"Signature strikes" -- the target has a signature (movement, data, use of a satellite phone or specific cellular number, entourage, etc) that matches that of an HVT (high value taget) that is authorized for termination by drone strike. The CIA has killed lots of the wrong people because "signature strikes" don't require second source intelligence to verify who the target is (eg: is the person using the satellite phone really the HVT or is it a courier or even his kid?). As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.
"Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Other sources can be mistakes or intentional lies. What matters is the quality of the totality of the evidence, and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.
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.
Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.
Ah yes... The sordid NASA/pork barrel effect. I am aware. That's orthogonal to the fact that Congress, besides setting the budget is also tasked wit Oversight. I'm damn sure they've not done/doing a great job of it, because there are many members of the legislature who find themselves straight up lied to by the Executive, yet nothing is done in terms of consequences.
Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.
It's not about how much absolute money is spent per each false positive, it's about how much you can get away with wasting. If a decision maker in the CIA is not punished for each brain fart, why would they avoid mistakes ? You get the behaviour that you reinforce and tolerate.
Exactly. A false positive likely results in more money because you need to buy more equipment to replace what you just used, and even more to do it "right this time".
Uncertainty is (unfortunately) everywhere; for example, what probability is “beyond a reasonable doubt”? There are many who take issue with that question, but the answers I’ve seen range between 0.1% and 5%, with no general consensus.
Similar to gmail and youtube suspension process. It happens to you, you or someone makes your case on social media, someone in google may listen and modify the policy rules.
I know we're talking about drone strikes, but we should always and forever note that the civilian casualties from the US' war on terror far outweighs [0] those who died from terrorism. Not to mention the US troops who died to make Iraqi oil available to US businesses, or who continue to die by suicide and social deaths related to their experiences in the war [1].
Ya, I wouldn't defend the broader war. I think Afghanistan was reasonable and necessary but probably should have been more surgical, and Iraq was basically indefensible. However, conditional on being committed to fighting the wars, I think drone strikes are an excellent tactical choice.
And now think about other countries conducting drone strikes on US soil as they see fit.
It would be only fair, right?
And what level of collateral damage would be acceptable in that scenario?
2000-3000 would be OK?
Maybe 10000-20000 since those other countries can't afford precision munitions and global surveillance network.
It's easy to justify any number of collateral damage when it's not you and yours that is the collateral damage.
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."
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.
From your first link: The "estimates of civilian casualties are hampered methodologically and practically";[5] civilian casualty estimates "are largely compiled by interpreting news reports relying on anonymous officials or accounts from local media, whose credibility may vary."
So let's not speak with too much certainty. Drone operators have harrowing stories of false positives that were never reported as such. A false positive is a strike on civilians.
Sure, there's plenty of uncertainty. But there are also far more casualties of 9/11 than the immediate ones. Tons of people got cancer and died, or were seriously disabled, etc. Drone strikes had some similar collateral damage too, I imagine, but certainly not on the scale of 9/11.
So for you the CIA has the same moral requirements than terrorists groups? That line of reasoning ends up to the conclusion that CIA's assassination is just state sponsored terrorism, and I'm not sure that's the argument you are willing to make.
But there are also people that acknowledge the existence of uncertainty and draw conclusions from that. Countries without a death penalty for example. Uncertainty being a fact is not a free ticket.
That's a false equivalence though and not what the alternative option is here. The government was killing its enemies 100 years before the word digital was invented and will continue to do so as long as government exist. They will use every technology invented in the pursuit of doing so. Blaming metadata signature based approaches is no different than blaming their use of satellites, metallurgy, hell the wheel is a big part of their war machine. It has always been this way and it will continue to always be this way.
In 2010, an American citizen was killed in a drone strike by the US military, without a trial or any attempt to make an arrest. This was the first time in history that a US civilian was killed by the US military. Before 2010, we were doing just fine without executing citizens on suspect legal grounds.
Edit: Edited to state that this was not fire of combatants in a combat zone.
> This was the first time in history that a US civilian was killed by the US military.
I'm sure that there were plenty of other times it happened, but, for a relativly well-know and documented incident in 1932, check out the Bonus Army[1]
Upon failing to retake Fort Sumter, Union troops turned their cannons on the city of Charleston itself, killing an estimated 80 people over the course of the 500+ days of bombardment. To this day, the area is host to unexploded ordnance (rusted black-powder shells, basically).
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.
Kent state does not count? It has happened probably a lot, it is just hard to find good records about now and they actually tell people. Pre-1900s, you just are not hearing about it probably. I don't buy the military getting less moral recently.
