drones « Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse

February 28, 2014 // 09:30 AM EST

Drone haters have a new reason to fear the flying robots: they’ve learned to work together.

In a paper submitted for an IEEE conference later this year, a Hungarian team claim to have created the first drones that can fly in an autonomous flock. Nature’s Ed Yong reported that the work saw ten quadcopter drones fly in formation over a Budapest field, without any central control.

That’s to say that the drones figured out their own flight paths by communicating with each other, just like natural group travellers like flocks of birds or schools of fish. Principal investigator Tamás Vicsek explained in a video that building the robots was in fact a step towards better understanding flock behaviour in nature.

They started with standard commercial quadcopters and added their own hardware “brain.” “With the proper flocking algorithms fed to this new brain, the copters are able to fly autonomously, which could totally eliminate the need for manual control, and a group of quadrocopters could perform flights and tasks on their own,” said robotics leader Gábor Vásaárhelyi.

The video shows some pretty cool flight patterns; when the drones are directed to form a circle, for instance, they all find their own place and even decide which way to fly around depending on the positions they held before the formation. When they need to get through a gap, they all queue up mid-hover and go through one by one.

They’re given a direction or a formation to follow, but it’s up to them to figure out how to work as a group and avoid crashing in a collision of wires and rotors. They navigate using GPS, and communicate with each other over radio, which sounds pretty much like what humans do when trying to coordinate a trip.

The drones before take-off. Image: Hungarian Academy of Sciences

While other researchers have looked into drone flocks, this innovation is a first insofar as the drones were tested in an open outdoor area and weren’t hooked up to a central computer.

In their paper, the researchers lay out the advantages of a multi-drone flock: It’s able to operate longer than an individual robot and cover more ground, which could be useful for applications such as monitoring the environment. Other jobs they suggest for the robo-swarms include forming ad-hoc mobile networks, helping with airport traffic control, assisting in rescue missions, and pest control (I’d love to see that last one).

There is perhaps some cause for worry, though, as the authors recognise another potential sector for development: military applications. “However, by demonstrating the stable flight of a truly autonomous, decentralised robotic flock, our main goal was to show that the various peaceful applications of drones are by now feasible,” they finished.

Drones Are Now Flying in Flocks | Motherboard

March 2, 2014 8:38 am / Leave a comment

Drones Are Now Flying in Flocks | Motherboard.

February 28, 2014 // 09:30 AM EST

Drone haters have a new reason to fear the flying robots: they’ve learned to work together.

In a paper submitted for an IEEE conference later this year, a Hungarian team claim to have created the first drones that can fly in an autonomous flock. Nature’s Ed Yong reported that the work saw ten quadcopter drones fly in formation over a Budapest field, without any central control.

That’s to say that the drones figured out their own flight paths by communicating with each other, just like natural group travellers like flocks of birds or schools of fish. Principal investigator Tamás Vicsek explained in a video that building the robots was in fact a step towards better understanding flock behaviour in nature.

They started with standard commercial quadcopters and added their own hardware “brain.” “With the proper flocking algorithms fed to this new brain, the copters are able to fly autonomously, which could totally eliminate the need for manual control, and a group of quadrocopters could perform flights and tasks on their own,” said robotics leader Gábor Vásaárhelyi.

The video shows some pretty cool flight patterns; when the drones are directed to form a circle, for instance, they all find their own place and even decide which way to fly around depending on the positions they held before the formation. When they need to get through a gap, they all queue up mid-hover and go through one by one.

They’re given a direction or a formation to follow, but it’s up to them to figure out how to work as a group and avoid crashing in a collision of wires and rotors. They navigate using GPS, and communicate with each other over radio, which sounds pretty much like what humans do when trying to coordinate a trip.

The drones before take-off. Image: Hungarian Academy of Sciences

While other researchers have looked into drone flocks, this innovation is a first insofar as the drones were tested in an open outdoor area and weren’t hooked up to a central computer.

