Re:The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thous...
by mike_hearn on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @08:27AM
(#11109619)
The evidence is that the head of the NSA literally said, "we use metadata to kill people". It doesn't get more direct than that. Signature strikes are a well documented phenomenon by now.
Also there's no way the CIA drone program can sustain the kind of long term kill rates they've been having without routinely killing innocent people. Terrorists just aren't that common (although if you define anyone who tries to seek revenge thanks to an errant drone strike as a terrorist, that "problem" can eventually solve itself).
Re:The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thous...
by 15charlimit on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @08:56AM
(#11109773)
I can't believe I'm actually defending the NSA here, but "we use metadata to kill people" does not mean "we ONLY use metadata and nothing else".
Re:The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thous...
by tremon on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @11:57AM
(#11111221)
Of course, they also use bullets.
/s
Re:The NSA’s machine learning algorithm may be killing thous...
by Houshalter on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @04:58PM
(#11113435)
They asked the NSA to defend themselves, to make a comment on the issue. They were totally silent.
This appears to be what they do?
The National Security Agency reportedly tracked phone calls between the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's relatives in the Persian Gulf to all numbers in Pakistan, and NSA surveillance eventually tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti's location in Pakistan via one such phone call.... In August 2010 they tracked al-Kuwaiti as he drove from Peshawar to a residence in Abbottabad – and as analysts inventoried the compound's striking security features they became convinced that it housed a high-level al-Qaeda figure... In September 2010, the CIA concluded that the compound was "custom built to hide someone of significance" and that it was very likely that Osama bin Laden was residing there[1]
As it turned out, that was where bin Laden was killed, so that process seemed to have worked.
I'd note that the arstechnica article gives no evidence at all that this particular program is used to generate kill lists. As you note, identifying possible couriers and just killing them without further investigation is a dumb idea. Fortunately I don't see any evidence in this or other articles that this is what happens.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ahmed_al-Kuwaiti