31–40 of 221 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can we review these lists/tools and reach our own conclusions? References please.
I'm completely unconvinced that it isn't reasonable for an agency to keep lists and perhaps tools like this secret. Police don't let criminals know when they are being watched, and that is generally seen as reasonable. Abuse is a problem. Not sure what the solution is, but I'm not sure making this type of list public is the solution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they did not, what could Pakistan do about it? The U.S would do so anyway covertly, and the Pakistani government would be seen to be weak, since they were powerless to stop it. So the Pakistani government 'allows' it to at least appear in control.
They have nukes. They could easily institute a defense doctrine of nuclear retaliation tomorrow, and the terror would stop. But the reason they don't is that they are bought and paid for, both as a country via foreign aid and as individual government members via bribes (or "speaker fees", as you guys call those now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
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.
Focus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can we review these lists/tools and reach our own conclusions? References please.
I'm completely unconvinced that it isn't reasonable for an agency to keep lists and perhaps tools like this secret. Police don't let criminals know when they are being watched, and that is generally seen as reasonable. Abuse is a problem. Not sure what the solution is, but I'm not sure making this type of list public is the solution.
> 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.
Wait, this isn't an Onion article? Please be hyperbolic bullshit. PLEASE BE HYPERBOLIC BULLSHIT!
Unfortunately, it is also tragically accurate, wrt the info in the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they did not, what could Pakistan do about it? The U.S would do so anyway covertly, and the Pakistani government would be seen to be weak, since they were powerless to stop it. So the Pakistani government 'allows' it to at least appear in control.
They have nukes. They could easily institute a defense doctrine of nuclear retaliation tomorrow, and the terror would stop. But the reason they don't is that they are bought and paid for, both as a country via foreign aid and as individual government members via bribes (or "speaker fees", as you guys call those now).
They're supposedly developing longer-range capability capable of hitting some of Europe[1], but right now they might be able to hit some US military bases in the middle-east[2].
I'm not saying Pakistan isn't corrupt, but pretending that they could simply switch from their current US-friendly policy to a strategy that's openly adversarial to US-interests seems to blatantly ignore the realpolitik of the situation.
They literally named it Skynet. They have an evil sense of humor. Actually using machine learning to detect terrorists isn't a terrible idea. But you are going to get an error rate, and probably a high one in the noisy real world. Maybe only 50% of the people you detect are actually terrorists. Maybe it's even worse than that. We can't even test it because there is no validation set and unreliable labels. The reasona…
That is in no way a reasonable thing to do if you're only 50% confident in your results. A reasonable thing to do would be scrap the whole system and make something more reliable than a coin flip.
This story is stupid. 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 jour…
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?
"Obliterated a wedding because people where celebrating by shooting in the air." This is the definition of evil. How and why is the Pakistani government allowing this program to operate within their territories?