In their paper, the researchers lay out the advantages of a multi-drone flock: It’s able to operate longer than an individual robot and cover more ground, which could be useful for applications such as monitoring the environment. Other jobs they suggest for the robo-swarms include forming ad-hoc mobile networks, helping with airport traffic control, assisting in rescue missions, and pest control (I’d love to see that last one).

There is perhaps some cause for worry, though, as the authors recognise another potential sector for development: military applications. “However, by demonstrating the stable flight of a truly autonomous, decentralised robotic flock, our main goal was to show that the various peaceful applications of drones are by now feasible,” they finished.

China Strikes Back At US “Human Rights Violations”: Slams PRISM Spying, Droning, Gun Violence, Homelessness And Unemployment | Zero Hedge

February 28, 2014 9:24 am / Leave a comment

China Strikes Back At US “Human Rights Violations”: Slams PRISM Spying, Droning, Gun Violence, Homelessness And Unemployment | Zero Hedge.

Everyone knows that when it comes to abysmal human right records, China is the perpetual whipping boy – in most cases rightfully so – of the US whose own “pristine” record of human rights violations in recent years has also been exposed as mockery, courtesy almost exclusively of one NSA whistleblower. Of course, the US has been far more tacit in how it encroaches on the rights of its own civilians at home, if not so much abroad where US drone strikes have killed and continue to kill countless innocent civilians

Today, China decided to strike back at the US with its own report on US “human rights.” In a nutshell, China launches a full frontal attack on the hypocrisy of the US, saying that “posing as “the world judge of human rights,” the U.S. government “made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks” on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions again in its just-released reports, the report says. “However, the U.S. carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” it adds. The report calls the U.S. tapping program, code-named PRISM, which exercises long-term and vast surveillance both at home and abroad, “a blatant violation of international law” and it “seriously infringes on human rights.”

Hard to argue with that.

Full report from Xinhua:

China on Friday responded to the United States criticism and irresponsible remarks of its human rights situation by publishing its own report on the U.S. human rights issues.

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013 was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council, or the Cabinet, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013 issued by the U.S. State Department on Thursday.

China said in the report that there were still serious human rights problems in the U.S in 2013, with the situation in many fields even deteriorating.

Posing as “the world judge of human rights,” the U.S. government “made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks” on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions again in its just-released reports, the report says.

“However, the U.S. carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” it adds.

The report calls the U.S. tapping program, code-named PRISM, which exercises long-term and vast surveillance both at home and abroad, “a blatant violation of international law” and it “seriously infringes on human rights.”

The U.S. also faces rampant gun violence, according to the report. “In 2013, 137 people died in 30 mass killings, which caused four or more deaths each, in the U.S..”

The report also cites figures to show that frequent drone strikes by the U.S. in countries including Pakistan and Yemen have caused heavy civilian casualties.

The U.S. has carried out 376 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, causing deaths of up to 926 civilians, according to the report.

“The U.S. still faces grave employment situation with its unemployment rate remained high,” the report says.

Rates of unemployment for the lowest-income families have topped 21 percent. The homeless population in the U.S. kept swelling and it had climbed 16 percent from 2011 to 2013, it added.

“There are also a large amount of child laborers in the agricultural sector in the U.S. and their physical and mental health was seriously harmed,” the report says.

To date, the U.S. remains a country which has not ratified or participated in a series of core UN conventions on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, according to the report.

Manipulating the Data on CIA Drone Strikes against Civilians: Leaked Pakistani Document contradicts US Accounts | Global Research

February 3, 2014 11:10 am / Leave a comment

Manipulating the Data on CIA Drone Strikes against Civilians: Leaked Pakistani Document contradicts US Accounts | Global Research.

A secret Pakistani government document contradicts several of the US’s rare public statements on the CIA’s drone strikes in Pakistan.

The document outlines over 300 drone strikes dating between 2006 and September 2013. It is compiled by local officials using a network of on-the-ground agents and informants reporting to the FATA Secretariat, the tribal administration.

