Octopus Overlords

Suspected U.S. drone strikes have killed three alleged al-Qaida operatives in Yemen's southwestern Bayda province, security and tribal officials said, the first such killings reported in the country since Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency Friday.

Airstrikes on a market and a farm in Yemen killed at least 68 civilians in a single day, including eight children, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The two attacks occurred on Tuesday, making it one of the bloodiest days for civilians so far in Yemen’s civil war. At least 109 civilians have been killed nationwide over the past two weeks, in a conflict that has intensified since the death of the country’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, this month.

Local Yemeni officials blamed the Saudi-led coalition for the airstrikes.

More than three years of fighting have turned Yemen, which was already the poorest Arab country, into the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Another former drone operator told me that screens can paradoxically magnify a sense of closeness to the target. In an unpublished paper that he shared with me, he called this phenomenon “cognitive combat intimacy,” a relational attachment forged through close observation of violent events in high resolution. In one passage, he described a scenario in which an operator executed a strike that killed a “terrorist facilitator” while sparing his child. Afterward, “the child walked back to the pieces of his father and began to place the pieces back into human shape,” to the horror of the operator. Over time, the technology of drones has improved, which, in theory, has made executing such strikes easier, but which also makes what remote warriors see more vivid and intense. The more they watch targets go about their daily lives — getting dressed, playing with their kids — the greater their “risk of moral injury,” his paper concluded.

A lawsuit filed by former employee Amy Liu this month alleges that Clarifai’s computer systems were compromised by one or more people in Russia, potentially exposing technology used by the US military to an adversary. The lawsuit says Clarifai learned of the breach last November, but that Clarifai’s CEO and other executives did not promptly report it to the Pentagon...

...Clarifai was working on a piece of Project Maven, former and current employees say, a Pentagon effort to infuse the US military with AI. Project Maven has triggered dissent inside Google, which took on a similar drone-analysis contract....

...In early November, Clarifai was informed by internet service provider Cogent that one of its servers appeared to be attacking Indiana University, according to an initial incident report seen by WIRED. The report says that all the company’s code and the credentials to its Amazon Web Services account that stored customer data could have been compromised—and that the malware appeared to have originated from a computer in Russia. The Clarifai spokesperson said that the company’s investigation found that none of the company’s data or code was compromised.

In chat logs from November 7 reviewed by WIRED, Zeiler, the CEO, says the malware had been attempting to contact computers “all over the world.” They included some belonging to the US government. “Oh fun,” Zeiler wrote. “One is DOD Network information center.”

I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 4:28 pm Imagine the PTSD of that kid. He's probably broken now.

AWS260 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 2:57 pm PTSD among drone pilots.

Kareem now had no doubt he was on America’s infamous “Kill List.” Most Americans don’t even know we have such a thing. We do. Officially, it goes by the ghoulish bureaucratic euphemism “Disposition Matrix.”

Seemingly conceived in the Obama years, the lethal list – about which little is known outside a few leaks and court pleadings – appears to sort people into targeting for capture, interrogation, or assassination by drone. It was run by a star-chamber of two-dozen security officials and the president. According to a 2012 New York Times report, they met once a week to decide which targets around the world lived or died.

These meetings became known as “Terror Tuesdays.”

As Obama was preparing to leave office, candidate Donald Trump was promising to jack up the number of bombings in the Middle East. “You have to take out their families,” he said.

It’s one of the few promises he’s fulfilled. Reports vary, but some estimate that Trump has upped the pace of drone attacks by about four or five times the Obama rate, which itself was 10 times the rate of Bush...

...With Reprieve’s help, Kareem did what the system asks a law-abiding American citizen with a grievance to do. He sued, filing a complaint in district court in Washington, D.C., on March 30th, 2017, asking the U.S. government to take him off the Kill List, at least until he had a chance to challenge the evidence against him.

The case, still unresolved more than a year later, has awesome implications not just for Kareem but for all Americans – all people everywhere, for that matter.

It’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the most important lawsuits to ever cross the desk of a federal judge. The core of the Bill of Rights is in play, and a wrong result could formalize a slide into authoritarianism that began long ago, but accelerated after 9/11...

...“OK, everybody,” Judge Collyer says. “We’re here for this really, really interesting case. Who’s going to argue for the plaintiff?”

The question before Collyer would challenge the most gifted legal mind. At issue is the fact that America, in the wake of 9/11, has become two countries.