It's complicated. The cynic's answer is "The United States prides itself on not turning its military on the civilian populace, and the National Guard is the practical method by which they hold a nation together while refraining on paper from such use of force."
As with so many aspects of American governance, they "solved" an either-or problem by implementing both ideas.
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.
> Before 2010, we were doing just fine without executing citizens on suspect legal grounds.
Well, no; we just weren't doing it using the military. Or at least weren't doing it using the military in a way that we got caught. The US government (and, I expect, nearly every government since the dawn of governments) has been killing people outside of "the battlefield" forever.
Apparently, you're not going to accept Kent State, but there are non-National Guard incidents from earlier than that. The Bonus Army protesters in 1932 were cleared from DC by the tanks of the 3rd Cavalry commanded by no less than George Patton. Unfortunately, there is no record of total deaths. 5 infantry regiments fresh out of Gettysburg were sent to quell the New York City draft riots in 1863. Again, not known how many they killed, but total deaths well into the hundreds.
This is to say nothing of the many, many times the Army was used to clear natives from lands claimed by the US. Presumably, in most of those incidents, they were not considered American citizens. However, they definitely were in the most recent incident I can think of, the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened in 1980. That was the 7th Cavalry, and they killed 250 Lakota, including women and children.
They also killed his 16 year old son and 8 year old daughter in separate attacks. Both of whom were American citizens. (Daughter was Trump)
The basics are that Al-Awlaki was (allegedly) a kind of pro-terrorist or pro extreme Muslim kind of preacher moving about the Middle East spreading his message. Possibly also hooked up with real terrorists / jihadis. A drone strike killed Awlaki and a second drone strike, a couple weeks later, killed his sixteen year old son. The US claimed killing his son was an accident - but that's pretty implausible. Years later, under Trump, a special forces team killed his eight year old daughter.
> The government was killing its enemies 100 years before the word digital was invented
Citation needed. The current pattern of extrajudicial remote targeted killings outside of a Congressionally-declared battlefield is completely novel and only began in the Predator drone age, as far as I can see
Where is the battlefield when dealing with asymmetrical enemies like terrorists? If only they'd wear uniforms, not hide behind civilians, and stay in the designated battlefield area we wouldn't have this problem.
The point is these killings have not been happening for 100 years as claimed. These are a new type of killing, with a newly invented legal justification
The US government was not murdering anonymous strangers using a shadowy intelligence agency with no oversight 100 years ago. Army SigInt was only founded in 1917, and prior the US didn't formally employ any spies, and certainly didn't carry out assassinations.
Other governments possibly did, though probably in a way less organized than today.
In 1896, under circumstances not entirely clear, Sun was caught and detained for 13 days by the Chinese legation in London. It appears likely that Sun ran into a fellow Cantonese who worked for the legation and was found out and seized while visiting him under an alias. The legation planned to ship Sun back to China, but, before this could be done, Sun had converted a British employee at the legation to his side and got word through to James Cantlie, former dean of Hong Kong College of Medicine. The British Foreign Office intervened, and Sun was released from his captivity. The incident engendered great publicity and gave Sun’s career a powerful boost.
From the biography of Sun Yat Sen. They probably wanted to execute him in China for plotting against the throne.
This is likely the most upsetting part. As flawed as US judicial system is, it is a system that still has to move within certain known parameters. The fact that judicial system stops applying the moment 'the government' decides it doesn't apply is in itself a big problem that effectively undermines basic trust in the system. I don't want to say that it started with Bush, because each president had their sins, but war on terror put a lot of clandestine stuff right in the open. Obama only made it worse ( since he actually killed a US citizen ). Biden was not better..
I am not some sort of naive activist. I accept there is a price to be paid for the relative comfort I live in. That said, some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed.
For better or worse, most citizens seem to be getting regular reminders[1] that the rules, at best, are not applied evenly. The trust in institutions is already low. Some basic accountability has to apply even to the highest echelon. Scratch that, it especially needs to apply to it.
-> 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.
Well, I am hardly a rebel. The rule you list is not a rule at all.
I am surprised that I even have to point it out, but you do not stop being an American by traveling outside the country. Hell, you do not stop being an American even if you send money to sanctioned entities.
There is a reason there is a process for those, who deviate from societal norms. It ensures people en masse do not take matters into their own hands. That process does not, or at least should not, include current regime deciding you get deaded behind closed doors. Deviation from it historically yielded very poor results.
