Clone Wars category archive

Writing in Lebanon’s Daily Star, former CIA officer and author Robert Baer opines that we have been sold a bill of goods about the effectiveness of vacuum-cleaner surveillance. In the process, he demolishes the claims of success that are commonly used by the surveillance cadre to trumpet their effectiveness.

My suspicion throughout has been that

• they surveil because they can;
• because they can, they want to;
• because they want to, they need a cover story;
• because they need a cover story, “surveillance works”;
• because “surveillance works,” they can;
• because they can, they want to . . . .

It’s the best catch there is.

A nugget from the article. Consider the rest your weekend assignment.

Washington is simply overdramatizing the value of this type of information. I haven’t heard of any NSA program that has prompted an investigation that stopped people from being killed.Take the case of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who died in a car-bomb blast in 2005. After the assassination, investigators trolled the data and found there were eight suspicious phone calls around the time of his death. But they only found the evidence after the fact. They weren’t able to anticipate the murder – there’s simply too much data to examine unless you can narrow it down somehow.

Interviewed on Radio Times, writer Mark Bowden says that what distinguishes today’s drones from yesterday’s model airplanes is not radio-controlled flight; it’s the data pipe.

From the website:

Since the U.S. launched its first drone strike in Yemen in 2002, the drone program has been the subject of legal and ethical debate. As one of the most efficient weapons in history, the drone has significantly changed the nature of war making it cheaper and less deadly for our forces. At the same time, the use of drones may inflict more harm on innocent victims with the potential outcome of spurring more acts of terror directed at the U.S. In the cover story of the September issue of The Atlantic, journalist MARK BOWDEN writes about the U.S. drone program and its many contradictions. He joins us in the studio to talk about it.

Follow the link to listen.

Whether or not you agree with some of his opinions, if you care about robotic death raining from the sky, you will find the discussion worth your while.

Coming soon to a sky near you, including more than meets the eye.

Bob Cesca points out something that this morning’s headlines about NSA snooping seem to have overlooked.

I mention this not because I’m a big fan of the vacuum-cleaner style “surveillance” instituted under President George the Worst, but because I am not at all a fan of having the vapors over something that anyone who has been paying attention has known about for a decade:

More importantly, this was an internal audit, which means… oversight!

Oh. You say you haven’t been paying attention . . . . Never mind.

Also, see DD’s Law.

Dan Simpson, writing at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, suggests that uniformed gamers’ raining robotic death from the skies may not be working out quite as intended.

He clutches at his pearls a bit about the recent temporary embassy closings in parts of the Middle East, but, on the whole, his column is worth a look.

Drones for peace! Drones for industry! (With apologies to The Firesign Theatre.)

Noz is rightly skeptical.

I keep seeing articles like these about how you can use drones for stuff other than killing people. Which is great! Except, that doesn’t take away from any of my concerns about those other drones that actually are killing people. Also, a lot of these non-killing uses don’t hold up very well if I think about them for too long.

More skepticism at the link.

At Asia Times, Peter van Buren is not optimistic about happenings in the US, anticipating a security dystopia

Even before the Manning trial began, the emerging look of that new America was coming into view. In recent years, weapons, tactics, and techniques developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the war on terror have begun arriving in “the homeland”.

Consider, for instance, the rise of the warrior cop, of increasingly armored-up police departments across the country often filled with former military personnel encouraged to use the sort of rough tactics they once wielded in combat zones. Supporting them are the kinds of weaponry that once would have been inconceivable in police departments, including armored vehicles, typically bought with Department of Homeland Security grants.

The Guardian reports on a GI gamer who rained robotic death from the skies when he answered the call of duty:

“It is a lot like playing a video game,” a former Predator drone operator matter-of-factly admits to the artist Omer Fast. “But playing the same video game four years straight on the same level.” His bombs kill real people though and, he admits, often not the people he is aiming at.

The remarkable insight into the working life of one of the most modern of military operatives is provided in a 30-minute film that will be shown at the Imperial War Museum in London from Monday, the first in a new programme of exhibitions under the title IWM Contemporary.

A United States military drone presumed to be a QF-4 crashed, exploded and sent up a large black cloud of smoke Wednesday morning at Tyndall Air Force Base. Following the accident, the UAV reportedly went up in flames and started a ground fire, prompting authorities to close nearby Highway 98. They’ve reported no injuries.

The item doesn’t answer the overriding question in the public mind:

In Florida, huh! How long had the left blinker been on?

Video of smoke at a distance at the link.

Robotic death raining from the skies because someone doesn’t like your looks.

Raining robotic death from the skies.

Because we can.

The handwritings on the wall–er–train.

“We must find new ways to fight graffiti,” the company’s security chief Gerd Neubeck told the paper. In 2012 alone, trains were defaced some 14,000 times, costing Deutsche Bahn (the German railroad–ed.) some €7.6 million ($9.8 million), he said.

The new drone, outfitted with an infrared camera and the company’s red and white logo, will use GPS to document the times and places where vandals are observed, making it easier to prosecute offenders. Flying at an altitude of some 150 meters (492 feet), it will be able to keep watch for more than 80 minutes at a time, quietly whizzing through the sky at up to 54 kilometers (33 miles) per hour. It can also be put on autopilot function for stretches as long as 40 kilometers, the paper said.

. . . is something entirely other. The ACLU reports:

Drone proponents would prefer that everyone use the term “UAV,” for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or “UAS,” for Unmanned Aerial System (“system” in order to encompass the entirety of the vehicle that flies, the ground-based controller, and the communications connection that connects the two). These acronyms are technical, bland, and bureaucratic. That’s probably their principal advantage from the point of view of those who want to separate them from the ugly, bloody, and controversial uses to which they’ve been put by the CIA and U.S. military overseas.

More linguistic magic tricks at the link.

No exit.

I predict an influx of jellyfish at nude beaches.