Killing You on Metadata

Wretchard:
[F]ormer Director of the CIA and NSA, General Michael Hayden, explained that the administration's drone kill list, contrary to the narrative, was not a masterpiece of judicial and Solomonic judgment by president Obama but simply the result of a computer program. “We kill people based on metadata,” Hayden said.

He then qualified that stark assertion by reassuring the audience that the US government doesn’t kill American citizens on the basis of their metadata. They only kill foreigners.

Pakistanis, specifically. It turns out that the NSA hoovers up all the metadata of 55m mobile phone users in Pakistan and then feeds them into a machine-learning algorithm which supposedly identifies likely couriers working to shuttle messages and information between terrorists.
A program prints it out. Obama reads it and signs it. In a very real sense occupant of the Oval Office has been partially replaced by a hit-list generator actually called Skynet, as Ars Technica explains.
Foreign Policy reports on an independent review of the White House's drone program that uses a report-card rating system. On not selling drones recklessly to foreign states, they get a C. Overall, they get an F.
The number of civilians killed or wounded in the strikes has also generated controversy and raised concerns that the operations foment more violent extremism directed at the United States. The Obama administration has insisted only a small number of civilians have been inadvertently killed in the strikes. Independent estimates from the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, which are based mainly on local media reports, have put the number in the hundreds, ranging from about 300 to more than 900 between 2004 and 2014. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates several thousand civilians have died in the drone bombing raids.
This comes to mind in part because of the President's self-congratulatory speech on closing GitMo. The reason he can consider closing that facility's prison is that he does not take prisoners. He kills everyone a computer program thinks even might be associated with terrorism, based on opaque metadata that is not subject to an independent review based on other evidence, nor is this killing subject to due process of any kind.

Nevertheless, the GitMo speech was delivered as yet another lecture from the High Moral Ground.

7 comments:

MikeD said...

This comes to mind in part because of the President's self-congratulatory speech on closing GitMo. The reason he can consider closing that facility's prison is that he does not take prisoners.

In a move that may shock you, I actually don't particularly have a problem with that ethical calculus. Under the Geneva Conventions, the only thing that may be lawfully done with unlawful combatants (other than holding them indefinitely) is execution. And given that the US Law of Land Warfare expressly forbids the execution of prisoners, the only lawful thing we may do is hold them indefinitely... or engage them with means that does not allow for capture, such as artillery or air strikes.

Now, I'm not saying I think that's the best way to prosecute a war. In fact, I think it's a rather poor way to do so. But ethically, I have no problems with not taking them prisoner.

Now, if you want to discuss whether we need to offer non-US citizens our due process (with regards to armed conflict, that is) I am against it. I am also against treating US citizens as enemy combatants (unless they are actively engaging US forces in combat... i.e. if you can drone strike them, they are not).

Grim said...

Under the Geneva Conventions, the only thing that may be lawfully done with unlawful combatants (other than holding them indefinitely) is execution.

Yeah, but you're supposed to give them a status hearing first. That status hearing does not consist of a computer spitting out a death list. It consists of three military officers considering the facts and coming to a conclusion about whether or not they are in fact unlawful combatants.

Also, they're supposed to be combatants. These guys are people with cell phones. We have no evidence as to whether or not they are combatants at all.

raven said...

I got nervous when the census taker walked up to my door, to take a GPS co-ordinate on my house. Maybe I missed my calling but the very first thing that crossed my mind was how easy that made targeting domestic dissidents.

Of course, maybe I am paranoid- my first reaction to facebook was how easy it would be to use it to roll up a network.

If that computer program has the right inputs, it can pick us all out of the background noise.

From what I have read, they are also using the strikes to hit respondents to the initial hit, to take out the rescuers, family, medics, etc. Would not take too much of that to convince someone to try to take the fight to the enemy.

Ymar Sakar said...

Way to make all the anti Americans right, "unintentionally evil Americans" right there.

Raven, remember that Chinese embassy that the Clintons "accidentally" bombed.

That could happen at any biker club meeting, any March to DC, which was a risk the Tea Party took without realizing it. They just need enough logistics in America to prop up some pretext or justification. Assuming SWAT teams doing "accidental deaths" isn't enough in and of itself in Wisconsin and other States.

The GPS was probably there to ensure that any SWAT raids would go to the right house, for once. That way when they see you pointing a gun at their midnight no knock raid, they will know that they give the SWAT team the right orders, given the ROE is to "kill anyone with a weapon in their hands or who looks hostile, including pets".

There is a huge problem if people become more paranoid than me, which they often fail to do. The other problem with that is, of course, a little more permanent. Not being paranoid enough can also have dramatic consequences, like at WACO 2 or in Wisconsin or for the Tea Party.

Ymar Sakar said...

The reason he can consider closing that facility's prison is that he does not take prisoners

No wonder the FBI has no clue on how to stop terrorists in the US, any more. Even without CAIR running their training programs.

Their intel has dried up. And so has Europe's intel from us, which means they suffered enormous attacks they failed to stop. Attacks which US intel in the past under Bush II, might have warned them about.

Tom said...

This just creeps me out. I have no problem with executing illegal combatants, if we follow the law in doing so, and if it makes strategic sense to do so, but we actually don't know who we're killing. Guy makes a few wrong friends, calls a couple of them up for dinner, and he and everyone within blast radius of him is taken out? Really?

As for networks, cell phones do this as well. On Android, you can choose to save new contacts just to your phone, but the default tends to be to save them to Google. I assume Apple does the same thing, but I haven't checked.

MikeD said...

Yeah, but you're supposed to give them a status hearing first. That status hearing does not consist of a computer spitting out a death list. It consists of three military officers considering the facts and coming to a conclusion about whether or not they are in fact unlawful combatants.

Yes, that's what the Geneva Convention requires. The problem being that there is a conflict with the US Laws of Land Warfare that dictates that US forces may not execute prisoners. There MAY be an exception for if we caught them in the commission of a war crime, but even then, they'd get a military tribunal, and that generally waits till after the conflict (see the Nuremberg Trials). If so, they never saw fit to brief us on that in Basic Training. We were simply told "no executing prisoners". So in that manner, our laws are more strict than the GC.

It always made me laugh when someone would blindly insist we needed to treat these combatants in accord with the GC, and I'd inform them exactly what they were asking for. You literally had to give them chapter and verse from the Conventions before they'd believe it.