One is a democracy, visible to the population and governed by the lofty laws and rules and constitutional principles we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock.

The second nation is an authoritarian state-within-a-state, governed exclusively by the executive branch. In this parallel world, all rights redound to a bureaucracy that may kill anyone it pleases at any time, restrained only by the inclinations of the executive.

Essentially, Kareem’s lawyers are appealing to the first America – Collyer’s courtroom – to force the second, secret America to hear him out.

Nobody seems to know what would happen if Kareem or Zaidan tried to come to court, another thing that makes this case uniquely bizarre. Would Kareem be allowed to walk in and take a seat at the plaintiff’s table? Would he be placed under arrest outside the courthouse? Stuffed in the trunk of a Crown Victoria at the airport?

Kareem didn’t have a guess, and the Department of Justice will not comment. So Kareem and Zaidan are represented in person here by a young, quick-witted lawyer named Tara Plochocki, of the Beltway firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, partners to Reprieve...

...Collyer is asking if Elliott is really going to force her to waste time arguing who the hell else, in Syria, shoots Hellfire missiles at people out of drones.

Apparently, Elliott will, in fact, waste the judge’s time in this fashion. He affects ignorance.

“I would not know, your honor,” he says.

Elliott’s argument doesn’t advance much beyond this point. Collyer, sometime later, summarizes the government’s position:

“So [your] argument is that if, A, we didn’t have anything to do with it… but if we did, we did so only because of a determination that – and I’ll talk about Mr. Kareem, because he’s the one with constitutional rights – that Mr. Kareem was a grave threat to national security and the executive gets to make that determination, not a court.”

Gatwick Airport's runway has reopened after a drone prevented any planes flying in or out but "continued disruption" is expected.

A drone has not been spotted over the airport since around 10pm on Thursday and police are continuing to search for the operators.

The airport later confirmed the runway is now "available" and that a "limited number" of planes were scheduled for departure and arrival.

The chaos began when a drone was spotted shortly after 9pm on Wednesday, prompting a shutdown for safety reasons, which caused hundreds of flights to be cancelled.

Air traffic at Newark Liberty International Airport was temporarily halted early Monday evening after two drones were spotted in the area.

Gregory Martin, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration said the drones were spotted flying near Teterboro Airport around 5 p.m. Teterboro is a general aviation airport about 20 miles north of Newark International. As a precaution, arriving flights at Newark were temporarily held, he said.

Drones can cause severe damage to aircraft in addition to distracting pilots. The drones in the Newark incident were flying at 3,500 feet, officials said.

Industry experts, however, are pushing back against the reports. The objects could have been balloons, plastic bags or space junk, they said. Brendan Schulman, spokesman for DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, said the pilots likely spotted something in the air, but said it’s unlikely it was a drone.

One reason, Schulman said: the drones were reportedly flying at 3,500 feet. Under FAA rules drones are not permitted to fly higher than 400 feet. And while it’s possible for them to fly higher with FAA permission, Schulman said it’s “highly unlikely.”

He said previous reports of drones flying near Gatwick and Heathrow airports in London — have made people more “predisposed”to assuming when they see something in the air, it’s a drone.

President Trump on Wednesday ended an Obama-era requirement that the U.S. government publish an annual report on the number of people killed in drone strikes or other counterterrorism operations outside of war zones.

Trump issued an executive order revoking the requirement, capping months of speculation that he would revoke the disclosure rule.

The order says the director of national intelligence must no longer issue “an unclassified summary of the number of strikes undertaken by the United States government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities, as well as assessments of combatant and non-combatant deaths resulting from those strikes, among other information.”

The White House last year chose not to publish the unclassified report detailing the number of strikes carried out against terrorist targets and the number of combatants and civilians killed. The administration was facing a May 1 deadline to issue the next report.

Former President Obama mandated the public report in a July 2016 executive order following years of criticism that his administration’s use of drone strikes against terror groups in countries such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen was not transparent.

“This action eliminates superfluous reporting requirements, requirements that do not improve government transparency, but rather distract our intelligence professionals from their primary mission,” a National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.

Officials pointed to a major defense law passed by Congress last year that requires the administration to submit a civilian casualty report to lawmakers. That measure, however, allows the Defense secretary to classify the report if he decides that its publication would pose a national security threat.

The provision applies to military operations and does not cover drone strikes carried out by the CIA, which oftentimes carries out strikes in areas where U.S. forces are not present.