If you are not sure why that is a bad idea, and a bad omen, for a republic supposedly governed by law, I am genuinely not sure I can help. I am just sad that some people explicitly believe this.
It's not the choice you have though in areas where those killings take place. It's either drone strikes or nothing. Boots on the ground to catch bad guys and bring then to court isn't possible.
You're essentially saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the CIA to extra-judicially kill any people in Pakistan with virtually no oversight, because the CIA gets to decide who is a "bad guy" and has a right to operate in any foreign country at will, whether the country accepts it or not.
Oh, it's possible. It just risks American lives, so it's obviously unpalatable when robots are available (at the cost, of course, of arms-length evaluation of kill orders).
This is an excellent summary of how to make decisions, and to continually get better at making them.
> and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.
This in particular. How did proceeding this way do in the past? What did we get when we decided to continue with a discrepancy? If the discrepancy did not result in an issue, why? was the information bad, our handling of it, or just chance? If it was an issue, can we avoid overriding it again, can we get better info, can we discard it altogether from consideration?
(note: this comment doesn't relate to the content of the article at all, but about the decision-making process outlined above)
>> "Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources.
Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, and they are almost always better than low-grade intelligence obtained under pressure/influence (like the WMDs in Iraq). That is no justification.
>> Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information,
You're probably right about this, in a sense, but it beckons a pretty interesting question: provide an example when "signatures" are better than first-hand information.
Counter example: If your job is to find enemy subs, then sonar feedback off the hull of a Akula Class nuclear attack sub may be better than direct visual observation of the sub
Nobody complains too loudly if you fire a torpedo at a blue whale, but there would be dire consequences if you hit the wrong sub. I wouldn't call sonar contacts statistical evidence though, even if it is partially correct.
The counter example doesn't fit. In you example the sub is hostile because it is Russian. Here the people are convicted to death by circumstantial evidence. Very, very bad circumstantial evidence. It is just "worth" it because there are little consequences for the murderers.
If you use the same statistic model to estimate how likely it is for people to be a danger to others for political reasons, also called terrorism in some cases, you very likely would need to shoot those that implemented these decisions.
>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 operation, and then you go around associating with even more armed militants working against the US, you're asking a lot of your US citizenship to protect you from getting droned.
From the article, it seems like he was collateral damage and not the intended target - the drone strike was targeting Ibrahim al-Banna. That sucks, very much a wrong place wrong time, but I would say that a fairly effective strategy for not being collateral damage is to not hang out with internationally wanted terrorists.
I don't really see the problem with this either. It seems like they would have liked to capture him, but it was infeasible. The guy essentially declared war on the US with his actions. What special steps should they take because he is an American citizen?
A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?
> What special steps should they take because he is an American citizen?
The due process afforded in the constitution. With, you know, trials and juries and such.
> A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?
I would say that an operation specifically to assassinate that person without a trial should be viewed as unconstitutional.
It's illegal to assassinate even mass shooters in the US. It's only legal to kill them in defense during an active situation.
And just going to through out there that Anwar al-Awlaki isn't accused of taking up arms, just publishing political speech that the US government didn't approve of.
> It's illegal to assassinate even mass shooters in the US. It's only legal to kill them in defense during an active situation.
A drone strike feels like a pretty active situation no?
I'm not being pedantic, just pointing out that there is a ton of grey area that your statement doesn't account for, and we'd need to dive into the details of this situation to determine whether the assassination was justified or not. Even then, it would mostly be a qualitative judgement.
For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?
What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?
I'm not saying the gov was wrong or right with Anwar, just that the arguments presented here fail to account for real world complexity.
> A drone strike feels like a pretty active situation no?
Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed.
No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation.
> For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?
> What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?
The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.
Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.
> Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed. No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation.
My point was that you haven't defined what an "active situation" is. I could say "we should only kill people when we have to" and that'd be accurate, but that'd be useless for the point of this conversation, which at this point seems to be defining "have to".
> The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.
Indeed, however, such things happen and people are forced to act during them. I also highly doubt the playbook the military uses is "do we have at least a modicum of evidence? then kill them."
>Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.
I am ignoring no such thing as I made no comment on his situation other than to say I do not have enough information to make a judgement.
It's common enough that states have statutes regarding the use of deadly force when someone is believed to pose a threat, whether or not they are a threat in that moment. "Fleeing Felon" statutes for instance.
At the time of the assassination order, he had been out of the US for over 6 years, and was a public leader in a war against the US that had already killed thousands of American civilians.
