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When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country’s drone target list, he wasn’t sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does – and is suing the United States to contest his own execution
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With Reprieve’s help, Kareem did what the system asks a law-abiding American citizen with a grievance to do. He sued, filing a complaint in district court in Washington, D.C., on March 30th, 2017, asking the U.S. government to take him off the Kill List, at least until he had a chance to challenge the evidence against him.The case, still unresolved more than a year later, has awesome implications not just for Kareem but for all Americans – all people everywhere, for that matter.
It’s not a stretch to say that it’s one of the most important lawsuits to ever cross the desk of a federal judge. The core of the Bill of Rights is in play, and a wrong result could formalize a slide into authoritarianism that began long ago, but accelerated after 9/11.
He needs to take the matter to Information Retrieval, but heaven help him if he doesn't get his receipt stamped first.
[Ed note: It's a long read, but provides extensive background on the US government's kill list development, implementation, and complications in trying to do anything about it.]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday July 21 2018, @04:46AM (3 children)
One of the many things that is disturbing in TFA is that the "Kill List" is at least partly determined by some random computer algorithm. Not only are we potentially assassinating U.S. citizens without trial, but we are putting people on a list potentially based on some BS AI algorithm that looks at (and I quote) "metadata."
Well, it's finally come to pass. Gordon Dickson predicted that people would be executed by computer error [wikipedia.org], but he at least postulated it would also involve a bunch of human error too. Instead, Obama and Trump seem happy to kill based on scant evidence.
But Dickson got the bureaucratic element right -- once somebody gets on a computer's kill list, no simple court maneuver will easily get that person off... Which is horrifying.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 21 2018, @06:27AM
Of course it does. The error to let the computer make the decision was definitely made by humans.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday July 21 2018, @11:31AM
It's a very short step to applying that kill list to Americans on US soil, too.
They'll do that, and people not so targeted will buy the flimsy pretext that they were bad, an 'imminent danger' to the country, because that's what sheep do.
250 years later, it's as true now as it was then.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 21 2018, @11:18PM
if you put it inside of quotation marks it is already a quote, you don't need to verbally declare it so, but i guess it doesn't hurt.