I like it so much. Since Asimov, we always were afraid to be confronted to a rogue AI killing people. Turn out, human specifically trained the AI to kill people. The kicker: The program has the same name as the killer AI in Terminator. Reality so much more fun than our wildest fiction.
Having known a few people working on military applications, that was almost certainly on purpose. Those guys know they're building scary stuff, they just either actually believe the military should have that scary stuff or care about having an interesting problem to work on more than how their solution will be used. Either way, they develop a sense of humor about it.The kicker: The program has the same name as the killer AI in Terminator.
Mmmmm, terroristiness...Overall, the slides indicate, the NSA machine learning algorithm uses more than 80 different properties to rate people on their terroristiness
There are plenty of 'known terrorists.' That's a silly argument. I used to hunt and find these guys in some secret squirrel units with the Air Force. The list of possible targets is lengthy and they aren't on that list for flimsy reasons generally. That being said, in my experience, this would only be for early use as a development target and is not 'actionable' intelligence; it wouldn't get you on the "things to do" list. It's the kind of intel that, if one of these guys went and pulled off a suicide bombing, would be used to say that he was already labeled a terrorist and should have been taken out despite not really having much to go on other than being on a computer generated list in a pile of thousands. There aren't enough resources in the first place to be making any use of this information other than feeding it into another system which either verifies it and builds a case, or rejects it. And likely that system is human, labor intensive, and overworked. Big data that is this inefficient does not translate into big results. In reality, the high amount of civilians being killed by drone strikes are a real consequence of drone warfare meeting guerilla warfare. When combined with the USAF stance that anyone who is a military aged male (MAM) associating with known terrorists is not a civilian and is not considered collateral damage, and how that definition does not always carry with other non-military agencies, you can see how the civilian count is so high when not disclosed by the US government. When people ask why I don't want being on the no-fly list to preclude second amendment rights this would be a good reason. The no-fly list is non-judicial and has no threshold for inclusion which is possible to appeal or even petition to understand. And yet, getting put on this suspected terrorist list, would be a very obvious step to getting put on the no-fly list.
But seriously, this seems to be a very poorly designed program. That being said, there has to be something were missing here. Like a manual second level process where a human sorts through the machine selected terrorists and evaluates them. Right? ....
Yeah. This article discloses a very real and very important program, and completely takes it out of its very real and very important context in order to make it sensational. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of this kind of information, and you never stop asking whether or not you did the right thing or even if there is a right thing if you pull the trigger, or drop the bomb, or call in heavy hitters or whatever you do to end that person's life. It's just done. Nobody who has ever killed in these programs would ever glibly send something to the top of a priority list based on a single input from a poorly known NSA program. Every drone strike has a human pilot behind the controls, and their ass is on the line if they don't question suspicious direction. No matter whether it's a well-supported kill or not, that human has to live with it. They have to go back to their lives and tell their children that hitting is wrong when they know they just killed a father. They watch murderers get locked up and ask how they are different because of geography and power. I see the children of men I killed in my son's face. So please don't dismiss the humanity of these men because they have done bad things. It's hard enough for them to not dismiss their humanity for themselves.
From what I understand, sorties are assigned by human coordinators who evaluate intelligence from multiple sources in order to measure out priorities. It's entirely possible that the stuff from the NSA gets added to the pool as "SKYNET says this guy is a baddie." It's also entirely possible that these human coordinators then roll their eyes and say "well if SKYNET says he's a baddie..." and passes them on to the kill pile. After all, they're just Hajis.