It is the fullest official record of the covert campaign yet to emerge, providing the dates, precise times and exact locations of drone strikes, as well as casualty estimates. The document abruptly stops routinely recording civilian casualties after the start of 2009, but overall casualty estimates continue to be comparable to independent estimates such as those compiled by the Bureau.

The US description of Yahya al Libi’s death differs from the version in the Pakistani document.

Neither US nor Pakistani officials routinely acknowledge strikes or provide estimates of casualties. But occasionally the US’s view of individual strikes emerges – usually through an anonymous official quoted in a mainstream media outlet.

The secret document shows that Pakistani officials sometimes filed a rather different assessment from the US’s occasional public statements.

For example, in June 2012, the CIA launched the latest in a series of attempts to kill Abu Yahya al Libi, al Qaeda’s second-in-command. Congressional aides told Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Dilanian that after the strike, the CIA showed video of the strike to politicians who are charged with overseeing the drone programme. This showed a missile killing ‘just one person’ – al Libi.

But contemporaneous media reports, as well as later field investigations by Amnesty Internationaland the Bureau, found a far higher casualty toll. These found that the attack was a sequence of three strikes, including an attack on rescuers. Amnesty found that 10-16 died in total. Six were civilians who had come to rescue the injured after the initial blast.

A named CIA spokesman strongly rejected the allegation that lawmakers might have been shown only partial footage of the strike, calling the claim ‘baseless’. But the Pakistan government document records 10 deaths.

The Pakistani document also contradicts the US account of a strike in 2011. Drones attacked a large gathering of men who had gathered in a public space in Dattakhel one morning in March 2011. The Pakistani government was quick to protest that the attack had killed tribal elders who had gathered for a jirga – a traditional form of mediation.

US officials speaking on condition of anonymity have poured scorn on this claim. ‘These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale. They were terrorists,’ one told the New York Times the day after the strike.

The New York Times later published the results of the Bureau’s first field investigation into drones, naming 19 individuals killed in this strike. An unnamed US official who briefed the paper continued to insist the dead men were legitimate targets.

‘The fact is that a large group of heavily armed men, some of whom were clearly connected to al Qaeda and all of whom acted in a manner consistent with AQ-linked militants, were killed,’ he said.

The leaked Pakistani document stops regularly recording civilian casualties in January 2009, but occasionally uses ambiguous language that suggests non-combatants were among the dead. For this strike, the document appears to privately echo what the Pakistani government was already saying in public: ‘The attack was carried out on a Jirga and it is feared that all the killed were local tribesmen.’

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Bureau yesterday: ‘While we will not be commenting on the details or locations of purported counterterrorism operations, there is a wide gap between US assessments of civilian casualties and non-governmental assessments.’

He added: ‘There is no credible information to substantiate claims that US counterterrorism actions have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians, but there are parties interested in spreading such disinformation.’

In the case of the jirga strike, multiple international organisations – including a field investigation byAssociated Press – have identified civilian casualties, and Pakistan’s army chief complained about a high civilian death toll. The case has been used as a basis for a complaint to the UN Human Rights Council and a legal challenge in England.

The US government has protested over the claims of civilian casualties but has never indicated who it was targeting.

The same New York Times article contains a third example. The anonymous official rejected the Bureau’s description of a separate strike, on December 6 2010.

Journalists reported that a drone fired on a vehicle carrying three alleged militants as it drove through the village of Khushali. ‘The sources say one militant was able to escape from the car and hide inside a nearby shop. The drone then fired two more missiles at the shop killing the militant, as well as two civilians inside,’ CNN reported.

Presented with this finding, the unnamed official told the New York Times: ‘There were two strikes that day, and neither matches the claim. One targeted a car, killing two militants who had visited several Al Qaeda compounds that day; the other killed a handful of militants, including a top AQ [al Qaeda] terrorist.’

But again the document appears to contradict this, noting: ‘At about 1840 hours US Drone carried out missile strike at a shop in village Khushali Tori Khel, Tehsil Mirali, North Waziristan Agency’.

