Death by drone strike, dished out by algorithm
Source: The Guardian
Death by drone strike, dished out by algorithm
John Naughton
The US National Security Agencys Skynet project uses metadata to help decide
who is a target but is it technologically sound enough to justify drone strikes?
Sunday 21 February 2016 08.59 GMT
Guns dont kill people, is the standard refrain of the National Rifle Association every time there is a mass shooting atrocity in the US. People kill people. Er, yes, but they do it with guns. Firearms are old technology, though. What about updating the proposition from 1791 (when the second amendment to the US constitution, which protects the right to bear arms, was ratified) to our own time? How about this, for example: algorithms kill people?
Sounds a bit extreme? Well, in April 2014, at a symposium at Johns Hopkins University, General Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, said this: We kill people based on metadata. He then qualified that stark assertion by reassuring the audience that the US government doesnt kill American citizens on the basis of their metadata. They only kill foreigners.
Pakistanis, specifically. It turns out that the NSA hoovers up all the metadata of 55m mobile phone users in Pakistan and then feeds them into a machine-learning algorithm which supposedly identifies likely couriers working to shuttle messages and information between terrorists. We know this because of one of the Snowden revelations published by the Intercept, the online publication edited by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
The NSA programme doing this is called Skynet, is not to be confused with the murderous intelligent machine network in the Terminator films. In essence, its a standard-issue machine-learning project. What happens is that the algorithm is fed the mobile metadata of a number of known terrorist suspects, and then sifts through the data of 55m users to try and find patterns that match those of the training set. Its the same kind of approach that drives your spam filter: its fed examples of known spam, and then uses that to decide whether a particular message is junk mail or not. The critical difference is that if your filter gets it wrong, then the worst that can happen is that you are annoyed or amused by its clumsiness; if Skynet gets it wrong you could find yourself on the receiving end of a Hellfire missile dispatched by a Predator or a Reaper drone.
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Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/21/death-from-above-nia-csa-skynet-algorithm-drones-pakistan