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Drones, Computer Viruses and Blowback
Hugh Pickens writes "Michael Crowley writes that using drones rather than soldiers to kill bad guys is appealing for many reasons, including cost, relative precision and reduction of risk to American troops. But there's plenty of evidence that drones antagonize local populations and create more enemies over the long term than we kill in the short term. The failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, has said that about the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan, and the Washington Post has described how drone strikes may be breeding sympathy for al-Qaeda in Yemen. 'It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries,' says Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010. 'Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.' Now there's another component to the new warfare that threatens blowback: cyberwar. Like drones, cyberweapons are relatively cheap and do their work without putting American troops in harm's way. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use. 'We may indeed be at a critical moment in history, when the planet's prospects could be markedly improved by an international treaty on cyberweapons, and the cultivation of an attendant norm against cyberwar,' writes Richard Wright. 'The ideal nation to lead the world toward this goal would be the most powerful nation on earth, especially if that nation had a pretty clean record on the cyberweapons front. A few years ago, America seemed to fit that description. But it doesn't now.'"
Well known, and has been for quite a long time. The use of overwhelming force may satisfy some primitive emotional desires, but it basically never leads to a win in any conflict. I am surprised that people are still surprised at this.
As to malware created by states: Just make them responsible for the full damage caused if they miss their target. With the incompetence displayed recently, that is bound to happen quite often.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem is that since WWII the groups we tend to fight ignore all treaties. So if we agree not to use "cyberweapons" and thus do not buld effective counter measures, we leave our stuff open to attack by groups who would not give a second thought to vilating a treaty, be it for cyber, biological, nuclear or chemical weapons.
This is just an extension of what people really object to: the US coming to their country and killing people. You were not invited, you kill civilians and there is no justice or consequences. You develop drones to make this even easier.
I'm not sure why US commentators can't see this. Imagine if every now and then a Pakistani drone blew up a random wedding or accidentally killed some people trying to do their weekly shopping in your neighbourhood. Wouldn't that annoy you?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because drones don't take any risk with themselves - no human pilot - but take BIG risks with the lives of people on the ground - collateral damage is very common in drone strikes - they are widely seen as a "Coward's Way of Fighting" in the countries in which they are used (Afghanistan, Pakistan et cetera). This in turn helps various "undesirable" organizations to recruit many new people, to fight the "Western Cowards killing our Countrymen with Aerial Toys". ----------> In short, drone strikes make the local population hate you, and help the enemy recruit new ground troops. That simply isn't a great formula to bet on over the long run...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Sounds consistent with established U.S. foreign policy to me.
There's barely any collateral damage now that Obama has defined "militant" as being "military age male".
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/
A few infants here and there don't really bother democrats.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
They are considered cowardly because it means that have no chance of winning. Killing a bunch of remote controlled robots just means there will be more robots in the next wave.
Fuck our enemies feelings about our weaponry.
Should we be forced to use stone clubs and IEDs because those apes do?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
winning pakistanis approval might be the most noble goal, but so much of pakistan is so antagonistic to the usa's goals, nevermind the usa's methods, that earning scorn for our methods doesn't really amount to much, as we're already heavily scorned
i don't really understand an analysis of the usa's lack of moral loftiness when we are dealing with organizations within pakistan whose own methods make the usa's drones and cyberwarfare look like jaywalking. the goal is to defeat these organizations, not look like paragon of moral virtue
you might say that because we aren't acting as paragons of moral virtue we are losing public sympathy within pakistan. i am saying the public sympathy already was nonexistent and therefore disavowing something like drones and cyberwarfare wins us very little and loses us strategic abilities
i really don't understand an analysis of american actions that starts with the prerequisite that the usa always be morally lofty while engaged with enemies whose behavior is utterly amoral, within a populace that hates us no matter what we do while large sections of the society and body politic provide cover and cheer for the likes of lashkar-e-taiba
where is your analysis of their moral fibre?
