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I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

theguardian.com

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Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#91

Post by macspoofing »

melling wrote: post #36
ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments. We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible. The real solu…

>Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars.

What war are we in currently?!

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#92

Post by runjake »

melling wrote: post #36
ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments. We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible. The real solu…

I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about war.

> There's a high cost in both money and American lives.

Likewise, there's huge financial opportunities in a war for the military-industrial complex which just so happens to have strong ties with our political leadership.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#93

Post by cmdkeen »

opinali wrote: post #64
melling wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There you go again ck2. One of your classic comments. We used to napalm people. Lots of "wrong people" get killed in all wars. Flying in B-17's and B-52's was pretty ugly too, we just couldn't record the carnage on video. There's probably never going to be a war where innocent people aren't killed. Precision weapons probably kill fewer people but if you want a "clean" war, I don't think that's possible. The real solu…

Drones, Napalm, B-52 bombing—all weapons for cowards. The problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost; remember that the Vietnam war didn't end because the great public bought into the hippies' peace&love ideology, it ended because the great public was receiving too many of their sons back in body bags.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.” Patton

All weapons are the weapons of cowards. It isn't fair that almost all the weapons we use in Afghanistan are superior to our enemies, and it isn't fair that they resort with IEDs and suicide bombs.

If you have equal weapons then you look for superiority in numbers or tactics. Long gone are the days when "honourable" war meant agreeing to fight pitched battles on terrain that suited neither side and both sides knew was coming. Those "honourable" wars were also the most brutal to both prisoners and civilians.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#94

Post by cmdkeen »

bdg wrote: post #31
ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

As a human analogue to the drones, it is not unrealistic to imagine that phones, shovels, or other objects have been mistaken for guns by an observer in a tense situation (for example: a SWAT raid). Granted, one is clear visual cues that are confused by a human mind in the heat of the moment, while the other is bad quality readings. We're talking about two different implementations of the error. This drone project co…

How does upgrading the video affect latency?

Drones already have long latency times, their "flight" which is the bit that requires potentially quick response times is already "AI" controlled.

People don't move so quickly you can't handle latency in terms of targeting. Vehicles can be identified and the weapon system can handle tracking them - latency doesn't come into it.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#95

Post by stevenrace »

rwmj wrote: post #70
rickdale wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how we can have a the technology for a drone but we can't fly it close enough to get a good quality photograph. I am all for limiting casualties for the US, but how is it not a war crime to just kill people without 100% proof they are the enemy? And seriously, if cell phones are going to 39 megapixels, why can't a drone send back a good photo?

The advantage of a drone is it can "lurk" too far away to be easily seen. Building a camera that can take very clear pictures from a long way away is impossible (because of distortion from the air and weather). If you make the drone itself smaller, then you hit the Rayleigh limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_criterion#Explanation

Additonally, bandwidth needs to be taken into account. Even military satellite uplinks are slow and in many cases feeds are being sent to a ground station and then converted into digital for uplink.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#96

Post by tokenizerrr »

macspoofing wrote: post #86

The entire concept of targeted drone assassinations is so surreal. Executing a convict in the US civilian court system requires a trial with a high-burden of proof, and the convict is afforded multiple appeals before the sentence is carried out. But in this case all it takes for the state to execute a suspect is the interpretation of some mid-level analyst. More perplexing, there are no qualms around civilian collate…

> In what universe is striking a convoy carrying a suspect but also carrying innocent (or even if not innocent, not deserving a death sentence) civilians, deemed acceptable?

America.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#97

Post by dspeyer »

1457389 wrote: post #42
bdg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a human analogue to the drones, it is not unrealistic to imagine that phones, shovels, or other objects have been mistaken for guns by an observer in a tense situation (for example: a SWAT raid). Granted, one is clear visual cues that are confused by a human mind in the heat of the moment, while the other is bad quality readings. We're talking about two different implementations of the error. This drone project co…

The crucial difference is that drones are used in contexts where they have a very high false positive rate. It doesn't matter how accurate your missiles are if you are operating in an area where it is impossible to accurately identify targets. Considering the total lack of oversight and regulation on these secretive programs, it is unsurprising that they have the latitude to cause large amounts of civilian damage wit…

Do drones have a higher false positive rate than human-piloted air support? Numbers are going to be hard to come by -- the military doesn't want to reveal anything. Qualitatively, the Collateral Murder video that wikileaks posted a while back (in which a US helicopter gunned down a pair of Reuters reporters because they were carrying objects that could have been weapons) sounds very similar to what's described here.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#98

Post by BrandonRead »

Does anybody think there is space for a "CS Students against Weaponry" alliance? I go to Umass Amherst, and there are tons of people who end up working for Raytheon upon graduation. Sure, the 100k / yr is quite tempting when you just came from community college and a retail job just years before, but perhaps some education may stop students from agreeing to internships and careers at Raytheon, etc. It's oftentimes good students who are mostly oblivious to why their skills are being exploited. Maybe we could affect this mindset and bring a larger student audience into the ethical discussion. It is becoming harder and harder to distinguish your contributions to the indirect damages caused to innocent third-parties. And with CS, it's not like there is a shortage of jobs. But that may be a misguided view--it's obvious that students take these jobs because they 'have to' or risk suffering anywhere from 10k to 300k of debt, depending on the school and their financial background. It's all very much a shame.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#99

Post by hbags »

sneak wrote: post #83
sleepyK wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But unfortunately, it always is. American life, and American citizenship is more precious than any other life. I know it's not the same issue, but throughout the whole NSA snooping revelations, Americans have only been concerned by the legality of spying on their own citizens. All of us foreigners are fair game. This is similar. The value of an American life is much more than that of a foreigner's life.

> All of us foreigners are fair game Americans feel this way, sure. But Americans are only 4% of humans, and soon 100% of humans will be on the Internet. This worldview is not an economic survival trait. I suggest relaxing, brewing some tea, and waiting for this to play out in the global market. Either they'll change, or they'll go out of business.

> Americans feel this way, sure.

I'm American. I don't feel that way at all.

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

#100

Post by cmdkeen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #19
ck2 wrote: post #4

The feed is so pixelated, what if it's a shovel, and not a weapon? I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people If this question even comes up once, drones should never, ever be armed. Why is is okay to repeatedly kill the wrong person in another country? Can you imagine if that happened even just once in the USA? We need an international ban on armed…

You act as if the alternative to drones (20 year old kids with guns) never kills the wrong person. Yvain's essay asking "what if drones came first" is highly relevant here. http://squid314.livejournal.com/338607.html?thread=9878703

No - the alternatives are air-strikes and artillery.

Drones have the advantage of loiter time, they can spend ages in situ gathering intelligence and analysing whether to shoot or not. This does generate the mental health problems for the analysts the articles describes - the same as for snipers, they watch the person they are going to kill.

Aircraft and the infantry that call in air strikes and artillery do not have loiter time, usually the enemy know they're out and about (certainly in Afghanistan) and thus they are "reactive".

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