{"id":13819,"date":"2015-10-26T06:18:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T11:18:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13819"},"modified":"2015-10-26T06:18:29","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T11:18:29","slug":"drones-ibm-and-the-big-data-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13819","title":{"rendered":"Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death<\/a><\/h3>\n

LAST WEEK\u00a0The Intercept<\/em>\u00a0published a\u00a0package of stories<\/a>\u00a0on the U.S. drone program, drawing on a cache of secret government documents leaked by an intelligence community whistleblower. The available evidence suggests that one of the documents, a\u00a0study\u00a0<\/a>titled \u201cISR Support to Small Footprint CT Operations \u2014 Somalia\/Yemen,\u201d was produced for the Defense Department in 2013 by consultants from IBM. If you look at just one classified PowerPoint presentation this year, I recommend you make it this one.<\/p>\n

Like a good poem, the ISR study has multiple meanings, and rewards careful attention and repeated reading. On its surface, it\u2019s simply an analysis by the Defense Department\u2019s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the \u201cperformance and requirements\u201d of the U.S. military\u2019s counterterrorism kill\/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen. However, it\u2019s also what a former senior special operations officer\u00a0characterized<\/a>\u00a0as a \u201cbitch brief\u201d \u2014 that is, a study designed to be a weapon in a bureaucratic turf war with the CIA to win the Pentagon more money and a bigger mandate. The study was also presumably an opportunity for IBM to demonstrate that it can produce snappy \u201canalysis\u201d tailored to the desires of its Defense Department clients, as well as for current Defense employees to network with a potential future employer.<\/p>\n

But the presentation\u2019s most compelling meaning is much deeper: It\u2019s a rare, peculiar cultural artifact that opens a window into the deep guts of the military-industrial complex, where the technologies of assassination and corporate sales converge, all described in language as dead as the target of an ISR platform kinetic engagement.<\/p>\n

Edge Methods<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2010, IBM employees delivered a\u00a0talk<\/a>\u00a0at IBM\u2019s Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., titled \u201cAn Introduction to Edge Methods: Business Analytics and Optimization for Intelligence.\u201d The audience was \u201cthe Defense and Intelligence communities,\u201d and IBM\u2019s goal was to explain to them how the company could help them with \u201cmanaging large volumes of data\u201d to derive \u201cinvaluable\u201d insights. Among its already-existing governmental customers, IBM explained, was the ISR Task Force.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death LAST WEEK\u00a0The Intercept\u00a0published a\u00a0package of stories\u00a0on the U.S. drone program, drawing on a cache of secret government documents leaked by an intelligence community whistleblower. The available evidence suggests that one of the documents, a\u00a0study\u00a0titled \u201cISR Support to Small Footprint CT Operations \u2014 Somalia\/Yemen,\u201d was produced for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[135,171,190,1007,4170,528,620,10231,765,786,5567,901],"class_list":["post-13819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-cia","tag-corporations","tag-data","tag-drones","tag-ibm","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-pentagon","tag-somalia","tag-surveillance","tag-technology","tag-the-intercept","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13820,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13819\/revisions\/13820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}