i am not interested in hearing what the usa can do better to win over pakistanis. i am interested in hearing what pakistanis are willing to do to defeat the religious fanatics which will most certainly consume their country. if pakistanis cannot will themselves to see the usa is their ally in this struggle, then the let the chips fall where they may. there is no use wooing a society or a country where there is nothing to build upon in the first place. you cannot hide someone like bin laden in pakistan without tacit support within the establishment, and then jail the doctor for treason who revealed the mass murderer, and then expect to take seriously the idea that the usa's behavior is the problem here
you really have to wonder why pakistan is considered our ally when so much of their actions are that of an enemy. pakistan will be eaten alive form within by the likes of the religious fanatics, and pakistan currently seems to think that's not the most pressing problem. so i see no relationship to salvage. let the fake relationship fall, and i am not impressed by appeals to the lack of the usa's failure to be morally lofty. let us hear more of pakistan's failures, since that is the real story here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So it's cowardly to remotely fly a drone and fire on people, but it's not cowardly to dress as a civilian, snipe at the enemy clearly outfitted as non-civilians, then when the enemy comes after them, hide their weapon and claim to just be a regular civilian?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"Western Cowards killing our Countrymen with Aerial Toys".
Hypocritical whinging from zealots who hide in mosques, impose themselves on the homes of non combatants or hide in and attack from a civilian population. Veiled suicide bomber kills four French soldiers in Afghanistan
There's a school of thought that says "rules of war" are inherently stupid, that whenever we go to war we should kill as many people as possible by whatever means we have available, that prisoners should be treated harshly and civilians as disposable. When used in reference to our current wars, this usually goes along with some Internet Tough Guy posturing about how wimpy liberals don't understand that the world is full of bad guys who want to kill us, blah blah blah.
But the Iraqis who surrendered en masse in Desert Storm (you know, the Iraq war we actually won) did so in large part because they knew they'd be treated well when they did so. Yes, they were shell-shocked, but remember that the Iraqi army of the day was hardened by years of grueling WW1-style combat against Iran -- they could have kept fighting, and would have done so if they'd believed there was anything to be gained by doing so. I know; as a medic I had a good perspective on the guys on the other side (there were far more Iraqi wounded to treat than American or other Allied soldiers.) And in the more recent war, the insurgency picked up steam with every atrocity. A similar pattern was seen in Vietnam, and probably in every guerilla war in history. Big, technologically advanced occupying powers always think that they can use a steamroller to intimidate the populace into submission, and they're always wrong. Inevitably, they end up creating more enemies than they kill, until their only choice is either to go home or "make a desert and call it peace."
It's worth noting that Sherman, who popularized the phrase "war is hell" (and earlier made the more precise statement "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it") and who is largely remembered today as the boogeyman who burned his way across the South, actually took care to minimize civilian casualties, made sure that displaced populations had the means to feed themselves, and was punctilious about the care of prisoners. Had the technology been available to him, I'm sure he would have been happy to use drones to find and destroy Johnston's army, but I'm equally sure he would have rejected out of hand the idea of using them against civilians. Smart guy, he was.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Better than carpet bombing from 20,000 feet.
Good points. A fundamental question after 9/11 was "Why do they hate us?" The knee jerk response was "They hate us because we are free and wealthy and they hate freedom and wealth". But a truer answer is more likely "They hate us because we fund their oppressors and so have contributed to their relative unfreedom and poverty".
The biggest issue with all this is that advanced technologies of abundance like robotics, networked computing, nanotechnology, nuclear, aerospace, biotech and so on must be used from a perspective of abundance. Such technologies, like Bucky Fuller talked about, could create universal abundance for all of humanity -- and then some, as we spread into the solar system and to the stars, But, people are often using such technologies of abundance from the perspective of scarcity and so they are adapting advanced technology to fight the last century's wars over perceived resource scarcity. Thus we have ironies like people creating nuclear missiles to fight over oil fields, rather than using advanced materials and knowledge about how the atom works to make clean cheap energy for everyone (whether via nuclear means or solar panels or hot or cold fusion or whatever). I wrote a related essay here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
The same is happening with the misguided energy going into creating stuff like Stuxnet, especially given that what goes around comes around, and now everyone has access to Stuxnet as a prototype platform to build even worse stuff. Obama's escalations of the drone wars and the cyber wars just adds more ironies to his Nobel Peace Prize.
