Clone Wars category archive

Secret Sheriff surveillance secrecy in San Diego:

They were “as transparent as they can be” except when they weren’t.

Pretty soon, you won’t be able to soak up the rays in your backyard.

The activist group whose drone was shot down by hunters on Sunday, Nov. 19 has released video of the incident.

A drone owned by SHARK, or SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness, was flying above the Wing Pointe club in Berks County, Penn. and observing a pigeon shooting event when it came under fire.

For more hot QuadCaptor action, see Peter64’s YouTube channel.

Via GNC.

Also, some sauce for the goose, from Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

Video via the Linux Outlaws.

According to the first part of this report, every agency wants more fighting robots in the sky, mindless bots that gamers fly.

I wonder how much of that is a “mine is bigger than yours” between the CIA and the Pentagon?

Jim Henley:

May I suggest that before people throw around a term like “surgical strikes” they try undergoing some surgery? It’s a big deal, people. If you were here, I would tell you, using a piece of my leg to help do so¹.

Like Savoir Faire, Skynet is everywhere. Der Spiegel reports:

The unmanned aircraft are constantly sailing through German airspace. Drones carry cameras and video recorders, infrared sensors, measuring devices and radar technology. High-tech models like the AR 100-B are available from mail-order electronics stores, as are do-it-yourself quadrocopters. The devices were a hot topic at the ILA Berlin Air Show in mid-September, where experts demonstrated how the aircraft can behave in a swarm and be designed to be even smaller than they already are. Drones currently represent “the most dynamic segment in (the) aviation industry,” according to the event’s brochure.

Police and firefighters use drones to monitor protests and borders. They film crime scenes from above and measure levels of toxic materials in the air during major fires. Companies deploy drones to inspect pipelines and measure progress on construction sites. Architects, surveyors and photographers also use the airborne assistants.

There is no such thing as a “surgical strike.”

It exists only in the imagination of those who think war is a video game (and those who monger war).

The geniuses at Apple are keeping its iJunk safe from news about robotic death raining from the sky:

Begley hunkered down and made his first iPhone app, Drones+, which tracks drone strikes by aggregating information from a Bureau of Investigative Journalism database.

(snip)

Begley said that Drones+ was rejected twice by Apple on technical grounds since he first submitted it to the Cupertino, California-based maker of iPhones, iPads, iPods and Macintosh computers in July.

A third rejection came this week, according to Begley, with Apple informing him that Drones+ would not be allowed in the App Store because many people were likely to find the content objectionable.

iJunk apps don’t download themselves and force users to run them.

Apparently, in Apple world, robotic death raining from the sky is quite acceptable, thank you, so long as no one learns of it on iJunk.

Skynet–not just in the movies.

After reviewing the arguments that robotic dealers of automated death from the skies are “good weapons” (follow the link for the arguments), Der Spiegel tries to assess the goodness. A nugget:

To date, the most humane of all weapons is the one that is potentially the most gruesome — the intercontinental ballistic missile, equipped with multiple nuclear warheads, which is capable of wiping out a city of a million people. It has zero victims, because no one has dared to use it.

The “good” drones, on the other hand, have a much more tragic track record. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London found that the United States used drones in Pakistan 337 times between 2004 and 2012, killing between 2,524 and 3,247 people. The casualties included 482 to 852 civilians, of whom 175 were children. Of the many evils of war, civilian victims are the worst.

Read the whole thing.

At Psychology Today, Ray B. Williams wonders whether the United States is in decline.

I know, it’s an apocalyptic question that is usually employed to support blowing up faceless, usually brown, people somewhere in the world, on the theory that decline may be blocked by piling up bodies of dead strangers in faraway places with strange-sounding names.

Williams’s take has a twist. Among others, he cites Alfred McCoy, who suggests that blowing up faceless, usually brown, people somewhere in the world is the problem, not the solution:

McCoy argues that a big contributor to the U.S.’s decline is militarism; specifically what he calls “micro-militarism,” which has plagued previous empires. These are foreign military adventures, which are not full blown “wars” that end up costing horrendous amounts of money or end in defeats. He says, as “allies worldwide begin to realign their politics to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintain 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington.”

Read the rest.

Remote-control robotic death from the skies.

According to Robot’s Rules of Order, he was hit by drone. Therefore he was ipso facto an “enemy combatant.”

If the drone has missed, he would not have been a combatant.

It’s the best catch there is.

Too true to be funny.

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.