What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

This certainly is the nightmare that follows logically from all the Israeli influence in police and military.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Certainly our democratic machinery is badly broken, but until we have something better working — and in order to at least keep that option open — I believe we need to keep using those tools.

Fuck. I mean, read the article. Heartbreaking for the past and present even more than terrifying for the future.

Ah sweet, man made horrors are now comprehensible

The answer to killer death robots is registering to vote? Democrats fund the same programs. Community self defense is the only way forward

Which was revealed when Anthropic made their very simple demands and the administration threw a tantrum.

1. No fully autonomous murder; a human must make the final decision.

2. No domestic mass surveillance.

Pretty simple demands that should have been easy to agree to.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data

Jesus

FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

Now that's something I haven't heard before

Anyone remember that short film from 2017 Slaughterbots?

https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

I think it's important to note that one of the metadata points that increased your chances of being bombed in Gaza was if you slept somewhere different too often.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if "changing your address too frequently" makes you climb the kill list in the US program

As far as I can tell, it's been reality for like 20 years now. The drones became smaller and perhaps more precise, that is all

Fucking cowards using flying drones. Kill me with a full humanoid and then I'll be impressed.

That’s a bit scary.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

Sounds like we need cheap open source defense drones that can defend our communities by knocking these murder drones out of the sky.

Does anyone have a link to a project to 3d print drones that can be used to disable other drones in the sky?

Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare...

I read that as "we will fight terrorism with terrorism"

...and that's especially concerning because the current administration defines "writing articles like this one" as terrorism, because it's antifascist

Umm..didn't Obama do this to the first US American living abroad?

We've had this reality for a looong time

The abandoned this a few days ago because of a law suit that rightfully pointed out that because ICE refuses to make themselves easily identifiable, the rule is impossible to follow. A drone operator can't know where an Ice vehicle is before launching a drone.

Don't want to be that guy, but this is far from new news.

"Less than two weeks ago, the United States conducted a drone strike over central Yemen, killing one al-Qaeda operative. The strike was the last under Obama (that we know of). The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians. As he reportedly told senior aides in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

This is from 2017. You can find even older stuff.

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

We need FTL's Anti-Drone Drones.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don't close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you're planning to do things there you don't want photographed

While this may be a factor, it’s also more likely that they don’t want other drones interfering with their own drones. You can obviously crash into each other, or cause interference if you’re using the same radio frequency and/or video channel.

In a future where this is a real issue, people could semi-easily build devices that jam the radio and/or GPS signals so they’re much more difficult to fly, if at all. Depending on their failsafe mode, it could just cause them to start flying back to the pilot, outing their location.

I look forward to flying drones for the resistance. 🥽

Interesting how ELITE seems to operate in basically the same way as Persona, which was apparently just for "age verification" and Thiel funded. Must just be a coincidence.