Features

By Mary L. Cummings – As the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Humans and Automation Laboratory, I was asked to comment from a technologist’s perspective at the recent symposium Drone Warfare: New Robotics & Targeted Killings on the panel  “Unmanned Robotics & New Warfare.”  My perspective is unique in that not only do I conduct millions of dollars of research in the development of technologies to enable one or more humans to control unmanned vehicles (i.e., robots) more easily, but I also look at these issues from the perspective of having flown advanced fighters in the U.S. Navy, […]

By Brett H. McGurk – Killer mechanical robots the size of flies, giant predator drones piloted from an iPhone, together with a new mode of warfare embraced by the U.S. military and both political parties in Washington.  That is the upshot of the recent symposium – “New Robotics and the Legality of Targeted Killings” – hosted by the Harvard National Security Journal.  The technology is here to stay, and it is being deployed to kill designated enemies of the United States and its allies.  What are the legal and ethical implications of this trend?  And what rules govern killing by

By Jeffrey Kahn – When your favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  After the near-catastrophe on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, it is not surprising that many hammer away with the tools they know best: data-mining and watchlists.  The conventional wisdom is that if we know enough soon enough, we can stop the next attack.  The problem over Christmas, therefore, is identified solely as a function of that tool: we didn’t know enough, or, if we did, not everyone did, or if we all did, we forgot crucial bits in the welter of all

By Nathan A. Sales – It didn’t take long after 9/11 for the conventional wisdom to crystallize.  The devastating terrorist attacks were almost immediately, and almost universally, chalked up to the intelligence community’s failure to share information.  Yet if al Qaeda’s attempt to down Northwest flight 253 is any indication, the feds still haven’t learned how to connect the dots. The Christmas plot is shaping up to be an information-sharing epic fail.  As early as last fall our spies began picking up alarming signals that something big was afoot.  The clues should have been circulating widely throughout the intelligence community. 

By Paul Rosenzweig – “We slipped up.”  That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He has a gift for understatement. But the real question isn’t whether we “slipped up”—everyone knows we did.  It’s rather how and why we did.  The truth is that this was a failure of policy, not of law.  We did it to ourselves.  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) began work on techniques of data