Search: drones
23 Feb Weekly News Wrap: Monday, February 23, 2015
...national for drugs trafficking. Oceania Australian air force personnel have begun training on armed drones in the United States, Australian defense officials said on Monday, less than a week after Washington said it would begin exporting the controversial weapons system. Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced that his government will tighten immigration laws and crack down on groups that incite hatred under a raft of counterterrorism measures introduced in a bid to combat the threat from “home-grown terrorists”. UN/World United Nations war crimes investigators plan to publish names of...01 Jul Weekly News Wrap: Tuesday, July 1, 2014
...apart after an onslaught by Sunni Islamists who have declared a “caliphate” to rule over all the world’s Muslims. Americas The US has armed drones flying over Baghdad to protect US troops that have recently arrived to assess Iraq’s deteriorating security, the Pentagon said on Friday. The White House says the US will no longer produce or acquire anti-personnel landmines in the future and intends to join the Ottawa Convention that bans their use. BNP Paribas has pleaded guilty to two criminal charges and agreed to pay $8.83 billion in...14 Jun Weekday News Wrap: Thursday, June 14, 2012
...a unanimous resolution on Yemen calling for an end to violence from both sides. A defense lawyer for one of the suspects before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, set up in The Hague to investigate the death of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, claims that the tribunal has a political agenda and should therefore not conduct the trial. Salon has posted a piece demonstrating the global unpopularity of the US’ use of drones. A Tunisian court has sentenced former President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to 20 years in prison. As...
05 Sep Iran’s Threat of Retaliation
...time” in the “appropriate” manner, reduce the likelihood of immediate retaliation. Furthermore, the US response, involving the deployment of additional fighter squadrons and more warships to the Middle East to help defend Israel, may diminish the chances of Iranian reprisals. On the other hand, Iran certainly has the capacity to retaliate militarily, as evidenced in April when it launched more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel. The decision of certain airlines to halt operations to the Middle East and the calls by states for their citizens to evacuate from...13 Apr Detention and Interrogation in the LA Times, and a Targeted Killing Conference at Penn
...of targeted killing and drone warfare, let me point readers to a conference at University of Pennsylvania Law School this weekend, a joint effort among lawyers, philosophers, diplomats, and national security and military personnel. It’s an impressive lineup – including Deborah Pearlstein and John Dehn – and you can even get CLE credit, I believe. (I’ve put the announcement below the fold.) I’ll be talking at the Penn conference about an ethical tension between jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Targeted killing through drones results (I will take by...04 Mar Weekday News Wrap: Monday, March 4, 2013
...in today’s presidential election. A UN senior official has addressed sexual violence issues in Cambodia and Kenya. Human Rights Watch has called for an end to the violence in Bangladesh in light of the recent sentencing of opposition leader Jamaat-e-Islaami. Jurist has more here. Foreign Policy recently carried out a survey of 70 experts about global conflicts; an analysis of the results can be found here. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported last week that UK terror suspects are being stripped of their citizenship before being killed by US drones....30 Nov Events and Announcements: November 30, 2014
...peace and justice, values that were at heart of Mr Weinrebe’s humanitarian activities. In his keynote lecture, Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights and renowned barrister will focus on pressing issues at the intersection of peace and justice including: mass digital surveillance in the global age, the use of drones in the fight against international terrorism, the rights of victims of terrorism and areas of good practice in the fight against terrorism. Opening Remarks will be given by Professor Robert McCorquodale (Director, BIICL) and the lecture...
29 Aug Automatizing Patterns of Conduct: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Commanders Better Comply with the Principle of Distinction?
...to “enable improved techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments”. In other words, the DoD is “developing a program of high-tech cameras mounted on drones and other robots that monitor cities, which enable identification and discrimination between civilians and terrorists through machine learning computers.” In this second example too, one can observe the importance of identifying patterns of conduct, especially in urban contexts, to separate civilians from combatants. However, while in the SKYNET programme AI is aimed at a very specific task (rating...12 Jan Laurie Blank on the Rationales for Targeted Killing
I want to call readers’ attention to a very useful new essay written by Emory’s Laurie Blank, which is forthcoming in the William Mitchell Law Review. Here is the abstract: Targeted strikes – predominantly using drones – have become the operational counterterrorism tool of choice for the United States over the past few years. Targeted killing can be used both within armed conflict and in the absence of armed conflict, as a means of self-defense, usually as operational counterterrorism. Indeed, this duality lies at the heart of the United States...
27 Nov Symposium on Open Source Investigation Labs: AI for Open Source Investigation
...of interest is well-defined. An example would be identifying a cat in an image. Since we can provide a large training data set of images, which contain images with cats, without cats, with cats of different sizes or types, the ML algorithm can derive a pattern accurately. Contrast this with identifying a novel weapon, where the training data would be extremely small and the new drone might have features that vary from existing drones. In such cases, ML algorithms are shown not to perform well and thus require extensive human...