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The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#101

Post by mike_hearn »

oafitupa wrote: post #67
Aeolos wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. In which freaking world are assassinations without due process legal or even desirable? The mere fact that we are debating whether someone was or wasn't assassinated is a perversion in itself. Arrest them and try them in a court of justice. End of story.

Arrest them? They were in freaking Pakistan. Why would you arrest them? You guys are going crazy. Don't be surprised when you travel and realize the world hates you.

He obviously means "send intelligence to the government of Pakistan and ask them to investigate".

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#102

Post by mike_hearn »

afsina wrote: post #85
vladtaltos wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is you don't know that 'If it is a false positive, probably they just ignore it.' -> 'probably' is a fucking optimistic view. AND how the hell do you know this is a false positive ? some algorithm tells a soldier that this person is probably a terrorist - what happens then ? do you think they bother to verify this by spending more money ? In my opinion it is most likely that, the people using this softwar…

AFAIK for such decisions human information/intelligence is required. And there are often screw ups/bad decisions. No need for bad machine learning algorithms for this.

Your optimism is misplaced. The USA routinely drone strikes people they have no intelligence on whatsoever on the basis of nothing more than 'they acted like a terrorist', these are called signature strikes, i.e. they matched the "signature" of a terrorist.

Organisations that do this so frequently there's jargon for it are absolutely not going to be slowed down by requiring human intelligence (which is itself full of false positives and duplicity, see how random people were sold to US soldiers as "terrorists" to collect the reward money).

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#103

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

Houshalter wrote: post #7

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…

A drone strike typically kills identified terrorist targets but also unidentified targets. The trick is that as long as bystanding casualities (also children yes - or as the drone operators call them "fun sized terrorists") have not been identified they're automatically counted as terrorists. (see also https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/)

I don't think now that the beast has been unleashed it can be controlled or harnessed with peaceful means (the tools of democracy). It will take more than a couple of middle-class people with billboards handing out flyers. America is fuelling its own terrorism and creating hate so they can continue their war on terror. Every terrorist act in the West will further drive the hate and justify surveillance. Pretty sure this is a downward spiral which ultimately has only losers.

Which steps can the average Joe take which aren't considered radical by the system? Do you know any please share because I don't.

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#104

Post by hodwik »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #103
Houshalter wrote: post #7

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…

A drone strike typically kills identified terrorist targets but also unidentified targets. The trick is that as long as bystanding casualities (also children yes - or as the drone operators call them "fun sized terrorists") have not been identified they're automatically counted as terrorists. (see also https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ ) I don't think now that the beast has been unleashed it can be controlled or…

We need a military. All states do -- its part of their duty to their citizenry.

The problem in the US is that our hippy-run academia are driving the smart people out of jobs in the military (and police force for that matter), and it's putting us in a terrible position.

The only way to fix it is for smart people to start joining the military again.

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#105

Post by Aeolos »

binarymax wrote: post #77
oafitupa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrest them? They were in freaking Pakistan. Why would you arrest them? You guys are going crazy. Don't be surprised when you travel and realize the world hates you.

I think the parent means arrest the criminals responsible for killing thousands of people with drones based on a faulty algorithm.

I meant both, in fact.

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#106

Post by Aeolos »

mike_hearn wrote: post #101
oafitupa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrest them? They were in freaking Pakistan. Why would you arrest them? You guys are going crazy. Don't be surprised when you travel and realize the world hates you.

He obviously means "send intelligence to the government of Pakistan and ask them to investigate".

Thank you for stating the obvious.

Share information about terrorism suspects, arrest them, bring them to justice. Don't go all Rambo, shooting first, asking questions later. That only perpetuates terrorism - "you killed my innocent parents, I'm shall take my revenge" - and the circle of violence continues.

(Plus, it's already been proven that anyone shot is marked as an "Enemy Killed in Action" posthumously, just to cover the perpetrators asses.)

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#107

Post by 15charlimit »

mike_hearn wrote: post #88
nl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasonable thing to do with that information, would be to surveil them further, search their house, or arrest them. Not assassinate them without a trial. This appears to be what they do? The National Security Agency reportedly tracked phone calls between the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's relatives in the Persian Gulf to all numbers in Pakistan, and NSA surveillance eventually tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's locat…

The evidence is that the head of the NSA literally said, "we use metadata to kill people". It doesn't get more direct than that. Signature strikes are a well documented phenomenon by now. Also there's no way the CIA drone program can sustain the kind of long term kill rates they've been having without routinely killing innocent people. Terrorists just aren't that common (although if you define anyone who tries to see…

I can't believe I'm actually defending the NSA here, but "we use metadata to kill people" does not mean "we ONLY use metadata and nothing else".

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#108

Post by DKnol »

monort wrote: post #55
nl wrote: post #9

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…

We know that they do strikes based on circumstantial evidences (signature strikes): http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/war...

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#109

Post by Aeolos »

mcv wrote: post #68
cmdkeen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most of the strikes are in the Tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan where the writ of the Pakistani state doesn't really run. The Pakistani military has received some bloody noses when trying to operate in the area. Even Wikipedia is happy to classify the whole thing as a war[0]. Over 6,000 members of the Pakistani security forces have been killed, 20,000 civilians and 35,000 "insurgents". Pakistan g…

But the end result of all that is just that it generates even more hostility towards the US and feeds terrorism. The US is creating its own enemies this way. Again.

Cynically speaking, this is win-win for everyone involved. Except for the innocents who are killed.

The US gets to debug and optimize their assassination program "on brown people that noone cares about".

Pakistan and US also get to claim that they are "fighting terrorism". This breeds resentment and new generations of terrorists to be "fought" in the future (divide and conquer 101).

Plus, who knows when and where the droid program might come in handy in the future...

Re: The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thousands of innocent people

#110

Post by sitkack »

facepalm wrote: post #52
agd wrote: post #13

Big data analysis + mass surveillance is a frightening prospect. Of course you can train software to look for 'terrorists', but you could also train it to look for: - whistleblowers - minority groups (e.g. gay people, particular religious beliefs, political affiliation) - political dissidents - journalists whose behaviour changes - personal vulnerabilities (affairs, mental health issues etc) Think what authoritarian…

It seems like a safe bet that they will try to learn as much about people as possible. Not so different from classifying them into people who are likely to buy a new car or nutritional supplements.

But lots more churn and breakage.
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