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

[A.O.]

https://www.icrac.net/open-letter-in-support-of-google-employees-and-tech-workers/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/16/google-business-war-project-maven

Open Letter in Support of Google Employees and Tech Workers

Researchers in Support of Google Employees: Google should withdraw from
Project Maven and commit to not weaponizing its technology.

An Open Letter To:

Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet;
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google;
Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud;
and Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President, Google Cloud,

As scholars, academics, and researchers who study, teach about, and
develop information technology, we write in solidarity with the 3100+
Google employees, joined by other technology workers, who oppose
Google’s participation in Project Maven. We wholeheartedly support their
demand that Google terminate its contract with the DoD, and that Google
and its parent company Alphabet commit not to develop military
technologies and not to use the personal data that they collect for
military purposes. The extent to which military funding has been a
driver of research and development in computing historically should not
determine the field’s path going forward. We also urge Google and
Alphabet’s executives to join other AI and robotics researchers and
technology executives in calling for an international treaty to prohibit
autonomous weapon systems.

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 private data collected by Google comes with a responsibility
not only to use that data to improve its own technologies and expand its
business, but also to benefit society. The company’s motto “Don’t Be
Evil” famously embraces this responsibility.

Project Maven is a United States military program aimed at using machine
learning to analyze massive amounts of drone surveillance footage and to
label objects of interest for human analysts. Google is supplying not
only the open source ‘deep learning’ technology, but also engineering
expertise and assistance to the Department of Defense.

According to Defense One, Joint Special Operations Forces “in the Middle
East” have conducted initial trials using video footage from a small
ScanEagle surveillance drone. The project is slated to expand “to
larger, medium-altitude Predator and Reaper drones by next summer” and
eventually to Gorgon Stare, “a sophisticated, high-tech series of
cameras…that can view entire towns.” With Project Maven, Google becomes
implicated in the questionable practice of targeted killings. These
include so-called signature strikes and pattern-of-life strikes that
target people based not on known activities but on probabilities drawn
from long range surveillance footage. The legality of these operations
has come into question under international[1] and U.S. law.[2] These
operations also have raised significant questions of racial and gender
bias (most notoriously, the blanket categorization of adult males as
militants) in target identification and strike analysis.[3] These
problems cannot be reduced to the accuracy of image analysis algorithms,
but can only be addressed through greater accountability to
international institutions and deeper understanding of geopolitical
situations on the ground.

While the reports on Project Maven currently emphasize the role of human
analysts, these technologies are poised to become a basis for automated
target recognition and autonomous weapon systems. As military commanders
come to see the object recognition algorithms as reliable, it will be
tempting to attenuate or even remove human review and oversight for
these systems. According to Defense One, the DoD already plans to
install image analysis technologies on-board the drones themselves,
including armed drones. We are then just a short step away from
authorizing autonomous drones to kill automatically, without human
supervision or meaningful human control. If ethical action on the part
of tech companies requires consideration of who might benefit from a
technology and who might be harmed, then we can say with certainty that
no topic deserves more sober reflection – no technology has higher
stakes – than algorithms meant to target and kill at a distance and
without public accountability.

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.

Should Google decide to use global internet users’ personal data for
military purposes, it would violate the public trust that is fundamental
to its business by putting its users’ lives and human rights in
jeopardy. The responsibilities of global companies like Google must be
commensurate with the transnational makeup of their users. The DoD
contracts under consideration by Google, and similar contracts already
in place at Microsoft and Amazon, signal a dangerous alliance between
the private tech industry, currently in possession of vast quantities of
sensitive personal data collected from people across the globe, and one
country’s military. They also signal a failure to engage with global
civil society and diplomatic institutions that have already highlighted
the ethical stakes of these technologies.

We are at a critical moment. The Cambridge Analytica scandal
demonstrates growing public concern over allowing the tech industries to
wield so much power. This has shone only one spotlight on the
increasingly high stakes of information technology infrastructures, and
the inadequacy of current national and international governance
frameworks to safeguard public trust. Nowhere is this more true than in
the case of systems engaged in adjudicating who lives and who dies.
We thus ask Google, and its parent company Alphabet, to:

Terminate its Project Maven contract with the DoD.
Commit not to develop military technologies, nor to allow the personal
data it has collected to be used for military operations.
Pledge to neither participate in nor support the development,
manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to support efforts
to ban autonomous weapons.

__________________________
[1] See statements by Ben Emmerson, UN Special Rapporteur on
Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights and by Christof Heyns, UN Special
Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions.

[2] See for example Murphy & Radsan 2009.

[3] See analyses by Reaching Critical Will 2014, and Wilke 2014.


On 18-05-18 11:45, A.O. wrote:
> 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.
> 
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