The fact that 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed in Pakistan according to a completely opaque process for classifying targets and blasting them from the sky--a process that operates entirely outside any law--ought to be considered absurd, shocking, frightening, and soul-crushingly inhuman. But it's not. We're arguing about with each other about bullshit.
I'm incredibly appalled by that. That's why stories like this are dreadful. They overreach in their conclusions, and will be easily denied by people involved in the programs who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to: identify terrorist couriers.
That denial and evidence will then discredit all the sensible arguments about the drone strike program.
Don't believe it? There's a discussion down-thread where someone is equating this list with the US Terrorism Watch Lists. Their clearly not the same thing at all (once glace at the slides shows you that), but they demand evidence. Of course, I can't show evidence that will convince them, but at some point an agency will, and they'll show exactly how the ist in this article (or some other list) is very accurate (I'm sure there is some list that is) and that will discredit the whole argument against the watch lists.
* who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to*
No they won't, because they've been challenged to do such things repeatedly in the past and always failed.
These people live in a foreign country and it's not like the US Govt dispatches a bunch of detectives and lawyers based on the results of this ML model. Get real. The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes.
This is all incredibly well documented.
There is simply no mathematical way the program described in the article can be accurate, that's what the entire article is about. So I don't see why you have such profound faith in them. It's quite clear they're a bunch of maths geeks who have a single hammer and will use it to hammer any US foreign policy problem regardless of how much it resembles a nail or not.
> The intelligence is handed off to the CIA without revealing how it's generated, the CIA then says "we got a list of terrorist couriers from the NSA, let's go get em" and boom, off it goes.
> This is all incredibly well documented.
Then feel free to submit at least one source (or better yet, several) for this "well documented" fact that (a) the NSA does not due any due diligence into suspected terrorists after they get picked up by this meta data process; (b) the NSA does not indicate in any way to the CIA how the list was generated; (c) the CIA uses this information without performing any of its own due diligence on the targets; (d) the CIA then goes and kills everyone on the list without any further approval from DNI, SECDEF, POTUS, etc.
I'm no drone program apologist but let's get real here to suggest that there's no intelligence or due diligence into these operations is willfully disingenuous at best.
I'm incredibly appalled by that. That's why stories like this are dreadful. They overreach in their conclusions, and will be easily denied by people involved in the programs who will then produce evidence to show that this particular program does exactly what it tries to to: identify terrorist couriers.
That denial and evidence will then discredit all the sensible arguments about the drone strike program.
Don't believe it? There's a discussion down-thread where someone is equating this list with the US Terrorism Watch Lists. Their clearly not the same thing at all (once glace at the slides shows you that), but they demand evidence. Of course, I can't show evidence that will convince them, but at some point an agency will, and they'll show exactly how the ist in this article (or some other list) is very accurate (I'm sure there is some list that is) and that will discredit the whole argument against the watch lists.