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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

This is assassination we are talking about, not ad serving

Incredibly chilling for you to have to type this! But yes indeed.

Ad serving probably has less false-positives, because those cost the ad companies money.

You think that false positives requiring the staging/deployment of a multi-million dollar weapon system don't cost money?

It's not about how much absolute money is spent per each false positive, it's about how much you can get away with wasting. If a decision maker in the CIA is not punished for each brain fart, why would they avoid mistakes ? You get the behaviour that you reinforce and tolerate.

Exactly. A false positive likely results in more money because you need to buy more equipment to replace what you just used, and even more to do it "right this time".

Welcome to what happens when NatSec gets to set their own terms on visibility.

Not really, the US military practically has a blank check.

I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money.

Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.

That has more to do with the fact that Congress hasn't the backbone to call the Executive to heel on spending or transparency, or to empower OIG/GAO to pierce the national security veil.

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.

Only if they're public companies. If they're private (eg Dell) then their books are hidden from public view.

Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.

Ah yes... The sordid NASA/pork barrel effect. I am aware. That's orthogonal to the fact that Congress, besides setting the budget is also tasked wit Oversight. I'm damn sure they've not done/doing a great job of it, because there are many members of the legislature who find themselves straight up lied to by the Executive, yet nothing is done in terms of consequences.

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.

Digging would endanger their own grift after all

Uncertainty is (unfortunately) everywhere; for example, what probability is “beyond a reasonable doubt”? There are many who take issue with that question, but the answers I’ve seen range between 0.1% and 5%, with no general consensus.

What's the appeal process for being assassinated by the CIA like?

Pretty similar to the appeals process for being killed by the terrorist that the CIA chose not to assassinate.

How many Americans died from terrorism? How many foreigners died from anti-terrorism drone strikes?

The other question is how many terrorist did we create from drone strikes?

These are actually easy things to look up. 910-2,200 civilians killed by drone strikes[1]. More than that were killed on 9/11 alone [2].

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

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

And if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.:

"According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States."

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...

Why would we exclude the largest terrorist attack in American history, the thing that the interventions in question were explicitly designed to prevent a recurrence of?

And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans.

Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.

I know we're talking about drone strikes, but we should always and forever note that the civilian casualties from the US' war on terror far outweighs [0] those who died from terrorism. Not to mention the US troops who died to make Iraqi oil available to US businesses, or who continue to die by suicide and social deaths related to their experiences in the war [1].

[0] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathTol...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009846329/military-suicides-...

Ya, I wouldn't defend the broader war. I think Afghanistan was reasonable and necessary but probably should have been more surgical, and Iraq was basically indefensible. However, conditional on being committed to fighting the wars, I think drone strikes are an excellent tactical choice.

And now think about other countries conducting drone strikes on US soil as they see fit. It would be only fair, right? And what level of collateral damage would be acceptable in that scenario? 2000-3000 would be OK? Maybe 10000-20000 since those other countries can't afford precision munitions and global surveillance network. It's easy to justify any number of collateral damage when it's not you and yours that is the collateral damage.

From your first link: The "estimates of civilian casualties are hampered methodologically and practically";[5] civilian casualty estimates "are largely compiled by interpreting news reports relying on anonymous officials or accounts from local media, whose credibility may vary."

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...

Sure, there's plenty of uncertainty. But there are also far more casualties of 9/11 than the immediate ones. Tons of people got cancer and died, or were seriously disabled, etc. Drone strikes had some similar collateral damage too, I imagine, but certainly not on the scale of 9/11.

We should exterminate the entirety of humanity then, this is the only sure way to decrease terrorism to exactly 0.

Although when you think about it, those single-celled bacteria look awefully suspicious and up to nothing good.

So for you the CIA has the same moral requirements than terrorists groups? That line of reasoning ends up to the conclusion that CIA's assassination is just state sponsored terrorism, and I'm not sure that's the argument you are willing to make.

I didn't say that, nor did I bring up the casualties comparison. The person I was responding to asked what the relative casualty counts were.

About the same as that for being killed on a battlefield, and not much worse than that available to an indigent defendant.

Similar to gmail and youtube suspension process. It happens to you, you or someone makes your case on social media, someone in google may listen and modify the policy rules.

And then you get your life back?

I think that was the point of the sarcasm

Nope. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

The CIA will torture any witnesses of you having had any life and then denies that you ever existed.

But there are also people that acknowledge the existence of uncertainty and draw conclusions from that. Countries without a death penalty for example. Uncertainty being a fact is not a free ticket.

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