"Signature strikes" -- the target has a signature (movement, data, use of a satellite phone or specific cellular number, entourage, etc) that matches that of an HVT (high value taget) that is authorized for termination by drone strike. The CIA has killed lots of the wrong people because "signature strikes" don't require second source intelligence to verify who the target is (eg: is the person using the satellite phone really the HVT or is it a courier or even his kid?). As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.
"Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Other sources can be mistakes or intentional lies. What matters is the quality of the totality of the evidence, and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
This is an excellent summary of how to make decisions, and to continually get better at making them.
> and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
This in particular. How did proceeding this way do in the past? What did we get when we decided to continue with a discrepancy? If the discrepancy did not result in an issue, why? was the information bad, our handling of it, or just chance? If it was an issue, can we avoid overriding it again, can we get better info, can we discard it altogether from consideration?
(note: this comment doesn't relate to the content of the article at all, but about the decision-making process outlined above)
>> "Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources.
Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, and they are almost always better than low-grade intelligence obtained under pressure/influence (like the WMDs in Iraq). That is no justification.
If you use the same statistic model to estimate how likely it is for people to be a danger to others for political reasons, also called terrorism in some cases, you very likely would need to shoot those that implemented these decisions.
>Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered.
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.
From the article, it seems like he was collateral damage and not the intended target - the drone strike was targeting Ibrahim al-Banna. That sucks, very much a wrong place wrong time, but I would say that a fairly effective strategy for not being collateral damage is to not hang out with internationally wanted terrorists.
If you're in a foreign country aiding what is essentially a terrorist group or directly fighting for them on the front lines, why do you expect they would get due process?
> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.
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.
> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this
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.
I am reading "a peoples history of United States" by Howard zinn. It highlights US in a very negative light so with that caveat out of the way, it appears we are continuously ashamed of things we did just a century back. Always.
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.
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.
I don't bear 1 ounce of shame of anything I wasn't a direct participant in. Not slavery, not the KKK, not any of our lame ass wars, none of that. Should we try to fix the ills of those terrible things? Absolutely. I acknowledge it all happened and it was an awful thing. It always has to be viewed through the context of the times it happened in though. None of this "white man's guilt" crap. Let's all work together to fix it, not continuously spin our wheels feeling guilty and hating each other. CRT is an attempt to push the guilt narrative and that's why I agree with it pitched out on it's head from schools, not because I think history shouldn't be taught but "emotion as history" is a bad road to go down.
I have trouble seeing how this is relevant. We're talking about USA's criminal decisions in the middle east here, which was ongoing as recently as 5 or 3 years ago.
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.
> “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.
Governments killing people without due process in this manner is criminal homicide.
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.
I'm not sure why this isn't upvoted beyond anything here. For them to even admit they've killed people based on metadata means they could kill you for your uncle's friend's mom being a terrorist.
Since the Obama administration, any male over the age of 16 we kill anywhere is retroactively considered a legitimate target regardless of any "proof" of their guilt. Obviously this is a horrific policy that is a fig leaf to cover up for mass murder. Everyone involved in these murders going back a decade should be on trial for their crimes.
Please, with the anniversary coming up shortly, remember the event that they used as an excuse to start "programs" like these: 9/11.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think OP is suggesting that “just metadata” is a sensationalist title, because to a lay person it suggests that decisions predicated on metadata are uninformed compared to decisions predicated on “data,” even though this isn’t necessarily true.
If the title were “We kill people based on data,” then the knee jerk response might be “… obviously.”
The CIA is a US state-sponsored terrorist organisation. Every one of those people should be on trial for war crimes.
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.
For a while I saw Palantir showing what sounded like remorse in their website, in stating explicitly that they had purposefully taken distance from their days security contractors providing products in service of the War on Terrorism; they provided one that was used precisely for this.
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.
To me discussions about privacy often seem like bullshit. Here is a comment I wrote yesterday about a former AdWords employee as privacy violation apologist:
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.
People don't have a choice about giving information to governments. There's a fourth amendment for a reason so I'm obviously anti dragnet. Private parties though may opt into providing anything legal to other private parties at their sole discretion and that's the nature of things. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans are making market choices that many of us would consider "not privacy respecting", that does not make these interactions "public" de facto.
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.
If there were proper protections in place to protect privacy it doesn’t matter whether the violator is a government or commercial enterprise. Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
This is only viable when viewed as an economic game. As soon as a real war breaks out or national security is threatened, privacy invasions from foreign powers and literally anyone not whitelisted, will be ended quickly and be treated as acts of war.
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.
That’s an empty argument. People don’t have a choice on what third parties share and disclose. People don’t have a choice on things like HIPAA and banking regulations and they shouldn’t because those regulations protect people but don’t regulate people.
Companies don't kill me. It's the government I'm worried about, and the governments of the world have literally no intentions on respecting your privacy.
Readit News
Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
> 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.
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki Thank you Jaywalk for the correct link
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
Read that Osama bin Laden was verified by people on ground masquerading as health workers.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Relative classification of data and metadata is a separate category of data.
If the title were “We kill people based on data,” then the knee jerk response might be “… obviously.”
Data on the other hand is a "serious" word that we can make decisions on.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.