He was convicted and ordered to "capture dead or alive" by a Yemeni court.
Should the US conducted the formality of convicting him of treason in absentia? Sure.
None of this remotely excuses killing his children.
Many American officials were public leaders in war that already have killed about a million. Would it be ok for foreign governments to liquidate those people, or should they conduct the formality of convincing them first?
Once again - you’re assuming US was the good guys there. Which is quite an absurd assumption if you look at the numbers instead of propaganda.
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 striking him would probably not be considered "necessary and appropriate force". But, it wasn't reasonable to capture him, so what alternative is there?
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.
Well, that sounds like a great idea. But, it needs to be a two way street. Convince terrorists planning terror attacks to not murder people on the other side of the world, then I'm sure America would drastically cut down on the number of people it killed on the other side of the world.
> 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.
Well, that depends - is the US government a failed state incapable of enforcing its own laws? Or did the US government give permission for this to happen? Then sure, go right ahead Russia. The Yemeni government gave the greenlight for the US to drone strike al-Awlaki.
Number of victims of terrorist attacks on the other side of the world is orders of magnitude lower than number of victims of American invasions. Even 9/11 was a minor episode compared to the invasion it served as an excuse for.
Essentially, you’re assuming US are always the good guys. And the easiest way to explain this is the foundation of all US politics: racism.
Having said that, US _arr_ the good guys at the moment, and let’s hope it stays that way.
If Russia executed people that were waging war against Russia from within the US, that the US had already convicted of making war on Russia, was the US also trying to capture or kill at the same time?
There’s no conviction involved in either of those situations. Just Russia - or Iran - executing people inconvenient to Russia, on US soil, obviously against US will. Exactly what US is doing to other countries.
Yeah that analysis of if he could be captured alive feasibly was his crappy version of due process.
Not enough for my taste, but it at least caused a hiccup in the meat grinder. And it diminishes Obama's legacy in an objective way that can be repeated ad nauseam, legitimately. He lives on past the bullets as a bullet-point in presentations, discussions, debates and speeches.
Salutations, fellow United States citizen Mr. Al-Awlaki.
If you're in a foreign country aiding what is essentially a terrorist group or directly fighting for them on the front lines, why do you expect they would get due process?
> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.
Same and seconded. That includes presidents too; take every living president and have them stand for these crimes. There's no reason that being president should be carte blanche for murder.
The last president who seemingly took issue with these powers was conveniently assassinated. His successor (and the successor's allies) wasted no time in appeasing those powers by beginning lots of wars that killed and destroyed the lives of many people. I too doubt anything will happen.
At the risk of starting a Chomsky flame war and for anyone curious about what happened in those wars, and why nothing will happen: read "Manufacturing Consent".
How do you propose to change this attitude in a time when people who organise groups to change this attitude always end up mysteriously killing themselves?
> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this
Have you voted against all of your elected representatives that authorized it?
The only way things like this will change is if the people force them to change by making it clear to politicians that they will not be elected or re-elected if they support them.
Politicians currently in office of both parties do it, yes. That doesn't mean politicians of both parties who will be running for office in the future will necessarily do it. There are many ways for voters to communicate preferences prior to elections in order to influence the policy positions of candidates. Of course it won't change drastically in just one election; we didn't get to where we are now with just one election. It took many decades. But change has to start somewhere.
I am reading "a peoples history of United States" by Howard zinn. It highlights US in a very negative light so with that caveat out of the way, it appears we are continuously ashamed of things we did just a century back. Always.
Maybe in a hundred years we will also talk about the current era as dark times (as long as we are the top dog or maybe number 2). But at that point we will have something else to be ashamed of (but that will not be talked of at that time).
If we spiral out of control or break up, then the story (in hindsight) will be even more amazing.
But then I look at other countries and apart from some good European socialism which is quite recent, there ain't much to be proud of, when you look at any country, of any era.
Maybe "ashamed" is too strong a word, but thinking smaller scale, if you look back at the way you handled things when you were younger, don't you think you could have done anything better?
Isn't this how we learn and progress as a person? Seems likely to be true for a society as well.
I don't bear 1 ounce of shame of anything I wasn't a direct participant in. Not slavery, not the KKK, not any of our lame ass wars, none of that. Should we try to fix the ills of those terrible things? Absolutely. I acknowledge it all happened and it was an awful thing. It always has to be viewed through the context of the times it happened in though. None of this "white man's guilt" crap. Let's all work together to fix it, not continuously spin our wheels feeling guilty and hating each other. CRT is an attempt to push the guilt narrative and that's why I agree with it pitched out on it's head from schools, not because I think history shouldn't be taught but "emotion as history" is a bad road to go down.
