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“We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

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Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#191

Post by lupire »

ALittleLight wrote: post #148
engineer_22 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-> some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed. I guess one of those rules could be: Don't travel overseas to participate in a war against the US government. Yes, I understand, this is a hard rule to follow, especially if you're of the rebellious bent, but comfort requires compromise.

Also it's a hard rule to follow if you are a child. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki

Everyone in USA knows that every child is responsible for choosing good parents.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#192

Post by trasz »

googlryas wrote: post #137
jaywalk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are afforded due process rights under the Constitution. I'm not saying he wasn't a bad guy, he clearly was. But it's not the same as a soldier (or police officer, or anyone really) shooting someone who's actively shooting at them. This was a straight up execution of a citizen without due process. Nobody, including the President, has the right to do that. It was blatantly unconstitutional.

What other due process is there, relative to the Authorization for Use of Military Force act of 2001? Congress gave POTUS the power to go after people like al-Awlaki with it. It's been on the books for 20+ years, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled it is a constitutional giving of power by Congress to POTUS e.g. in Hamadi vs Rumsfeld. If the US military could have captured al-Awlaki without incident, then drone s…

How about simply not murdering people on the other side of the world?

Here’s a mental experiment for you: what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#193

Post by Qem »

donatj wrote: post #60
throwaway0asd wrote: post #20

To me discussions about privacy often seem like bullshit. Here is a comment I wrote yesterday about a former AdWords employee as privacy violation apologist: Hypocritically people bitch about intrusive data collection from governments and yet simultaneously give away the same data, and encourage others to do the same, and more to private companies knowing that data will be weaponized against them. As such it’s almost…

Companies don't kill me. It's the government I'm worried about, and the governments of the world have literally no intentions on respecting your privacy.

Depending on the country, companies may kill you. Even Coca-Cola would not refrain from dispatching hitmen to kill employees if given opportunity. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#194

Post by trasz »

bragr wrote: post #110
chasd00 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget American citizens are on the table too, no due process required! EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki Thank you Jaywalk for the correct link

> Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered. I'm not for drone strikes, but it seems to me if your dad is an armed militant working against the US and killed in a US military operati…

So defending against an invading empire is a capital offense now?

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#195

Post by dwater »

darawk wrote: post #164
ivalm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Americans died from terrorism? How many foreigners died from anti-terrorism drone strikes?

These are actually easy things to look up. 910-2,200 civilians killed by drone strikes[1]. More than that were killed on 9/11 alone [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

And if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.:

"According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States."

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#196

Post by trasz »

mandmandam wrote: post #139
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The numbers are impossible to pin down, given the lack of clear reporting on the ground in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

Ha, it almost seems like you're saying that since the US doesn't keep good track of how many civilians they've murdered with "signature strikes", no one can claim that "lots of innocent people are dying". Even when many reports and groups say that lots of innocent people are dying, including the article you're quoting. That would by psychotic though, so I'm surely misinterpreting what your actual point is. Care to cl…

In other words, we can safely assume US doesn’t go murdering people, because they say their own lists of murdered people aren’t kept tidy enough?

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#197

Post by ta8645 »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #156
ta8645 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was the first time in history that a US citizen was killed by the US military. That seems incredibly unlikely. Friendly fire incidents have been a fact of war, pretty much forever.

Friendly fire, _by definition_, is a mistake. Friendly fire, _by definition_, is not something the Army _actively plans_ to do.

I don't understand your comment. The claim, to which I responded, said _nothing_ about _active plans_. The claim was simply that it was the first US civilian ever killed by the military.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#198

Post by salawat »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #174
salawat wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that false positives requiring the staging/deployment of a multi-million dollar weapon system don't cost money?

Not really, the US military practically has a blank check. I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money. Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.

That has more to do with the fact that Congress hasn't the backbone to call the Executive to heel on spending or transparency, or to empower OIG/GAO to pierce the national security veil.

You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized.

None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-positive "costs money".

Ad companies don't get to hide their books from the public.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#199

Post by darawk »

dwater wrote: post #195
darawk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are actually easy things to look up. 910-2,200 civilians killed by drone strikes[1]. More than that were killed on 9/11 alone [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

And if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.: "According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States." https://ww…

Why would we exclude the largest terrorist attack in American history, the thing that the interventions in question were explicitly designed to prevent a recurrence of?

And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans.

Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.

Re: “We kill people based on metadata” and other metadata things

#200

Post by trasz »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #173
guhidalg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you’re splitting hairs. A government ordered death is the same no matter if the shooter is a soldier or a national guardsman.

This is a big difference. State national guards operate a lot more like the state police than like the army. Posse Comitatus does not apply to them. By the way, if you want to split hairs and bring up examples like Kent State, the elephant in the room is the self-defense justification in a lot of these examples. Find a killing that occurred when a soldier believed their life to be in danger.

I wonder if you realize you are rationalizing Kent State the exact same way some Chinese rationalize Tienanmen.
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