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Thousands dumped from hospital waiting lists

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DRONES, IBM, AND THE BIG DATA OF DEATH

LAST WEEK The Intercept published a package of stories on 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 study titled “ISR Support to Small Footprint CT Operations — Somalia/Yemen,” 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.

Like a good poem, the ISR study has multiple meanings, and rewards careful attention and repeated reading. On its surface, it’s simply an analysis by the Defense Department’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the “performance and requirements” of the U.S. military’s counterterrorism kill/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen. However, it’s also what a former senior special operations officer characterized as a “bitch brief” — 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 “analysis” tailored to the desires of its Defense Department clients, as well as for current Defense employees to network with a potential future employer.

But the presentation’s most compelling meaning is much deeper: It’s 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.

The Intercept

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FBI director’s ‘all lives matter’ message clashes with Obama

FBI director James Comey, in a speech to the University of Chicago Law School on Friday, gave voice to a controversial theory that scrutiny of police conduct and the threat of exposure through “viral videos” has generated a “chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year.”

Comey’s description of “The YouTube Effect” as “the one explanation that does explain the calendar and the map and that makes the most sense to me” contrasts with the uncertainty of his remarks following a meeting with the nation’s law enforcement officials on October 7:

“We stare at the math, and stare at change in cities that seem to have nothing in common with one another. What’s the connection among Boston, Washington, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Dallas, other than being American cities?” he said. “Has policing changed in the YouTube era? I don’t like the term ‘post-Ferguson,’ because I actually believe the ‘YouTube era’ captures it better.

The question I keep asking my staff is, ‘Do these hypothesis fit the map and the calendar?’ ” he continued. “Cities with nothing in common are seeing in the same degree and in the same time – dramatic increases in violence, especially homicides — does heroin explain that? I struggle with that … is it guns? Well, what’s changed with guns in the last nine months? Is it the criminal justice system? Well, I keep asking my staff, what has changed that would explain that this is happening in the first nine months of this year and all over the country?”

MSNBC

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