Still, ultimately, "war is a racket", and that racket sadly drives much of US foreign policy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
In general, everyone globally needs to totally rethink our collective economy and geopolitics for new 21st century realities. That will happen eventually because we can't survive the way we have been going on. It's only a question of how long until that change in mindset happens and how much suffering the world experences (including from nucelar war) until then. Here is another related website:
http://anwot.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
but it's not cowardly to dress as a civilian, snipe at the enemy clearly outfitted as non-civilians, then when the enemy comes after them, hide their weapon and claim to just be a regular civilian?
Indeed. Those Colonists have no sense of honor, sir, none at all. We ought to hire more Hessians to go over there and burn them all out. That will surely bring this absurd rebellion of theirs to its knees.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The US is using targeted, small scale means to attack people we don't like. I won't claim it's perfect, or that we don't kill people we shouldn't.
But "overwhelming force"? Hardly. We're not leveling entire cities with fleets of a hundred bombers. We're not turning the entire nation into a glass parking lot. We're not even attacking the nation at large, but trying (again with admitted imperfection) to surgically attack specific elements within it. We're even trying to befriend and assist other segments of the population.
The US is capable of using far, far, far more overwhelming force than it is doing.
Fuck our enemies feelings about our weaponry.
Way to miss the point. "Enemy" is not a status assigned at birth. The world is full of people who really don't care about us one way or another, who in fact have never given a thought to the US in their lives ... until an American drone appears in the sky over their homes. Drones are fine tools for finding and killing the enemies we already have, but this isn't particularly useful if we also create more of them with every use.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Any treaty on cyberweapons is doomed to fail.
This is information warfare, and in essence requires knowing more hidden features about your enemies computer systems than they do, and thanks to globalization we all pretty much use the same computer systems.
The best defense against cyber weapons is bug free code, finding all the security flaws within the software systems that are used and then fixing them. The best form of attack with cyber weapons is finding all the security flaws, before the other side does, not fixing them, and then attaching a payload to software that can exploit this. Ignorance is hell. So a treaty cannot ban computer security research, as its the only defense against cyberweapons, and this sort of research is not limited to state actors.
Creating a virus and then releasing it is almost undetectable. With both Flame and Stuxnet, we have narrowed the list of suspects to probably USA or Israel but this is based mostly on question "who gains"? Was it explicitly state sanctioned? Was it a rogue department with the CIA or Mossad? Was it Anonymous? Was it an Iranian traitor/defector with inside information? Was it a black flag operation? Its very easy for each of the state actors to deny responsibility for this, and almost impossible to prove.
The rules of course are firstly don't get caught, most attacks only work once, so use them wisely, and thirdly don't piss anybody off so badly that they will actually want to physically invade your country.
This is a perfect example of asymmetric gorilla warfare in the digital age. Having a large standing army and being dependent upon huge computer systems just makes you more vulnerable rather than less. Even
This is asymmetric warfare, so even MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is not going to help you here. Treatys are based on consequences, so what good is your treaty going to do here? The Hans Blix of the cyberweapons world will be looking for a bunch of smart people in a room full of computers, good luck with that!
The U.S. has been engaged is what is now called "cyberwarfare" through "Active SIGINT" for decades, the only difference is people are catching on.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
How are you going to get weapons inspectors around a cyberweapons facility?
"Ma'am we need to ask your son to leave the premise for the next 12 hours and for you to grant us full access to your basement"
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Fuck our enemies feelings about our weaponry.
Including the (non-trivial) civilian casualties that they don't like? Who cares about that, right?
Should we be forced to use stone clubs and IEDs because those apes do?
Oh, my, you must be one of those people who aren't bothered by the collateral damage at all...