Chris Woods, who ran the Bureau’s drones project at the time and is now writing a book about armed drones, said: ‘When the Bureau first challenged CIA claims of zero drone civilian casualties in 2011, anonymous US officials used the New York Times to disparage some of its findings. An official denied, for example, that a shop had deliberately been targeted in December 2010. This secret FATA document, never intended for public release, indicates that a shop was indeed hit that day.’

He continued: ‘The CIA’s ongoing role in the Pakistan drone campaign appears to be the greatest obstacle to much-needed transparency in cases such as this.’

The US official told the Bureau: ‘US counter-terrorism operations are precise, lawful, and effective. The United States takes extraordinary care to make sure that its counterterrorism actions are in accordance with all applicable domestic and international law, and that they are consistent with US values and policy.’

But other observers criticised the US policy of releasing information through selective leaks rather than a more routine disclosure policy.

Mustafa Qadri, the Amnesty International researcher who investigated strikes for the organisation’s report, Will I Be Next?, said: ‘Ultimately the US bears primary responsibility for disclosing the full extent of its drone program, the facts about how many have been killed and the factual and legal basis for these deaths.’

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Activist Post: Indiana House Committee Approves Anti-Drone Bill by a 6-1 Vote

January 28, 2014 10:19 am / Leave a comment

Activist Post: Indiana House Committee Approves Anti-Drone Bill by a 6-1 Vote.

Today, an Indiana state house committee gave preliminary approval to a bill which would severely restrict the use of drones within the state.

Introduced by Rep. Eric Allan Koch (R-65), House Bill 1009 (HB1009) “Prohibits the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and tracking devices to conduct warrantless searches,” with very limited exceptions.

HB1009 was referred to the State House Committee on Courts and Criminal Code where a hearing was held this morning. After a short discussion, the bill passed by a vote of 6-1. Voting yes were committee chair, Rep. Jud McMillin (R-68), along with Reps. Pierce, McNamara, Harman, Mahan and Rhoads. The lone no vote was cast by Rep. DeLaney (D-86).

The legislation does include some narrow exceptions to the warrant requirement to allay the fears of law enforcement officials who did not want to be hamstrung in emergency situations when a drone’s use might spell life or death.

Even so, the bill also sets strict standards governing the use of a drone when authorized. It also “prohibits the placement of cameras or electronic surveillance equipment on private property to conduct warrantless searches.” Evidence obtained in violation of the act would be “inadmissable as evidence in an administrative or judicial proceeding.”

The ACLU has weighed in on the issue on a national level, warning that “unregulated drone use could pose serious threats to our privacy.”

Tenth Amendment Center national outreach director Amanda Bowers noted that Indiana could join a growing chorus of states putting strict limited on drones. “Already, a number of states have passed similar bills into law, and we are expecting more in the coming weeks and months,” she said. “From California to Washington State, and from New York to Missouri, legislators and the general public from left to right want to see a dangerous future stopped before it happens.”

Bills were signed into law in 2013 in Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Last earlier this month, the South Carolina House passed a similar bill by a vote of 100-0.

HB1009 is expected to move to the full State House for a debate and vote. If it passes by a majority, it will be sent to the Senate, where it will need to pass out of committee before the Senate can vote to concur.

TAKE ACTION
If you live in Indiana: Click HERE to find out what steps you can take to support HB1009
If you live in another state: Take action to limit drone use in your state HERE.

Please visit and support the Tenth Amendment Center where this release first appeared.

UK military goes on drone charm offensive – Europe – Al Jazeera English

January 16, 2014 6:54 am / 2 Comments on UK military goes on drone charm offensive – Europe – Al Jazeera English

UK military goes on drone charm offensive – Europe – Al Jazeera English.

Unmanned aircraft, or drones, are playing an increasingly important role in military campaigns around the world.

Though they are controversial and often blamed for the deaths of civilians, the British military also wants to show people that they save lives too.

The UK says 459 missiles have been fired from its unmanned Reaper aircraft in Afghanistan, with only one civilian recorded killed.

Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands reports from the Royal Airforce’s drone headquarters in Waddington.

