Entries Tagged "military"

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Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots

Ronald C. Arkin, “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture,” Technical Report GIT-GVU-07011. Fascinating (and long: 117-page) paper on ethical implications of robots in war.

Summary, Conclusions, and Future Work

This report has provided the motivation, philosophy, formalisms, representational requirements, architectural design criteria, recommendations, and test scenarios to design and construct an autonomous robotic system architecture capable of the ethical use of lethal force. These first steps toward that goal are very preliminary and subject to major revision, but at the very least they can be viewed as the beginnings of an ethical robotic warfighter. The primary goal remains to enforce the International Laws of War in the battlefield in a manner that is believed achievable, by creating a class of robots that not only conform to International Law but outperform human soldiers in their ethical capacity.

It is too early to tell whether this venture will be successful. There are daunting problems
remaining:

  • The transformation of International Protocols and battlefield ethics into machine usable representations and real-time reasoning capabilities for bounded morality using modal logics.
  • Mechanisms to ensure that the design of intelligent behaviors only provide responses within rigorously defined ethical boundaries.
  • The creation of techniques to permit the adaptation of an ethical constraint set and underlying behavioral control parameters that will ensure moral performance, should those norms be violated in any way, involving reflective and affective processing.
  • A means to make responsibility assignment clear and explicit for all concerned parties regarding the deployment of a machine with a lethal potential on its mission.

Over the next two years, this architecture will be slowly fleshed out in the context of the specific test scenarios outlined in this article. Hopefully the goals of this effort, will fuel other scientists’ interest to assist in ensuring that the machines that we as roboticists create fit within international and societal expectations and requirements.

My personal hope would be that they will never be needed in the present or the future. But mankind’s tendency toward war seems overwhelming and inevitable. At the very least, if we can reduce civilian casualties according to what the Geneva Conventions have promoted and the Just War tradition subscribes to, the result will have been a humanitarian effort, even while staring directly at the face of war.

Posted on January 28, 2008 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

Swedish Army Loses Classified Information on Memory Stick

Oops:

The daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, turned the stick over to the Armed Forces on Thursday. The paper’s editorial office obtained the memory stick from an individual who discovered it in a public computer center in Stockholm.

An employee of the Armed Forces has reported that the misplaced USB memory stick belongs to him. The employee contacted his superior on Friday and divulged that he had forgotten the memory stick in a public computer. A preliminary technical investigation confirms that the stick belongs to the employee.

The stick contained both unclassified and classified information such as information regarding IED and mine threats in Afghanistan.

I wrote about this sort of thing two years ago:

The point is that it’s now amazingly easy to lose an enormous amount of information. Twenty years ago, someone could break into my office and copy every customer file, every piece of correspondence, everything about my professional life. Today, all he has to do is steal my computer. Or my portable backup drive. Or my small stack of DVD backups. Furthermore, he could sneak into my office and copy all this data, and I’d never know it.

Also this. Although why the Swedish Army doesn’t encrypt its portable storage devices is beyond me.

Posted on January 9, 2008 at 1:46 PM • View Comments

U.S. Army Installing Apple Computers

Because they’re harder to hack:

Though Apple machines are still pricier than their Windows counterparts, the added security they offer might be worth the cost, says Wallington. He points out that Apple’s X Serve servers, which are gradually becoming more commonplace in Army data centers, are proving their mettle. “Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off,” he says.

Posted on January 7, 2008 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Movie-Plot Threat Described as Movie-Plot Threat

The lead paragraphs:

The plot was like something from a Hollywood blockbuster: dozens of foreign terrorists working with a Mexican drug cartel to attack a Southern Arizona Army post with anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers.

Paying one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels $20,000 apiece, 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists would be smuggled into Texas and hole up at a safe house.

Their weapons, Soviet-made and easily acquired on the black market, were funneled through Arizona and New Mexico in hand-dug tunnels that cut across the border.
Their target: 13,500 military personnel and civilians working at Fort Huachuca, roughly 75 miles southeast of Tucson.

But (no surprise):

But the plot, widely reported by local stations and national TV networks and The Washington Times, turned out to be nothing more than fiction, an FBI spokesman said Monday.

Posted on November 29, 2007 at 1:44 PM • View Comments

Terrorist Insects

Yet another movie-plot threat to worry about:

One of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today is also one of the most widely ignored: insects. These biological warfare agents are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly, spread disease, and devastate crops in an indefatigable march. Our stores of grain could be ravaged by the khapra beetle, cotton and soybean fields decimated by the Egyptian cottonworm, citrus and cotton crops stripped by the false codling moth, and vegetable fields pummeled by the cabbage moth. The costs could easily escalate into the billions of dollars, and the resulting disruption of our food supply – and our sense of well-being – could be devastating. Yet the government focuses on shoe bombs and anthrax while virtually ignoring insect insurgents.

[…]

Seeing the potential, military strategists have been keen to conscript insects during war. In World War II, the French and Germans pursued the mass production and dispersion of Colorado potato beetles to destroy enemy food supplies. The Japanese military, meanwhile, sprayed disease-carrying fleas from low-flying airplanes and dropped bombs packed with flies and a slurry of cholera bacteria. The Japanese killed at least 440,000 Chinese using plague-infected fleas and cholera-coated flies, according to a 2002 international symposium of historians.

During the Cold War, the US military planned a facility to produce 100 million yellow-fever-infected mosquitoes a month, produced an “Entomological Warfare Target Analysis” of vulnerable sites in the Soviet Union and among its allies, and tested the dispersal and biting capacity of (uninfected) mosquitoes by secretly dropping the insects over American cities.

Posted on October 24, 2007 at 6:14 AM • View Comments

IEDs in Iraq

This article about the arms race between the U.S. military and jihadi Improvised Explosive Device (IED) makers in Iraq illustrates that more technology isn’t always an effective security solution:

Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive devices that are simple, cheap and deadly: Almost anything that can flip a switch at a distance can detonate a bomb. In the past five years, bombmakers have developed six principal detonation triggers—pressure plates, cellphones, command wire, low-power radio-controlled, high-power radio-controlled and passive infrared—that have prompted dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.

[…]

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. “If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week,” a former Pentagon official said.

[…]

Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, “The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons.”

EDITED TO ADD (10/8): That was the introduction. It’s a four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Posted on October 2, 2007 at 4:23 PM • View Comments

Idiotic Cryptography Reporting

Oh, this is funny:

A team of researchers and engineers at a UK division of Franco-German aerospace giant EADS has developed what it believes is the world’s first hacker-proof encryption technology for the internet.

[…]

Gordon Duncan, the division’s government and commercial sales manager, said he was convinced that sensitive data could now be sent across the world without fear of it being spied on by hackers. “All the computer technology in the world cannot break it,” he said yesterday.

At the heart of the system is the lightning speed with which the “keys” needed to enter the computer systems can be scrambled and re-formatted. Just when a hacker thinks he or she has broken the code, the code changes. “There is nothing to compare with it,” said Mr Duncan.

EADS is in talks with the Pentagon about supplying the US military with the system, although some American defence companies are also working on what they believe will be fool-proof encryption systems.

Snake oil, absolute snake oil.

EDITED TO ADD (9/26): Steve Bellovin, who knows what he’s talking about, writes:

Actually, it’s not snake oil, it’s very solid—till it got to Marketing. The folks at EADS built a high-assurance, Type I (or the British equivalent) IP encryptor—a HAIPE, in NSA-speak. Their enemy isn’t “hackers”, it’s the PLA and the KGB++. See this and this.

Of course, Marketing did get hold of it.

David Lacey makes the same point here.

Posted on September 24, 2007 at 1:58 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.