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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

#121

Post by gcv »

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 problem with remote-control war is that there's no political cost

Oversimplification. Domestically, the US is still paying the cost of using, eg, Agent Orange in Asia, today (children of service members born deformed).

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

#122

Post by fit2rule »

cmdkeen wrote: post #113
fit2rule wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of one drone would provide ample resources for a village in Afghanistan to educate itself and defend itself from other killers. Drop books not bombs!

You do realise the Taliban are specifically opposed to Western education, especially the education of women. You have groups like Boko Haram (literally "Western education is sinful"). Dropping books on villages when the security situation hasn't been established is akin to dropping landmines - anyone who picks one up and takes it home risks being killed. There is a very good reason the Afghan campaign was about provi…

Educating new generations is vital to the effort to replace these heinous groups with sane, functioning societies. Just because 'its hard to educate' doesn't justify the continued killing of innocents.

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

#123

Post by philwelch »

sleepyK wrote: post #50
k-mcgrady wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "There's a high cost in both money and American lives" There's a high cost in both money and human lives - nationality should not be a consideration.

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.

It's not an American thing. It's the human condition. I don't care where you live, if someone who lives down the street from you and looks like you gets killed, you care more about that than about someone on the other side of the world. That's how people work.

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

#124

Post by fit2rule »

yeukhon wrote: post #85
hobs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument that society was built on foo can also be used for arguing for slavery, the oppression of women, child labor, etc. Just because we did do something in the past does not justify doing it in the future. The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. The places that these drones are being used are not places that have a credible military threat to the united states. (unle…

> The right to defend yourself is not the right to kill, especially on a mass scale. He is not asking not to kill at a mass scale. He is against killing others, regardless of what the reason is. There will be no ground for fighting for democracy. There will be no ground for protecting my life, my lover's life, or anyone's life. There is no mechanism to defend the things I cherish when a murderer comes to my doorstep…

We're talking about nation states here, not individuals. You have, absolutely, an individual right to defend yourself.

You do not have - unless the state grants it to you - the right to murder other human beings. States that use murder as a solution to their problems are undoubtedly going to fail - because the purpose of the State, in the first place, is to provide human beings with safety and protection from death. Death delivered, or received, is still a failure of the State to fulfill that promise.

I do not believe that anyones' interest is protected by the maiming, murder, and disfigurement of villagers' children, on the other side of the world, for the purposes given by the States that are doing it. I believe that the reason States are committing these crimes, is because the Murder Societies within these states are out of control, and no longer answer to the people who put them in power.

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

#125

Post by cmdkeen »

fit2rule wrote: post #122
cmdkeen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise the Taliban are specifically opposed to Western education, especially the education of women. You have groups like Boko Haram (literally "Western education is sinful"). Dropping books on villages when the security situation hasn't been established is akin to dropping landmines - anyone who picks one up and takes it home risks being killed. There is a very good reason the Afghan campaign was about provi…

Educating new generations is vital to the effort to replace these heinous groups with sane, functioning societies. Just because 'its hard to educate' doesn't justify the continued killing of innocents.

No-one is saying that we shouldn't try to educate our potential enemies, especially in places like Afghanistan. I'm just pointing out that your "drop books on them instead" it fatuous and wouldn't work.

Provide the security so that people won't be killed for being educated, and education is best. Educating without security just leads to dead kids.

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

#126

Post by Killah911 »

a_olt wrote: post #105
Killah911 wrote: post #58

I've worked on building some AI for drones for the US, and I'm fairly certain that advents in new technologies will mitigate most of the concerns in the article. It will make for a seriously scary new world, where devices like this exist at massive scale. Dictatorships will be even more brutal, and oppressors, even more oppressive. The sociopath in control of these machines will no longer have to worry about someone…

This article discussed one of the solutions proposed by psychologists to relieve drone pilots of the stress and guilt that comes with launching an attack: http://io9.com/psychologists-propose-horrifying-solution-to-...

Thx for posting the article. "Siri, kill those people", sounds like the makings of a new John Cleese bit. Had to check twice and make sure I wasn't reading an Onion article.

I still wonder how much less existential strife an operator might experience by delegating the killing to an AI machine, especially if one can still see the faces (better resolution) and the carnage following "Siri" carrying out orders.

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

#127

Post by fit2rule »

jusben1369 wrote: post #112

We need to make sure we're not being manipulated. Here the Guardian is just serving up an emotional, unsubstantiated, one sided view of this discussion. I'm not sure how this is different to much of the chest beating I'd see on Fox News. I'm not here to argue for or against the drones. Just that if we pride ourselves on being educated and critical thinkers that we apply that to all sources of data we read. We all kno…

How is this story anything but a plea to the people to reign in their heinous military masters? You state 'we must be sure we're not being manipulated' - towards what end, exactly? The logical conclusion of this opinion piece (it is marked thus) is that we should not allow our elected representatives to get away with murder.

How is that in any way a negative result?

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

#128

Post by frostmatthew »

yeukhon wrote: post #7

> The UAV's in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this Honestly, it has always been seen as a weapon. The whole point of drone is to carry out mission 24/7 as much as possible, because a pilot can't fly back and forth without sleeping. Also, humans have emotions they don't always follow orders. > incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify…

> The whole point of drone is to carry out mission 24/7 as much as possible, because a pilot can't fly back and forth without sleeping.

Humans are still required to fly the drones. The "whole point" is that drones can accomplish the same mission without risking a pilot and at a fraction of the cost of a manned aircraft.

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

#129

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

The problem with this is that it doesn't give any context for the capabilities of other platforms. In reality it is the best we have, by far for attempting to identify friend or foe on the battlefield. When I say by far, I mean it. It is several orders of magnitude better, oh and it has a memory (DVR) so that the users can improve their capabilities.

So the whole things couches it wrong. You could have just as easily have written this:

Despite the feed often being highly pixelated, the video feeds offer far better resolution on suspected enemies than any other method, day or night, often including close quarters combat

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

#130

Post by rcthompson »

How are the drones even relevant to the discussion? There are people controlling some device in order to kill other people. Why does it matter that the device happens to be an UAV in this case? How is it different if the device in question is instead a cruise missile? A rifle? A knife? A fist?

To me, the whole discussion about drones is a big misdirection that uses people's irrational fear of "killer robots" to make detractors forget that ultimately, there's a human pulling the trigger.

Who cares if Obama authorized a drone strike to kill a US citizen abroad? What I care about is that he authorized an assassination of a US citizen, not that he chose "drone strike" as the method.

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