Clone Wars category archive

Drones hacked and pwned.

From the website:

The US Department of Homeland Security has already spent $240 million on the drone project for the US Border Patrol. Each predator drone costs $18 million to build and can run $3,200 per hour just to fly. So are flying robots in the sky effective for patrolling America’s borders? Trevor Timm, activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives us his take.

It’s all about alternative markets, folks.

Harry Shearer sings a song of robotic death from the skies to celebrate what he imagined Bob Dylan was unable to say at the White House Medal of Freedom ceremony.

More Harry Shearer here.

Via Attytood.

At the Chicago Tribune, Robert C. Koehler takes a critical look at the ethical implications of raining robotic death from the skies. A nugget:

While drones may represent the quintessence of soulless modernism, dehumanizing violence and making bureaucratic murder a technological reality — computer operators several thousand miles from the action, in Nevada or Ohio, California or Missouri, can take out “insurgents” in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen with no more risk than gamers face as they pursue their fantasy conquest of evildoers — drones also indulge a dark yearning to acquire godlike power, to attain omnipotence.

When we murder by drone, we may be both perpetuating an inhuman, bureaucratic control over random enemies and, at the same time, satisfying an age-old lust to play god.

If you follow only one link from this site, make it this one.

Asia Times reports:

As convenient as it is for someone in a cubicle in the Nevada desert to press a button and incinerate a Pashtun wedding party in North Waziristan, now, with only a click, anyone can download a 359 KB file available on Amazon for only $8.99 – including free wireless delivery – and learn everything there is to learn about All Things Drone.

It’s fitting that Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 has been put together by Tom Engelhardt – editor, MC of the TomDispatch website and “a national treasure”, in the correct appraisal of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole – and TomDispatch’s associate editor Nick Turse, author of the seminal 2008 study The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.

I haven’t decided whether to get it yet, but I probably shall. I know I should. And you should too.

Get it here.

PoliticalProf is carrying on an excellent discussion about drones and policy over at his place. The crux of his argument is that drones are not ipso facto the issue; they are the symptom.

The discussion starts here. Read it then follow the discussion in subsequent posts. (He’s behind Tumblr’s garden wall, so forget about a “comments section” as we know it.)

Via TPM.

Thoreau explains it all.

Advent of the megadrone: