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Drone Swarms and the Homicidal Impunity of Governments

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | September 16, 2024

Drone swarms have been under development for years now, with the usual suspects touting the virtues of the latest and greatest automated technology to be purchased through lucrative government contracts for what are claimed to be purposes of national defense. As the name implies, drone swarms are modeled after the behavior of large groups of birds or insects which move in concert to produce what looks like purposeful action, despite the lack of a conscious intention on the part of any of the individual members of the group. Drones can be programmed to act in tandem to accomplish tasks such as locating specified persons and, in some cases, killing them.

Many of the drone swarms used in cutting-edge public events, concerts, air shows and the like, have not been “licensed to kill.” Neither were the first large surveillance drones. Instead, the capacity to kill was later appended to them. Small, insect-sized surveillance drones were featured in the film Eye in the Sky, which proved to be a fairly successful feat of propaganda in that it appeared to reconfirm the uncritical assumption on the part of much of the public that the use of drones by the military corps of governments the world over is not only inevitable but in fact good. But just as the most famous of the large reconnaissance drones, the RQ-1 Predators, were transformed into remotely controlled combat aerial vehicles, the primary mission of which became to kill designated targets, drone swarms, too, will likely be used for the same deadly purpose. This prediction flows from the fact that both efficiency and increased lethality have become the ultimate aims of military innovation.

As has been true of other means to mass homicide, including the machine gun, the underlying assumption behind the use of remote-control technology to kill has always been that taking soldiers off the battlefield and simultaneously increasing the lethality of means used against the enemy is not even worthy of debate—it’s obviously the right thing to do. This despite the fact that the use of drones in the twenty-first century has dramatically lowered the threshold for governments to engage in a wide-range of homicidal missions, both within and outside areas of active hostilities (i.e., declared war zones), including outright assassination, once regarded as officially taboo—even if it has been carried out covertly by paid operatives on behalf of governments since time immemorial.

Today’s leaders vaunt their use of cutting-edge technology to eliminate specific, named individuals, as though killing the victims were obviously permissible, given that targeted killing is now a standard-operating procedure of war, having been fully normalized. Rebranding political assassination as an act of war, provided only that the implement of homicide is a missile, was thus a slick and largely successful way of persuading people to believe that killing is an acceptable means to conflict resolution, even when it bypasses all of the standard procedures, including judicial means, for reconciling the rival claims of adversaries.

Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom, to name only the most obvious cases, have all premeditatedly and intentionally executed their own citizens without indictment or trial. Relatively little attention has been paid by the media to such flagrant violations of the citizen targets’ rights, because the narrative in every such case has been carefully controlled by the killers themselves. Samir Khan, Anwar al-Awlaki, and his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, were killed under the authorization of President Barack Obama in 2011, setting a new precedent followed in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered the RAF (Royal Air Force) to target and destroy British nationals Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, located in Syria at the time of their deaths. The list of Palestinian terrorist suspects killed by the Israeli government is far too long even to attempt to list here, but the point is the same: these people have all been denied their fundamental rights by the executive authority of their own government.

Equally and in some ways even more deplorable is that the much-lauded reduction of combatant troop casualties achieved through removing soldiers from the battlefield—sequestering them instead behind impenetrable bunkers in the Nevada desert and other far-flung safe spaces—has been paid for by a marked weakening of norms regarding what once upon a time was known as “noncombatant immunity.” At this point in history, the expression “collateral damage” rolls easily off the tongues of military officers, drone operators, politicians and pundits alike. Witness Gaza, where many thousands of entirely innocent persons have been systematically terrorized before being executed without indictment or trial, and without being guilty, or even suspected, of anything—beyond their spatial proximity and racial similarity to the members of Hamas responsible for the murder of Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. So little attention is now paid to the value of the lives of innocent human beings that even hostages taken by Hamas have been dispatched by their would-have-been rescuers, as a result of the Israeli government’s monomaniacal quest to “get Hamas,” no holds barred, even if that means finishing everyone else off as well.

Drones are being used more and more in warfare, and once fully weaponized swarms of microdrones are activated to kill, their efficiency and assiduousness will ensure that finding one’s name on a hit list of targets will essentially guarantee that death is at the doorstep—literally. Let us consider one possible example of the murderous potential of such devices. In any setting with ready access to movement through air (i.e., nearly everywhere people do in fact live) a target could be stung or bitten by what looks like a small insect which thereby introduces into the body a tiny dose of an incredibly powerful neurotoxin. Such agents kill so swiftly and thoroughly that there is no antidote fast or effective enough to save the targeted person’s life, no matter who they are, and no matter what their resources may be.

