I'm sorry. No fan of the NSA, but the premise behind it is completely ridiculous.
There is zero evidence of the repeatably asserted idea that the list this tool generates is any kind of kill list.
It's a tool that generates indicators of people that may be worth looking at when trying to find couriers. That's a very specific subgroup of terrorists, and I find it entirely unsurprising that a journalist would be falsely flagged as journalists have statistically unusual travel habits (Clearly labeling him as "member of Al Qaida" is unjustified by this evidence though).
Also, criticizing the NSA on their knowledge of statistics seems unwise. The NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.
Read the information yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
> Also, criticizing the NSA on their knowledge of statistics seems unwise. The NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.
Surely this would also apply to NASA, but then you go and read Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster and it doesn't seem at all the case.
I think the really unwise thing would be to ascribe abilities to an organization based on the abilities of individual members as politics starts to take over.
You may of course be right, I would find it surprising in the extreme if people were killed based purely on output of an algorithm. However we have no assurance that this tool was not used to generate kill targets without any human input. The NSA operates without any meaningful oversight and if they decided to use algorithms to generate kill targets, they would go right ahead and do it.
The thing is that the NSA doesn't kill people. The CIA and DoD run the drone program, and they both do their own due dilligence (how good is another conversation altogether) before carrying out their strikes. Also, most strikes have to be authorized from the top, up to and including the secretary of defense and the president.
> However we have no assurance that this tool was not used to generate kill targets without any human input.
That's absurd. We also have no assurance that the NSA isn't communicating with aliens to generate kill lists of people who will oppose the alien invasion of 2021, though we do have common sense to filter out such absurd scenarios. "We have no assurance that this isn't so" isn't an argument.
I'll bite. The difference is that communicating with aliens requires positing the existence of aliens, whereas simply generating a kill list is already something we know they do, though we don't know how it works.
It isn't "common sense" to filter out entirely obvious actions the NSA would take, and given the scale of disclosures from the Snowden files you ought to have already expanded your imagination away from "they'd never do that" to "yes, they already have the technical capability and have done similar things in the past, lied to Congress about it, dismantled oversight, lobbied against oversight, and otherwise deceived every mechanism of oversight put in place."
The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not. We're arguing about with each other about bullshit.
The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not. We're arguing about with each other about bullshit.
I'm incredibly appalled by that. That's why stories like this are dreadful. They overreach in their conclusions, and will be easily denied by people involved in the programs who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to: identify terrorist couriers.
That denial and evidence will then discredit all the sensible arguments about the drone strike program.
Don't believe it? There's a discussion down-thread where someone is equating this list with the US Terrorism Watch Lists. Their clearly not the same thing at all (once glace at the slides shows you that), but they demand evidence. Of course, I can't show evidence that will convince them, but at some point an agency will, and they'll show exactly how the ist in this article (or some other list) is very accurate (I'm sure there is some list that is) and that will discredit the whole argument against the watch lists.
* who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to*
No they won't, because they've been challenged to do such things repeatedly in the past and always failed.
These people live in a foreign country and it's not like the US Govt dispatches a bunch of detectives and lawyers based on the results of this ML model. Get real. The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes.
This is all incredibly well documented.
There is simply no mathematical way the program described in the article can be accurate, that's what the entire article is about. So I don't see why you have such profound faith in them. It's quite clear they're a bunch of maths geeks who have a single hammer and will use it to hammer any US foreign policy problem regardless of how much it resembles a nail or not.
> The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes.
> This is all incredibly well documented.
Then feel free to submit at least one source (or better yet, several) for this "well documented" fact that (a) the NSA does not due any due diligence into suspected terrorists after they get picked up by this meta data process; (b) the NSA does not indicate in any way to the CIA how the list was generated; (c) the CIA uses this information without performing any of its own due diligence on the targets; (d) the CIA then goes and kills everyone on the list without any further approval from DNI, SECDEF, POTUS, etc.
I'm no drone program apologist but let's get real here to suggest that there's no intelligence or due diligence into these operations is willfully disingenuous at best.
Furthermore, even if the algorithm was generating kill lists directly there seems to be the implicit assumption that that would be worse than having some human "yes-men" who are directly beholden to orders of their immediate superiors and surely care more about their career advancement than bombing random Pakistanis in charge of the process.
It's the same fallacy as being overly paranoid about the safety of self-driving vehicles, the system doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to suck less than what it replaced, how did the CIA/NSA come up with such lists before the advent of computer analysis?
Informers. Of which there are a limited number ... and of course they are themselves not entirely reliable which is why virtually all developed western countries have scrapped the death penalty.
> The NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.
I agree, and with the pedigree of cryptology that has come from the NSA (and with alumni like Knuth), that's very well established.
But non-technical people tend to have a habit of taking technically brilliant (and often specific) things and using them in a way that they were never designed or intended.
>> Read the information yourself, and come to your own conclusions.
> How can we review these lists/tools and reach our own conclusions?
Previous poster was referencing your charge that critics review the information.
The solution will involve some sort of cleared-but-not-invested ombudsman groups, whose job it is to be specifically critical of technology tools, who are given authority equal or greater than the organizations they review, and who are rewarded for performance opposite or conversely somehow to the groups they review.
These groups would have to care about personal liberty, have the authority to actually halt intelligence gathering organizations when necessary, and be rewarded/incentivized for discovering and stopping poor practices.
Congress or maybe the Executive branch has the authority to enact something like this, though it'd take some strong wills to do it.
The point of using computer models to 'find' terrorists isn't necessarily to find terrorists, it's to abdicate moral responsibility. Everyone can just say they were 'following the model' when it turns out they were wrong. You can't execute a computer for war crimes.
I'm sorry. No fan of the NSA, but the premise behind it is completely ridiculous.
There is zero evidence of the repeatably asserted idea that the list this tool generates is any kind of kill list.
It's a tool that generates indicators of people that may be worth looking at when trying to find couriers. That's a very specific subgroup of terrorists, and I find it entirely unsurprising that a journalist would be falsely flagged as journalists have statistically unusual travel habits (Clearly labeling him as "member of Al Qaida" is unjustified by this evidence though).
Also, criticizing the NSA on their knowledge of statistics seems unwise. The NSA is many things, but "bad at Math" isn't one of them.
Read the information yourself, and come to your own conclusions.