[D66] Academics protest Google’s role in drone murder

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/18/goog-m18.html

Academics protest Google’s role in drone murder
By Andre Damon
18 May 2018

Three prominent technology scholars published an open letter Monday, 
which has now received over 900 signatures, condemning Google’s 
collaboration with the Pentagon’s illegal “targeted killing” program.

The academics published their letter in support of over 3,100 Google 
employees who issued their own open letter last month protesting the 
company’s participation in a Pentagon program called Project Maven, 
designed to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to analyze 
footage collected by US military drones.

The starting point of the letter, said Lucy Suchman, a professor of 
anthropology of science and technology in the Department of Sociology at 
Lancaster University, and one of the co-authors of the statement, is the 
essential illegality of the US government’s targeted killing program.

The US drone murder program is based on “extrajudicial killing that is 
not accountable either to US or international law,” Suchman told the 
World Socialist Web Site Thursday.

“It’s clear that the people killed through this program are targeted 
through profiling and guilt by association.” She noted that, according 
to one study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, only 1.6 percent 
of those killed in drone strikes in Pakistan between 2001 and 2013 were 
specifically identified individually.

“This is summary execution of people who have received no due process 
whatsoever,” said Dr. Suchman. “This is not in combat zones, this is in 
people’s homes and communities.”

In areas targeted by US drone strikes, she said, people are living “in a 
state of constant threat of death from the sky.”

The researchers made clear that Google’s claims that its partnership 
with the Pentagon was nonviolent in nature are highly questionable.

“It is clear that the Pentagon aims to build out Project Maven to armed 
drones, and its functionality does not need much adjustment to become a 
target recognition system, carried out by an armed drone, that could 
function without meaningful human control,” said Peter Asaro, an 
Associate Professor at the School of Media Studies at The New School and 
a co-author of the letter.

The letter’s authors told the World Socialist Web Site that they drafted 
their letter in response to a request by a technology employee for 
support within the academic community.

“It was the Google workers who really inspired my co-authors and myself 
to write this letter,” Dr. Asaro said. “We thought that IT researchers 
and academics could really add their voice to this issue. IT workers do 
not often organize against their employers in this way, so we realized 
it was an issue that really touched a nerve,” he added.

“This statement makes clear that we stand behind the thousands of 
workers who have stuck their necks out to sign that letter” by Google 
employees, said Lilly Irani, an Assistant Professor at the University of 
California, San Diego and one of the letter’s authors.

“Google collects data on a global base of users, including people in the 
Middle East,” Dr. Irani said, and then “aligns that power with a single 
nation’s military. These massive companies that mediate and track our 
everyday lives are not accountable to the democratic process.”

“Google has a user base that is international, and it has a 
responsibility to the global constituency of its users,” added Dr. 
Suchman. They are “the custodians of the data of billions of people. We 
need to call them to account for that responsibility.”

Suchman emphasized that while Google’s management has sought to 
integrate itself into the military-intelligence apparatus, many of its 
employees remain committed to the defense of freedom of expression, the 
open Internet, and opposition to war. “Google management is attempting 
to slide out of this commitment that a lot of their employees have, and 
their employees have very rightly called them to account on that,” said 
Dr. Suchman.

Earlier this week, Gizmodo reported that over a dozen Google employees 
have resigned over the company’s partnership with the Pentagon.

The open letter authored by Irani, Suchman, and Asaro notes that “Google 
has long sought to organize and enhance the usefulness of the world’s 
information. Beyond searching for relevant webpages on the Internet, 
Google has become responsible for compiling our email, videos, 
calendars, and photographs, and guiding us to physical destinations. 
Like many other digital technology companies, Google has collected vast 
amounts of data on the behaviors, activities and interests of their users.”

The letter concludes, “We are also deeply concerned about the possible 
integration of Google’s data on people’s everyday lives with military 
surveillance data, and its combined application to targeted killing. 
Google has moved into military work without subjecting itself to public 
debate or deliberation, either domestically or internationally. While 
Google regularly decides the future of technology without democratic 
public engagement, its entry into military technologies casts the 
problems of private control of information infrastructure into high relief.”

Dr. Irani, who supported the World Socialist Web Site’s open letter 
opposing Google’s censorship of the Internet, said that the issue of 
Google’s integration into the military-intelligence apparatus was 
closely linked to the company’s role in “muting political opposition 
through its ‘search quality’ policies.”

Last year, Google, under pressure from the major US intelligence 
agencies, implemented a change in its search algorithm that slashed 
search traffic to left-wing, anti-war, and progressive web sites by 
nearly 50 percent, and to the World Socialist Web Site by 75 percent.

The WSWS’s open letter to Google—which was never answered—raises the 
question: “Is Google coordinating its censorship program with the 
American government, or sections of its military and intelligence 
apparatus?” The involvement of Google with the military’s drone 
assassination program makes clear that its support for the US military 
and its censorship of left-wing sites are two sides of the same process.

“I’m very supportive of the fight against Internet censorship,” said Dr. 
Irani. “For the average person, Internet censorship is invisible: you 
don’t know it unless your favorite YouTube channel gets taken down,” she 
said, citing the need to raise public awareness of the issue.

She also linked the growing willingness of technology workers to speak 
out against censorship and militarism to mounting struggles of the 
working class, including educators who are engaged in a wave of strikes 
throughout the country. “At least for one section of the tech workers, 
the condition of the wider working class is of great significance,” she 
said.

The WSWS urges all Google workers and all those opposed to the company’s 
integration into the military-intelligence apparatus to support the 
fight against Internet censorship. Sign up here.