Black Mirror, the dystopic series produced by Netflix since 2011, and created by the ingenious Chris Brooker, has incisively covered many facets of the dark side of the use by fallible and flawed human beings of many recent technological developments, including surveillance and other devices programmed to act autonomously. In season 3, episode 3 (2016), “Hated in the Nation,” the specter of drone swarms is taken up in a story where the danger of such devices is compounded by not only their sheer numbers, but also the means by which habitual social media behaviors can be used to drum up seeming support for even atrocious policies by fomenting easily multiplied expressions of hate.

The story features an evil genius of sorts who has devised what he likens to a “game of consequences” for social media users, who are invited to post a picture of a loathed person along with #Deathto… (+his or her name). Each day the person who has received the most “nominations for death” by 5pm is eliminated through the use of commandeered drone swarms, some of the many clusters of automated drone insects (ADI), being used throughout the United Kingdom (in the fictional world of the story) to pollinate flowers in the wake of the global honeybee crisis. The command and control system of drone swarms of the bee surrogates has been hacked into by the mastermind, a disgruntled tech worker and former employee of the firm which produced them, and the “bees” have been directed not to pollinate flowers but to locate and burrow themselves into the body of the “winner” of the consequences game, aiming for the pain center of the target’s brain and inducing deadly convulsions and behaviors as he attempts to put an end to his suffering.

Although it is fictional, “Hated in the Nation” illustrates many aspects of the use of drones by governments to kill in the real world. Take the criteria for placement on kill lists. People nominated to these lists have been selected on the basis of circumstantial evidence—signals intelligence (SIGINT, including video footage and cellphone data) and human intelligence (HUMINT, witness testimony acquired through bribery). The persons directing drone programs have been granted the prerogative to decide from behind closed doors who must die, bypassing altogether the need for any sort of checks and balances such as are used in the judicial system to ensure that, when a person is convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death, every effort will have been made to avoid the horrific specter of an innocent person’s being killed. We know that having the death penalty as an available sentence always leaves open the possibility of false convictions and the irrevocable termination of innocent human lives. We know this not only to be theoretically true or logically possible, but also because there have been a number of posthumous exonerations of convicts executed for crimes which they did not in fact commit, as occasionally emerges with new DNA and other forms of evidence.

On these sorts of grounds—above all, the fallibility of the human beings involved in capital cases at every stage, from arrest to indictment to prosecution to conviction to execution—a number of countries, including all European Union member states, have outlawed the death penalty. Many of the same countries, however, including Germany, where U.S. drones have been regularly directed from Ramstein Air Force base, have wholeheartedly embraced the targeted killing programs championed by the United States and Israel, apparently untroubled by the inherent contradiction in prohibiting capital punishment even of convicted criminals while permitting the remote-control killing of suspects identified as such on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

Posthumous exoneration is virtually impossible when drones are used to eliminate suspected terrorists because the people who kill them have defined them as guilty until proven innocent, and then all but erased the possibility of challenging their “conviction” through state execution. Any military-age male in an area deemed to harbor terrorist suspects is assumed to be a “bad guy,” and many have been eliminated on this basis, the label EKIA (Enemy Killed In Action) appended to their name, when known, and used in what are presented as carefully calculated reports of exactly how many terrorists have been terminated. The “success” of the lethal drone program, as relayed to lawmakers and the populace by the killers themselves, then serves as the rationale for continuing the mission, lengthening the list of targets and expanding the domains designated as appropriate for the use of remote-control killing.

In the Black Mirror story, each of the hash-tagged targets being convicted and sentenced to death has been nominated through a form of despotic ochlocracy, or mob rule, where angry people pile on by emoting their hatred (usually of someone whom they have never met and who has never wronged them personally), toward individuals who have been depicted in the media as horrible, despicable, even evil, people. In their manifest fervor to elevate themselves by joining in on the denunciation of the hated target by all “right-minded” people, those who participate in the game galvanize more and more other people to join in on what becomes the high-tech equivalent of stoning someone to death. One stone won’t kill a person (usually), but when many people join in, then the target has nearly no chance of surviving.

In considering the effects of this kind of online-generated and multiplied enmity, it is hard not to think of the mainstream media’s relentless portrayal of former President Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, on a par with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. After years of such media depictions, a disturbed young man eventually attempted to assassinate Trump, no doubt believing that he was doing the right thing. (I am assuming for the sake of this discussion that the person in question was a lone wolf, and the failure of the security services was unintentional incompetence, not an intentional conspiracy to kill Trump. I may be wrong.) Many, many people have exhibited behavior similar to that of the players of the Black Mirror hashtag game on Twitter, for example, including regularly expressed wishes that Trump should somehow come to ruin before the 2024 election. Strikingly, even after the assassination attempt, although there was a short respite of this sort of behavior, only weeks later it started back up again.