I have trouble seeing how this is relevant. We're talking about USA's criminal decisions in the middle east here, which was ongoing as recently as 5 or 3 years ago.
And the "other countries are genocidal maniacs as well" caveat only works if the person who is pointing out that the USA is a genocidal maniac is fond of another country, but there is no mention of any country to praise in this thread, just condemnation of USA's actions against individuals. All countries are genocidal maniacs, but only one controls the US military.
> “Signature strikes have resulted in large numbers of bystander casualties in Pakistan and Yemen,” Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Foreign Policy.
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 clarify?
Governments killing people without due process in this manner is criminal homicide.
Each person needs to held individually accountable for their crimes. State secrets should be declassified and released. Each person's individual actions should be documented. And they should be tried in court and serve sentences commensurate with their level of participation.
This does not secure the country. This creates enemies and makes the situation worse.
If we lived in a just world ever single one of these people would be serving a lifetime in jail. This includes the politicians that approved funding for it as well as any lawyers and judges that rubber stamped it.
There is war and then there is what the Federal government is doing. They are not the same thing.
I'm not sure why this isn't upvoted beyond anything here. For them to even admit they've killed people based on metadata means they could kill you for your uncle's friend's mom being a terrorist.
Since the Obama administration, any male over the age of 16 we kill anywhere is retroactively considered a legitimate target regardless of any "proof" of their guilt. Obviously this is a horrific policy that is a fig leaf to cover up for mass murder. Everyone involved in these murders going back a decade should be on trial for their crimes.
Thanks for the link. I wasn’t aware that this was official US government policy.
Reminds me of the Vietnam war (or American war as it was referred to by the locals) where the US couldn’t say they were winning based on the amount of territory they held (because they couldn’t actually capture and hold much territory for very long). Instead, the “quantitative measurements” of McNamara’s computer systems could only show that they were “winning” the war based on the number of enemy combatants killed – with the result that any Vietnamese killed by US forces were retroactively recorded as Vietcong. Most of us are familiar with Goodhart's law regarding measures becoming targets so I’d be curious to know how much it applied to the Vietnam war.
So how much does this lower the civilian death count of 9/11. As reasonably we should be able to apply same standard to those combatants. And treat both genders equally in case of USA. Upper limit could be let's say how old Biden is now.
Please, with the anniversary coming up shortly, remember the event that they used as an excuse to start "programs" like these: 9/11.
I was too young and dumb and propagandized to know what I was getting myself into, signing up to go fight "those evil terrorists", but it didnt take long for me to realize something wasnt right. I spent the vast majority of my life since I got out of the Corps trying to understand the why of it all, starting with the small picture view from an infantrymans perspective, working my way up piece by piece until I was at the 30k ft view at the global scale.
You can't solve the war on terror or the turning on of the totalitarian surveillance state without solving 9/11, the justification that enabled those things. The story as told by government and their operation mockingbird 2.0 lackeys in media just isn't true.
What I realized, that still terrifies me, is that all these tools and techniques we used "over there", are going to end up being used against us (and other countries) domestically.
There is no "just" metadata. Metadata is a relative classification of one piece of data compared to another piece of data, not an absolute classification.
But I think the distinction the various three-letter agencies make is between "metadata" and "content" for most data they process. So in terms of a phone call, an actual voice recording would be "content" while when the call was made and between which two numbers would be "metadata".
With "content" + "metadata" they could verify that the target is actually who they think it is, based on voice. With just "metadata", the chances are higher that it might not actually be who they think it is.
That is a cop out. If you listen to a call or read an email, you have context for innocence/guilt and punishment (however extra-judicial that might be.)
If you have "just" metadata, you just know two people spoke. Perhaps to order a pizza. Perhaps to arrange for a babysitter. No one knows. Killing based on that seems insane to me.
I think OP is suggesting that “just metadata” is a sensationalist title, because to a lay person it suggests that decisions predicated on metadata are uninformed compared to decisions predicated on “data,” even though this isn’t necessarily true.
If the title were “We kill people based on data,” then the knee jerk response might be “… obviously.”
the way agencies like the CIA use the term metadata, it is very much inferior to full "data". metadata is just the record of the time, date, parties,... of a phone call, without the voice record of the call. the latter would arguably make for a much better source of information (because you'd know what was actually said, could match the voices,...).