You know, they are people - even the actual terrorists and certainly the civilians (medics, funeral processions, etc) that are being killed. Dehumanizing people who are being bombed is a common strategy, but an evil one. And someone modded you up, too.
Include those right here at home.
The attitude that Americans have towards the deployment of such drones isn't all that much different from tribal areas in Afghanistan. People just don't like to be spied upon and treated like a bunch of peasants under the King's authority. The primary difference is that, in Afghanistan, its a foreign power, not local law enforcement. They didn't like it very much back when it was the British either.
Have gnu, will travel.
The US culture is based on inventions and the application of those inventions to labor saving devices. When the US goes to war, it is natural that they apply that philosophy. War throughout history has been a major incentive to produce innovation.
Instead of innovation, the Indians created multiple classes within their culture which doubtless stifled innovation.
The Chinese Taoists had exhortations (in the Tao Te Ching) against using labour saving devices (Pien 80).
The Muslims had a religion that promised virgins to holy warriors that died, and if you survived, you got to have multiple wives to breed your successful genes into the next generation. And so on recursively. Not unnaturally, they have a warlike culture that used conquered peoples as slaves (e.g. the Turkish empire prior to WWII).
What worries me is that those same labour saving military devices could so easily be turned against the 99%.
I don't know what about my post suggests I liked GWB, but to make it clear, Bush was as much an evil murderous SOB as Obama is.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
"They" is the wrong word to use here. "They" would not gloat, for example. Terrorists would gloat. Citizens would be happy, except in those cases (crushingly brutal regimes a la Syria, corrupt politicians a la Egypt) where they were not. Either way, it is provably wrong to think that the solution of going in and reducing people to wet chunks is a better one than standing back and acting in more difficult, less dramatic ways.
You are at best only killing "militant" and at worst terrorist, what traditionally has been done using either proper police, or cloak and dagger (and gun),a nd to do that you use *bomb* and *missiles* remotely controleld from a military plateform. This is a hammer to kill a fly , sorry. This is by definition overwhelming force for the problem at hand. That the US military can use much more force than that, is a testament to your incredibly high military budget, and the fact that some (not you) use the argument to indicate you are going "soft" in the middle east is a sad sad conclusion that some peopel lost utterly the sense of perspective.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.
In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach [to counting militants] is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
Let's not pretend it's as black and white as you're trying to paint it. They are trying to minimize civilian casualties. But if there are five guys hanging out at a terrorist training camp, odds are they're all militants, even if we don't know each individual's background. Just like people who died on the battlefields of World War II are considered to have been soldiers, even though it's remotely possible that some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"cyberweapons are relatively cheap .. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use"
The only reason cyberwarfare is even possible is the vast numbers of Windows computers connected to the Internet. And `international treaties' won't protect you from malware, what will is not downloading and executing code from some anonymous source on the Internet.
AccountKiller
I know this view is sincerely held by people who have only the best interests of the US at heart. But look, you have to consider the real-world alternatives and likely consequences of those alternatives or your analysis is coming up short.
To be sure, the US would like to have a weapon that causes people to just drop dead, or better yet, be whisked into US jurisdiction for a proper trial. That magic weapon is not available to us, and drone strikes are the closet thing we have right now. We don't want collateral damage- i.e. dead people- and we spend billions on weapons systems research to make them smarter, more precise and more flexible for just this reason.
The people who hate us would hate us just as much if we intervened in any other way which was equally effective at stopping people who are actively planning to kill us. If we sneak into the country and kill them, they'd still hate us as much and be just as motivated to harm us. They'd just have a different back story when interrogated. Why did bin Laden hate us? Because he wanted to be the one in Saudi to protect it and expel Saddam from Kuwait. And there we were, on HIS holy sand, doing what HE was meant to do.
So are we going to decide that we shouldn't do anything until they show up here with the biological agent / terror plot / suitcase nuke? Because if that's your defensive strategy, as everyone form Clinton to Bush to Obama has realized once they've had a few daily briefs from the CIA, it's not going to work.