People may claim, as they do in the Netflix episode, that they never meant that Trump needed to be literally “taken out.” They were merely using colorful metaphors to express their sincere hope that he will never again set foot in the Oval Office. When Kathy Griffin, way back in 2017, posted an image of an effigy of Trump’s bloody, decapitated head, she was denounced for inciting murder, but many people on social media appear to find nothing whatsoever wrong with expressing this sort of hatred, as has been going on now for years.

The twist in the “Hated in the Nation” story comes when data revealing the identity of the persons who have chosen to participate in the game by using the hashtag “Death to X” is accessed. All of the swarms of ADIs are then directed by the hacker to kill those people, whose numbers have grown by the pile-on effect to nearly 400,000. Because the hacker has taken over control of the bees, which do all and only what they are programmed to do, the story ends with the nation mourning all of the ignorant people killed—who really had no idea what they were doing—for their willingness to go along with the crowd, which had been decreed by the hacker himself to be a capital offense.

The episode ends on a somewhat incongruous note—at least for Black Mirror. A female police officer with experience in cybercrime, who feels guilt and responsibility for not having recognized the trap which set off the mass murder of her fellow citizens, sets out to hunt down and eliminate the perpetrator. It is unclear why anyone would think that murdering the person who devised the game and used it to illustrate how dangerously and deranged people can behave on social media, protected as they usually are by an avatar of anonymity, would constitute a form of vigilante justice. A pair of eyes for 400,000 pairs of eyes? Nothing approaching retributive justice there, needless to say. While eliminating that particular perpetrator would indeed prevent him ever from concocting another scheme to mass murder, the technology continues to exist, ready for commandeering by somebody else.

The parallels to the use of drone swarms in combat in the real world will become more and more obvious as the highly efficient and lethal machines are used to target groups on the basis of their seemingly “evil” nature, as determined by people whose job it is to locate and eliminate “evil” people. In the case of both the war on terror and the slaughter in Gaza, we already know that many of the individuals radicalized to the point where they cry out “Death to Israel!” or “Death to the invaders!” became incensed as a direct result of their witness of atrocities perpetrated by the governments which they came to despise.

The only difference between the rogue operator in “Hated in the Nation” and the rogue governments killing citizens with impunity is that there is no way to call a halt to the latter when it is the prerogative of the government itself to decree who constitutes the evil enemy. They call whistleblowers “traitors” and journalists who criticize regime narratives “antisemites” or “terrorist sympathizers,” setting them up, too, for neutralization, by hook or by crook. As the criteria for what constitute capital crimes are broadened, the state’s lethal authority will be reaffirmed and further expanded. The more people governments kill, the more enemies they will generate, who then become fair game for elimination.

This highly lethal environment, and the undeniable fallibility of all human beings, including government employees, underscores the danger of allowing officials not only to define notions such as “hate” and “evil,” but also to exact punishments against suspects on the basis of those same government-applied labels. Recall that during the Coronapocalypse, public health officials demonized the unvaccinated, going even so far as to withhold medical treatment from persons who dared to decline the experimental mRNA shots being foisted upon nearly all human beings, in nearly all countries, defying all previous protocols of medical ethics. The refusal to provide acute care to some of those people resulted in their deaths. Equally worthy of condemnation was the coercion of healthy young people, on pain of loss of employment or expulsion from school, to undergo a medical treatment for which many of them had no need, and which resulted in the deaths of some among them as a result of myocarditis and other vaccine-induced injuries. All of the excess nonvirus deaths caused by such political measures, imposed by ignorant officials on the unwitting populace, have been ignored by those responsible, no doubt written off by the policymakers themselves as unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage.

Government officials not only control the narrative but also define the terms, as pharma-funded public health officials did during the Coronapocalypse, and the drone warriors did throughout the war on terror when they perfunctorily filed all military-age male victims as “Enemy Killed in Action.” Persons who dare to denounce the obvious denials of human rights by government killers are swiftly categorized as “dangerous” or “treacherous” as well. Doctors who dissented from the government’s narrative on COVID-19 were deplatformed and discredited. Similar reactions were met by Daniel Hale, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and many other whistleblowers throughout the twenty-first century when they dared to reveal the criminal comportment of the U.S. government in its savage wars abroad.

If the appropriate response to a hacker’s having killed 400,000 persons whom he believed deserved to die was to hunt down and kill him, then what should be the analogous response to a government’s mass slaughter of innocent human beings? The lethal technologies already exist, so the only reasonable way to minimize their potential for evil purposes must be to reduce the government to a minimum and completely revoke what is arguably the most dangerous relic of the Cold War: state secrets privilege. Shrouding government activities in secrecy protects neither innocent civilians nor critics of immoral practices, but only the perpetrators of crimes, who act with effective impunity.

September 16, 2024 - Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, UK, United States