This. Metadata for the intelligence commmunity is a double-edged sword: is it something less, meaning it’s OK to mass collect? Or is it more, meaning it’s enough to justify a killing?
The CIA is a US state-sponsored terrorist organisation. Every one of those people should be on trial for war crimes.
The only consolation is that many of those people, the so-called "jackals", will eventually be taken out by their own. The diplomatic disasters they could cause should their conscience ever make them talk is too great of a risk -- all loose ends are eventually dealt with.
For a while I saw Palantir showing what sounded like remorse in their website, in stating explicitly that they had purposefully taken distance from their days security contractors providing products in service of the War on Terrorism; they provided one that was used precisely for this.
It was a change from the previous branding I saw from them, one where they would whitewash themselves by showcasing their most charismatic employees, showing that they were a friendly tech company for cool people (look, we have a handsome black dude who plays the guitar!), regardless of, you know, the blood money.
Now their website only talks about power and disruption, while showing pictures of heavy industry, infrastructure, and war.
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 impossible to take any opinion promoting commercial violations of privacy seriously.
People don't have a choice about giving information to governments. There's a fourth amendment for a reason so I'm obviously anti dragnet. Private parties though may opt into providing anything legal to other private parties at their sole discretion and that's the nature of things. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans are making market choices that many of us would consider "not privacy respecting", that does not make these interactions "public" de facto.
I don't have a Google account. I don't have a Facebook account. I don't take commercial genealogy tests, I'm not an Amazon Prime member. I would prefer to not have the government use the ubiquity of this kinds of behavior as a lever to usurp more information.
I agree that people that bitch about corporate overreach should just not interact with bad actors instead of bitching to the government to somehow safeguard themselves from contracts they sign. At this point, it's not even an information asymmetry situation. Lots of people know Facebook and Google are untrustworthy stewards of this kind of information, but to them the ends justify the means... and that's their market decision I guess.
I'm not saying I avoid the bot net completely -- no one does and it's only getting harder to do so. This is a result of people I know installing LinkedIn on their phones with my number in their contacts. It's still a consumer-first problem and awareness is lacking. Every dollar, click and eyeball you give to some product is one you're divesting from another and we should consider our market engagements endorsements of corporate behavior because that's what they are.
How much awareness will get people to reconsider though? People are paying out of pocket to install microphones in their own homes and cameras on their front doors. Even if dumb TVs were on offer for 2X the price, statistically no one would buy them. Privacy is only a concern if it's novel and studies show generations born into surveillance are numb to it. I feel like people need to be more aware AND more discerning in their consumption; awareness alone isn't enough. We should discriminate with our wallet more on these issues today while we still have some alternatives available.
If there were proper protections in place to protect privacy it doesn’t matter whether the violator is a government or commercial enterprise. Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
> If there were proper protections in place to protect privacy it doesn’t matter whether the violator is a government or commercial enterprise.
Legislative privacy protections make it impossible for you to sign certain things away contractually and/or make it impossible for someone else to ask you to do so contractually. The right to sell certain data to certain people at certain times, even if you have consent from the user, for example, can render a contract void. Of course legally limiting the things you can agree to in this way would limit the effect of these contracts. Don't sign shitty contracts though and you can get all of this today.
The government isn't bound by optional contracts though and as long as congress grants the government jurisdiction over everything not constitutionally interpreted to be covered by the fourth, government snooping is completely legal.
I agree with you. Congress should limit the government's data mining jurisdiction, but it seems hellbent on doing the opposite with things like PATRIOT, PRISM and wiretapping legislation. I think users should also stop being flagrant idiots with their data if they supposedly care about it so much. Users can effect change in the market by deciding not to do business with bad business practices. Meta says it's going to mix WhatsApp data with Facebook data and people boycotted, Meta backtracked (for awhile)... more of that, we can do both.
> Secondly, the courts have repeated ruled that the fourth amendment has nothing to do with privacy.
Privacy from whom? The fourth sets a bar for "unreasonable" searches of an individual by requiring a warrant for public access to "persons, houses, papers, and effects". The government can still ask you for information without a warrant and definitely will ask Google for information about you, which does not itself need to demand a warrant on your behalf. As stated above, everything that isn't explicitly enumerated as protected is fair game as well.
The constitution curtails the relationship between the government and the governed. The fourth says nothing about privacy from other private entities, corporate or otherwise.