Syrian opposition turns on al-Qaida-affiliated Isis jihadists near Aleppo | World news | The Guardian

January 4, 2014 8:40 am / Leave a comment

Syrian opposition turns on al-Qaida-affiliated Isis jihadists near Aleppo | World news | The Guardian.

Fighters of al-Qaeda linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant parade at Syrian town of Tel Abyad

Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria parade in Tel Abyad. Syrian rebels’ uneasy co-existence with the hardline Isis has turned to outright hostility. Photograph: Reuters

The most serious clashes yet between the Syrian opposition and a prominent al-Qaida group erupted in the north of the country on Friday as a tribal revolt against the same organisation continued to rage inIraq‘s Anbar province.

Opposition groups near Aleppo attacked militants from the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria (Isis) in two areas, al-Atareb and Andana, which are both strongholds of the fundamentalist Sunni organisation.

Battles also erupted in the Salahedin district of Aleppo itself, where both groups had reluctantly co-existed during recent months as Isis had imposed its hardline influence on parts of the city. Several hundred miles east, Isis remains in control of parts of the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, having raided mosques, sacked police stations and freed prisoners in moves reminiscent of the darkest days of Iraq’s insurgency, in which much of Anbar had been lost to al-Qaida.

Isis is the latest incarnation of the same ruthless group that held sway in Anbar before the Awakening Movement of tribal militias ousted it. The Awakening was led at the time by powerful local sheikhs and backed by the occupying US military and was credited with freeing both cities from the grip of the jihadists.

But over the past year, security there and elsewhere in Iraq has gradually ebbed as the war in Syria has intensified. In the past week, revitalised Isis insurgents stormed into both cities soon after the Iraqi military withdrew from a violent standoff with local tribes.

The same group has been at the vanguard of an increasing radicalisation of the anti-Assad opposition in northern Syria. Its members cross freely between Anbar and the eastern deserts of Syria as the insurgencies in each country steadily seep in to each other.

Tribal figures in Anbar said they were continuing to mount attacks on Isis and were determined to block the Islamists’ efforts to re-establish a foothold there.

“Never will we allow them to return to our towns,” said a senior sheikh from the outskirts of Ramadi. “We don’t trust the Shia regime of Maliki and we don’t trust al-Qaida. We will fight for our futures. No one else has our benefit at heart.”

The US military had placed great significance on Ramadi and Fallujah, having fought two major battles against insurgents in Fallujah in 2004 and having suffered more than one third of its casualties during the eight-year war in the restive province.

With the US having left Iraq three years ago, the government of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, recently travelled to Washington to seek renewed American intelligence help to get on top of the insurgency. The Obama administration agreed to supply weapons and technicians but it is not yet clear if it also agreed to re-introduce elements of its controversial drone programme.

Though not thought to be co-ordinated, the attacks on Isis strongholds in Syria and Iraq have mounted the most serious challenge to the group’s authority since it again became a dominant player in the region.

The group’s members have imposed a strict interpretation of Islamic law in much of northern Syria, subverting local authority and intimidating towns and communities. The increasing strength of the group has also further splintered the original armed Syrian opposition, which has at times come to a battlefield accommodation with the better funded jihadis, and had tried to avoid a reckoning with them.

However, opposition leaders told the Guardian that with military momentum at a crawl, they have little option but to try to oust Isis.

“We have surrounded them in Andana,” said a leader of Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamic group within the opposition. “We have told their foreigners that they must come and join us, within 24 hours, or face being killed.”

In al-Atareb, several dozen fighters, including Isis members, are believed to have been killed in the clashes. The group is thought have at least 10,000 members in northern Syria, many of them foreigners from elsewhere in the Sunni Islamic world, including up to 1,000 Europeans.

Isis has kidnapped more than 30 foreign aid-workers and journalists in the north, along with scores more Syrians. The French medical aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières said five of its members had been taken from a house in northern Syria on Thursday. It gave no details about the identities of the captives, or where they were taken from.