Technofascism blog

via news.antiwar.com

‘Year of the Drone Strike’ Netted Only Five Actual Militant Leaders

On January 1, 2009, a US drone strike killed two senior al-Qaeda leaders, the first in what then President-elect Barack Obama had said would be a dramatic escalation of the aerial bombardment of Pakistan’s tribal area.

And escalate it did. The US launched 44 distinct drone strikes in Pakistan in 2009, far more than in previous years. The pinnacle of America’s drone achievements was in August, when they killed Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) leader Baitullah Mehsud.

Much has been made of the successes, but while the strikes have been regular and they almost always are presented by Pakistan’s intelligence community as having killed “suspects,” the actual successes are few and far between, with only five confirmed kills of real militant leaders, and a handful of unconfirmed claims that usually haven’t panned out.

The vast majority of the deaths, around 700 according to one estimate, have been innocent civilians. With such a massive civilian toll and so little to show for it, it is no wonder that Pakistani people have been up in arms over the continued strikes.

But US officials have rarely commented on the drone strikes, except on those rare occasions when they actually kill someone meaningful, and seem completely ambivalent to the hundreds of innocent people killed in the meantime. The ultimate example of this was June 22-23.

On June 22, the US struck at a house officials called a “suspected militant hideout,” burying a few locals inside. When others rushed to the scene to rescue them, they launched another missile, killing 13 apparently innocent Pakistanis. When they held a funeral procession on June 23, the US hit that too, ostensibly on the belief that Baitullah Mehsud might be among the mourners. He wasn’t, but the attack killed at least 80 more people.

When announcing the December escalation into Afghanistan, President Obama reportedly also approved an escalation of drone strikes into Pakistan. It seems unlikely that the intelligence has gotten any better, however, and civilians across North and South Waziristan are in an understandable panic.

via ComputerWorld UK:

Transport for London has awarded a 10-year, £22.6 million contract to Easynet Global Services to provide digital telecommunications network services for its CCTV system upgrade.

The contract supports TfL’s move from an existing analogue CCTV system to a digital IP-based CCTV system, a separate contract awarded to Serco in March. TfL said the upgrade will improve the flexibility of the surveillance, and allow users to improve the road traffic flow in the capital.

Under the terms of the new contract, Easynet will provide design, build, test and support for a wide area and access network. It will also provide access from roadside camera locations via individual access links, and access links to the system to third-party locations, such as London borough councils and the Metropolitan Police.

As well as building the CCTV telecommunications network, Easynet will deliver a range of IP-based communications services, which is expected to be mainly fixed-line communications services.

London’s CCTV cameras have come under criticism from the Liberal Democrats in the past, who said that the surveillance systems were not helping to solve crimes.

Meanwhile, SAP-based TfL is preparing to sign an extensive range of framework agreements, totalling a potential £70 million and covering IT services. The services will be available to other high-profile local bodies, including the Greater London Authority, all London borough councils and the Metropolitan Police.

With the death toll climbing everyday from new drone strikes in Pakistan, one can only hope that the cowardly, murderous thugs that fly these things will be brought to justice soon.

via Wired:

The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday.

Harold Koh, the State Department’s top legal adviser, outlined the administration’s legal case for the robotic attacks last month. Now, some legal experts are taking turns to punch holes in Koh’s argument.

It’s part of an ongoing legal debate about the CIA and U.S. military’s lethal drone operations, which have escalated in recent months — and which have received some technological upgrades. Critics of the program, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have argued that the campaign amounts to a program of targeted killing that may violate the laws of war.

Think doctors won’t eventually be outsourced like IT workers, think again…

via Reuters:

(Reuters) – Doctors at a British hospital have carried out the first heart rhythm operation using a remote -controlled robot and say its success means patients could be treated by doctors in other cities, or even other countries.

Andre Ng, who performed the procedure on Wednesday from outside the operating theater, told Reuters it went very well and the patient’s irregular heart rhythm was restored to normal within an hour.

“It exceeded our expectations and we achieved what we set out to in very good time,” said Ng, a consultant cardiologist and electrophysiologist at Leicester’s Glenfield Hospital.

Robotic surgery is becoming more common in wealthy nations and can be used on patients suffering from gynecological cancer, coronary artery disease, kidney cancer, and bladder cancer.

Ng said he was the first doctor in the world to carry out this type of remote-controlled operation on a human patient using a system called a Remote Catheter Manipulation System.

The device was developed by the U.S. company Catheter Robotics Inc, which says it hopes remote operations may be carried out on patients in future all over the world.

The procedure carried out by Ng involved inserting thin wires called catheters into blood vessels at the top of the groin and then threading them up into the chambers of the heart.

Electrodes on the catheters record and stimulate different regions of the heart to help the doctor identify the cause of the heart rhythm problem, which usually involves an abnormality in the electrical wiring system of the heart.

Once the area is identified, one of the catheters is placed at the right location to ablate, or burn, the tissue to cure the problem. Catheter ablation has been developed and used over the past two decades effectively in many patients suffering palpitations due to heart rhythm disturbances.