This is only viable when viewed as an economic game. As soon as a real war breaks out or national security is threatened, privacy invasions from foreign powers and literally anyone not whitelisted, will be ended quickly and be treated as acts of war.
Assuming all private companies are bent is pointless. People should be allowed the choice to keep their data private and give it whomever they please. This is a 'free market' after all.
That’s an empty argument. People don’t have a choice on what third parties share and disclose. People don’t have a choice on things like HIPAA and banking regulations and they shouldn’t because those regulations protect people but don’t regulate people.
Choice doesn't mean controlling the other guy. At some point in the chain trust appears and canaries can be used to see if it has been violated, if you really care that much.
Some people have a non-commercial precommitment to privacy and finding the companies that honor it and relate to it is the choice we want.
If you want to force the discussion about privacy into regulation and non-market forces, then okay? Why would people legally and politically consent to a fully transparent world? The regulation will only end up going one way in the end and for all the split hairs along the way, it won't be in favour of ending privacy...
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.
I think the article's second part is missing the point [where a bunch of tools are recommended to remove metadata from eg. pdf files].
I suspect by "metadata" the general meant: A is a verified terrorist, B communicates a lot with A or maybe is often co-located with A, fits the demographic of a terrorist and some other coincidental "metadata" is enough to put a high-ish probability on B being a terrorist and target B; or at least treat him/her as acceptable collateral damage.
I was confused as well, so I poked around a few other articles - it seems to happen pretty frequently on this site.
Most of them do seem to be vaguely related to the articles so my best guess is that it's a combination of individuals trolling + lax/nonexistent moderation. The handful of articles I checked seemed to be above the board unless I missed some dogwhistles somewhere, so not sure why exactly the site seems to be a target for this specific sort of trolling.
June 2nd 2021 Winner was released from prison and moved to a transition facility. At the time the news was of her family asking for privacy, so it's not clear if she has been released from the transition facility.
Her custodial sentence was for five years and three months on August 23rd 2018, so she should be released in a couple of months.
It's always up to the President, but in this case there's very little grounds to pardon her. Her actions were pretty cut and dry example of leaking classified material.
If anything, a Presidential pardon from the current administration would be seen as a highly partisan move in an already politically-agitated climate and make everything worse.
Sorry, yes, poorly phrased. We don't know if he's guilty beyond reasonable doubt, and probably won't, because presidents and former presidents are immune to prosecution in this country.
It's always possible the he had legitimate reasons for storing SC information outside a SCIF. No one can think of any, including his own legal team, but hey, ex-President, right?
> because presidents and former presidents are immune to prosecution in this country.
I think saying things like this is deliberately provocative -- it's not the case.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Trump commits crimes flagrantly and to such a degree that Nixon never would have dreamed. He will get some kind of legal consequence ... eventually.
> He will get some kind of legal consequence ... eventually.
I don't see how you could possibly be confident of that. Even if he is absolutely guilty and gets to the point of a trial, which alone is a huge huge huge huge step, he may be able to delay things for the rest of his life.
If he took them while he was still President it was perfectly legal to do so in any manner he chose. His mere act of doing it made it official policy because that was his unique Constitutional power. The next President can create new policy, re-classify information, etc. The only real risk is if Trump perjured himself or something about the docs when asked. All of his property is secured by the secret service. The idea that anything at Mar-a-Lago was stored in an insecure way is preposterous on its face.
If you think it's a good idea to allow a former POTUS to retroactively and implicitly declassify information he is caught with after leaving office, or to issue a sweeping declaration that any documents he takes out of the Oval Office are automatically declassified, I suspect you won't be as blasé when someone of the opposing political party does it.
Turns out the raid was conducted with respect to the words “marked classified,” and in response to a subpoena. To be clear, “marked classified” documents remain so, because the president doesn’t personally operate the declassification stamp, nor is there any formal process for declass if one holds the authority. Even this DoJ doesn’t want to engage such an obviously specious argument about classification status.
This is pure sophistry, and in addition it is factually incorrect. You should look carefully at the word 'authority' and diversify your information sources.
Varied, mostly practitioners. High value on non-partisans, demonstrated by inclination to make and entertain counterargument, and an extensive history of demonstrated preference. By the way, I cannot help but notice that your “former NSA counsel” remains anonymous. Susan Hennessey, nor anyone affiliated with Lawfare or Brookings meet the minimum criteria.
