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| This is almost certainly just used as input for human analysts. by blackwater 02/17/2016, 12:17am PST | ||||
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| "Many facts about the SKYNET program remain unknown, however. For instance, is SKYNET a closed loop system, or do analysts review each mobile phone user's profile before condemning them to death based on metadata? Are efforts made to capture these suspected "terrorists" and put them on trial? How can the US government be sure it is not killing innocent people, given the apparent flaws in the machine learning algorithm on which that kill list is based?"
Many other "facts" remain unknown as well. Do NSA operatives use the skulls of Pakistani children as drinking cups? Does Donald Rumsfeld host wild orgies in mosques in Saudi Arabia? They MAY (note the classic journalistic weasel words here). But then again, they probably don't, and we don't really have any reason to believe that they do. In reality, the outputs from this kind of computer program are almost certainly just used as inputs for a team of analysts to sift through, to find the actual terrorists. But that's much less exciting than OMG DRONES ARE AUTOMATICALLY KILLING PEOPLE BASED ON A COMPUTAR PROGRAM so they led with that. Patrick Ball has a point that machine learning may not be the most useful tool here. It really does work better with hundreds of thousands of examples, not just a few dozens. But it certainly can flag unusual things, which people can then follow up on. I suspect just graphing a lot of this stuff out for a human to look at would get you a lot of value right out of the gate. Unfortunately it is a cat and mouse game, and Snowden has probably done a lot of damage to this effort with his leaks. There are a lot of reasons to be concerned and skeptical about extrajudicial killings done via drone strike. But then again, when you compare it to dropping daisy cutters in Vietnam, or... pretty much anything we did in WWII, ever, the civilian casualties are tiny. Ultimately wars cannot be fought without civilian casualties-- even modern ones. |
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US spooks build robo-bomber to kill pakis based on PRISM metadata, name it SKYNE by 02/16/2016, 11:10am PST  Fucked up the link, here's the right one by 02/16/2016, 11:12am PST Now THIS is cloud computing! by 02/16/2016, 12:42pm PST Next up is malware targeting the Killbots by 02/16/2016, 8:06pm PST This is almost certainly just used as input for human analysts. by 02/17/2016, 12:17am PST That was never the point, the point was how bizarre this all was culturally. by 02/17/2016, 8:35am PST I guess Colossus was taken. by 02/17/2016, 8:55am PST Is it possible it was called that to highilight how awful it is? by 02/17/2016, 9:26am PST |