We have to intervene earlier in the pipeline. Terrorism is going to be an ongoing reality that we have to face and deal with. There are no really good options, only less bad ones.
The fact of war is some individual personalities are critical to the enemy. Sorry to say but even in terrorism there's a thing called talent. Drone strikes such as the one that took out al Awlaki or al-Libi are a huge win that sets the enemy back. Until we understand the roots of terrorism, and I am not saying that US foreign policy has always been benign (why don't all Iranians just automatically hate us? Because they don't. Not the young people. ), until then we have to face the fact that people want to kill us and we need to stop them before they can succeed.
We are working on weapons systems even more precise than drones. We COULD go the other way and turn NW Pakistan into a sea of glass. That's not who we are. Drone strikes piss people off and incite, anything goes, suicidal rage in people. That was always baked into the equation from the start. This is a war, and the enemy doesn't like seeing their side's heroes dying. This is not news.
I am all about looking giving a thorough, searching and honest look our own actions in the ME . I myself think we should be in Syria right now, tipping that scale, hard. I am deeply concerned with how the rest of the world will perceive our inaction on global warming.. This is something that could galvanize and unite our enemies and coalesce neutrals against us. It's a huge propaganda weapon we're turning on ourselves; a massive unforced error our guys will ultimately end up dying for. That's why it's an act of patriotism and in fact our duty to wage a cultural war on deniers and bring it to them.
Drones are not good , they're just better than all the alternatives right now, that's all.
'Disarmament'. It was more like signing a treaty that a soldier is not allowed to carry more then 10 rifles at once.
Is Obama sacrificing America's long-term security for short-term political gain?
Christ what an asswipe. So stopping terrorism is a now just something a sitting President does for "short term political gain" ?
I have two words for the author of the below quoted excerpt- prove it.
Across the vast, rugged terrain of southern Yemen, an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.
These tribesmen were not previously sympathetic to al Queda? Is that what you're saying? Or they were sympathetic but that sympathy has "increased"... as measured by by what previously existing measure of "sympathy" ? And no, the vividness with which you imagine such a thing being true doesn't count.
I love this bit of fucking loose-associational "causation"
Across the vast, rugged terrain of southern Yemen, an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.
Hmm let's see might something else transpired in Yemen to effect the number of active participants in AQAP since 2009-2010? Well there's this:
The 2011-2012 Yemeni revolution followed the initial stages of the Tunisian Revolution and occurred simultaneously with the Egyptian Revolution and other mass protests in the Arab world in early 2011. The uprising was initially against unemployment, economic conditions and corruption, as well as against the government's proposals to modify the constitution of Yemen. The protestors' demands then escalated to calls for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign.
And oh, fuck, he also forgot about the civil war the north and south had been fighting which finally culminated, in 2007, with a split of the country and the establishment of the South Yemen Movement.
Yeah events on that scale sure can bring factions out of the woodwork and release previously occupied energy and attention or previously suppressed hatreds .
Of course the article doesn't recommend any alternative, equally effective course of action and the author, Robert Wright, isn't going to take responsibility or even be associated with it if a terrorist plot materializes because we backed drone strikes off in Yemen....
Here's some more:
If the strikes have such a big downside, why has President Obama accelerated their use, first in Pakistan, then in Yemen?
The answer: These strikes do, in the short run, impede the operational capabilities of al Qaeda, and Obama is scared to death of the fallout from a single successful al Qaeda strike.
The foiled airliner bombing on Christmas of 2009, which originated in Yemen, apparently freaked him out big time. At a meeting in its aftermath, Obama was "simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures."
Just what sentiment would you like POTUS to display given these events? I mean, is this guy serious?
Like when we ignored the anti-ballistic missile shield treaty when Bush was president, or ignoring the U.N. treaties on torture under both Bush and Obama, or threatening to attack another country (Iran) under both Bush and Obama, to ignoring Geneva Conventions, to ignoring silly treaties on how wars may only be fought for defense or humanitarian reasons....