Despite being outside the operating theater during the procedure, Ng said he felt in “complete control” and could see and speak to other medical staff who were beside the patient.

The main advantage is that the doctor doesn’t have to wear heavy radiation shields such as lead aprons, which are normally required in the operating room because X-rays are used to show what is going on inside the patient.

Long and complex operations can mean the doctor becomes tired and less able to concentrate properly, and also mean doctors risk high levels of radiation exposure.

“Because I was sitting down in a relaxed and controlled environment and not having to wear a heavy lead coat, it was actually a very pleasurable experience,” Ng said.

The operation, on a 70-year-old British man who had been suffering from an atrial heart flutter, was an initial test of the safety and efficacy of the system on humans.

Ng said he could see the remote-controlled robotic arm being used in more far off situations in the future.

“I think it would certainly be possible in future to do this from another city, or further away — all that’s required is a reliable link between your remote controller, where the operator is, and the robotic arm, where the patient is,” he said.

“If there is a reliable enough link, then you could do it from any location in the world.”

(Editing by David Stamp)

One of Zeus’ thunderbolts flies off into the unknown.  Oh, well, even the Gods on Mount Olympus have their bad days — guess they’ll just have to spend an extra couple billion and try again.
via Wired:

The Pentagon’s controversial plan to hit terrorists half a planet away suffered a setback this weekend, after an experimental hypersonic glider disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.

In its first flight test. the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) was supposed to be rocket-launched from California to the edge of space. Then the HTV-2 would could screaming back into the atmosphere, maneuvering at twenty times times the speed of sound before landing north of the Kwajalein Atoll, 30 minutes later and 4100 nautical miles away. Thinly wedge-shaped for better lift, equipped with autonomous navigation for more precision, and made of carbon-carbon to withstand the assault of hypersonic flight, the hope was it could fly farther and more accurately at a lower angle of attack than other craft returning to Earth.

At least, that was the idea. Instead, nine minutes after launch, Darpa researchers lost contact with the HTV-2. They’re still trying to figure out why. The agency says the flight test wasn’t a total bust: The craft deployed from its rocket booster, performed some maneuvers in the air, and “achieved controlled flight within the atmosphere at over Mach 20,” Darpa spokesperson Johanna Jones says.

But it’s bad news for the Pentagon “prompt global strike” program — a burgeoning and hotly-debated effort to almost-instantly attack targets thousands of miles away. The Defense Department is pursuing three different families of technologies to accomplish the task. One is to re-arm nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. But that runs the risk of accidentally triggering a response from another atomic power, who might mistake it for a nuke. A second effort is to build shorter-range cruise missiles than can fly at five or six times the speed of sound; that effort hit some recent turbulence when flight tests for the X-51 Waverider, scheduled for December 2009, were pushed until May 2010. Something like an armed version of the HTV-2 is the third choice.

“There’s always a concern that a conventional warhead on an ICBM might be confused with a nuclear device – what can you do to prove otherwise?” Dr. Mark Lewis, the former chief scientist of the Air Force, tells Danger Room. ”With a high lift vehicle, your trajectory would be so different that no one would likely confuse it with something more sinister.”

Brian Weeden, a technology advisor for the Secure World Foundation, agrees. “This thing itself is not a weapon. But it’s designed to lead to a precision strike weapon,” he says.

But the first step is to figure out what went wrong over the Pacific. Darpa says its investigation is ongoing.

“I don’t understand anything,” she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. “Nothing. Least of all,” she continued in another tone “why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly,”

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Nearly 700,000 prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics were dispensed for kids under 13 last year. The changes being proposed for the manual of mental illness — whose sales since 2000 have topped $40 million — would create even more patients for whom psychoactive drugs can be prescribed.

Photograph by: Joe Raedle, Getty Images

Remote-controlled bipedal army drones are on the way.  In a previous post, I mentioned that the SARCOS exoskeleton “could ultimately be replaced by a remote-controlled operator, similar to the way the drones in Afghanistan are operated.”  Well, the Mahru robot is a good demonstration of this technique.

via IEEE Spectrum:

To get an idea of how many cameras are actually installed and being used, someone made a google map of all their locations. Keep in mind that there are approximately 4.2 million cameras currently operated in the UK.

View Norwich Police/Norwich City Council CCTV Cameras in a larger map

It is being labeled as the world’s biggest IT disaster:  The British National Health Service database containing very private medical records is being leaked for fun and profit all over the UK.

via Mail on Sunday UK

Browsing through her NHS records, Helen Wilkinson stopped short. There, in front of her in black and white, was an entry labelling her an alcoholic. She began to panic. Who else could have seen the incriminating information? Would it affect her career? How had this awful mistake been made?

‘I went ballistic,’ she says. ‘As a former NHS manager, I know a lot of people who work in the health service. They could all have seen it. It was awful.’

A local councillor from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Wilkinson had gone into hospital for a surgical procedure. But an erroneous entry made on her file in 1988 had subsequently been added to her computerised records  -  and these could now be easily accessed by tens of thousands of medical workers.