Glenn seems fair, and he appears to answer a legitimate question reasonably. He's staying within his lane, which is narrow, and responding to a lead question. Both articles are tortured with journalistic misinterpretation. Frankly, you have to be able to contextualize with broader experience. Nothing to do with Trump or SCOTUS. I would bet if you asked Glenn 'Are claims necessarily retroactive or invalid from the get-go,' he would say, 'Absolutely no.' If you have a chance, ask him.
Any ideas you have about the President having to follow any sort of official process regarding classification are nothing but illusions. The most you're going to get here is he's irresponsible in a way people don't like but is not criminal.
Even if I were to imagine he were technically breaking the law with some of these documents, look at it from a practical standpoint. At one point he could've done whatever he wanted to with any documents, including tweeting them publicly. He may or may not have taken some sensitive information and stored it in a building wholly owned (secured) by the secret service. There is not really any risk here, any crimes would be mere technicalities.
Of all the crimes every President in my lifetime has committed, including Trump, mishandling some secret documents in this way is a total nothingburger. It's almost certainly not a crime and even if it is a crime it's a paperwork technicality crime.
I could've written down the correct numbers for the lottery but I didn't, therefore I don't get to claim any winnings.
I think it's kind of ironic that - speaking generally - the "patriots" don't seem to care at all that a former president took state secrets after leaving office.
I wonder how big the "nothingburger" would be if it turns out he actually did leak them.
I doubt I will be disappointed by the outcome. I've already been enjoying popcorn while watching the show. I recommend you review the laws cited by the FBI in the search warrant, and note that they do not require the documents to be classified for the penalties to exist.
This is not a true statement. The AEC has its own Restricted Data classification which is not under the purview of the president to declassify. There are other cases of classification but this is one that is not easily debatable.
> The AEC has its own Restricted Data classification which is not under the purview of the president to declassify.
They can certainly say that, but since the executive power is constitutionally vested in the president in Article II, it can't be true barring a constitutional amendment. I believe there are court cases already establishing that Congress does not have the authority to limit the President's power to classify and declassify[1]. In this particular case a constitutional argument isn't even necessary since Trump's conduct appears to be protected by the Presidential Records Act.
Of course this is Trump we're talking about, so half the country will happily shred the constitution to "get" him, including many federal employees.
> They can certainly say that, but since the executive power is constitutionally vested in the president in Article II, it can't be true barring a constitutional amendment.
Re: that case; yes for executive classification [The Supreme Court determined in its 1988 decision on Department of the Navy v. Egan that the president’s power over classified information comes from executive authority granted by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which says, in part, that the “President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”]. However, Restricted Data is under the SOLE authority of the Department of Energy[1] to declassify, even if the DoE is under the executive branch. The law is specifically written, in fact, so that the president is not explicitly given the authority to declassify materials, yet does play a role in declassification once the DoE initiates the process, which implies that Congress did not wish to grant the presidency that power. But I'm not a lawyer, and my opinion means little.
Trump's duty as a civil servant, whose role included "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" -- that ended on January 20, 2021. Along with the end of his duty, ended all of the power he wielded. In terms of real legal powers, he's just like you and me.
Yes, Trump definitionally cannot have leaked secret documents while he was president, because he had the authority to declassify them and the act of distributing them would have been a form of that declassification.
Reality Winner had no such authority to declassify documents.
The former president[T] could absolutely leak secret documents in violation of existing law. The former president[O] signed Executive Order 13526, which was never [publicly] rescinded nor modified by TFP[T], and that EO defines how classified material is to be handled. Agree that Reality Winner had no authority to declassify documents.
The very obvious 'alternative' is to restrict tools at their disposal. For example, genocide. Or nuclear weapons, poison gas, citizen hostages, mass casualty events, or tools with a high probability of killing innocent people. We are not and should not be a lawless people.
> I think it's good that US intelligence uses every tool at their disposal against foreign threats.
This either naively assumes the US's goals are aligned with some objective "good," or that things that benefit the US also directly benefit you, regardless of their goodness.
The second one I don't think I need to refute? Assassinating people for personal gain would not be valid under very many moral frameworks I don't think.
So we're down to basically "does the US generally use violence for widespread good?" Which is fraught, for sure, but also pretty clearly no? We use violence for all kinds of reasons some of which are roughly good for a lot of people but many are not at all. These institutions just aren't trustworthy in this way.
Article seems to draw an overly narrow conclusion that metadata only means extra data attached to document files like pdf, etc. When CIA says “metadata” they mean things like who you talked to (vs. what you said), where you were (vs. what you did), etc. I mean sure watch out for metadata if you are leaking document files or whatever, but it’s much broader than that.
