution curtails the relationship between the government and the governed. The fourth says nothing about privacy from other private entities, corporate or otherwise.
I suspect by "metadata" the general meant: A is a verified terrorist, B communicates a lot with A or maybe is often co-located with A, fits the demographic of a terrorist and some other coincidental "metadata" is enough to put a high-ish probability on B being a terrorist and target B; or at least treat him/her as acceptable collateral damage.
https://www.airforcemag.com/us-airstrike-total-in-afghanista...
Can't find the chart for Iraq.
So safe to say the US isn’t going to stop doing this any time soon.
Problem solved.
As many predicted correctly: "metadata" has become profoundly more difficult to collect in 2022 for those willing to invest the time and effort.
Most of them do seem to be vaguely related to the articles so my best guess is that it's a combination of individuals trolling + lax/nonexistent moderation. The handful of articles I checked seemed to be above the board unless I missed some dogwhistles somewhere, so not sure why exactly the site seems to be a target for this specific sort of trolling.
> Trump has already proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be guilty of.
?
Has he ever been convicted in a court?
Or did you mean a different phrasing about evidence?
It's always possible the he had legitimate reasons for storing SC information outside a SCIF. No one can think of any, including his own legal team, but hey, ex-President, right?
I think saying things like this is deliberately provocative -- it's not the case.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Trump commits crimes flagrantly and to such a degree that Nixon never would have dreamed. He will get some kind of legal consequence ... eventually.
I don't see how you could possibly be confident of that. Even if he is absolutely guilty and gets to the point of a trial, which alone is a huge huge huge huge step, he may be able to delay things for the rest of his life.
If you think it's a good idea to allow a former POTUS to retroactively and implicitly declassify information he is caught with after leaving office, or to issue a sweeping declaration that any documents he takes out of the Oval Office are automatically declassified, I suspect you won't be as blasé when someone of the opposing political party does it.
No?
Well, then, any such claims are necessarily retroactive, or else they're invalid from the get-go. Which do you prefer?
Even if I were to imagine he were technically breaking the law with some of these documents, look at it from a practical standpoint. At one point he could've done whatever he wanted to with any documents, including tweeting them publicly. He may or may not have taken some sensitive information and stored it in a building wholly owned (secured) by the secret service. There is not really any risk here, any crimes would be mere technicalities.
Of all the crimes every President in my lifetime has committed, including Trump, mishandling some secret documents in this way is a total nothingburger. It's almost certainly not a crime and even if it is a crime it's a paperwork technicality crime.
I think it's kind of ironic that - speaking generally - the "patriots" don't seem to care at all that a former president took state secrets after leaving office.
I wonder how big the "nothingburger" would be if it turns out he actually did leak them.
I'm not a Trump supporter.
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/08/trumps-dubious-standing-or...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/18/politics/trump-claim-standing...
Ultimately it'll probably come down to Trump thanking his lucky stars that he owns a big chunk of SCOTUS.
If they were already declassified then there wouldn't have been a raid.
Reality Winner had no such authority to declassify documents.
They can certainly say that, but since the executive power is constitutionally vested in the president in Article II, it can't be true barring a constitutional amendment. I believe there are court cases already establishing that Congress does not have the authority to limit the President's power to classify and declassify[1]. In this particular case a constitutional argument isn't even necessary since Trump's conduct appears to be protected by the Presidential Records Act.
Of course this is Trump we're talking about, so half the country will happily shred the constitution to "get" him, including many federal employees.
Re: that case; yes for executive classification [The Supreme Court determined in its 1988 decision on Department of the Navy v. Egan that the president’s power over classified information comes from executive authority granted by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which says, in part, that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”]. However, Restricted Data is under the SOLE authority of the Department of Energy[1] to declassify, even if the DoE is under the executive branch. The law is specifically written, in fact, so that the president is not explicitly given the authority to declassify materials, yet does play a role in declassification once the DoE initiates the process, which implies that Congress did not wish to grant the presidency that power. But I'm not a lawyer, and my opinion means little.
Yeah, that's not how this works.
Now let's pardon her.
If anything, a Presidential pardon from the current administration would be seen as a highly partisan move in an already politically-agitated climate and make everything worse.
Her custodial sentence was for five years and three months on August 23rd 2018, so she should be released in a couple of months.
The author shows their bias.
I think it's good that US intelligence uses every tool at their disposal against foreign threats. Tell me why they shouldn't? What is the alternative?
This either naively assumes the US's goals are aligned with some objective "good," or that things that benefit the US also directly benefit you, regardless of their goodness.
The second one I don't think I need to refute? Assassinating people for personal gain would not be valid under very many moral frameworks I don't think.
So we're down to basically "does the US generally use violence for widespread good?" Which is fraught, for sure, but also pretty clearly no? We use violence for all kinds of reasons some of which are roughly good for a lot of people but many are not at all. These institutions just aren't trustworthy in this way.