Printhello everybody here is tatiana basically from the disruption network club in berlin
and i'm happy to introduce our 26th conference and also at the same time
very touch because is not a easy topic and is something that
is going to make us all reflect on the present situation that we are leaving
but at the same time we also know that is important to have this moment of solidarity among us and also to speak
about very important and critical topics so i hope that these three days that we
are starting now will be also an important moment for sharing among all of us
and first of all i would like to thank the team of the disruption network club
that made this event possible so i'm going to name them one by one
first of all elena willian oscar and ozlem kaya from the production
nada backer that is also working on the production and since this year as community curator
lauren de carli as a legal advisor and admin officer jonas frankie for the design anesthetic
for the digital communication alicia basically for the communication assistance and then i also want to thank
burro doring for the great work that they did for the press especially tom mueller heiser and anna
jackish so as i say we are live now from consequential britannian in berlin and
this conference as the title the kill cloud network warfare drones and ai and
is a conference that we have been already planning since a very long time
actually we have been speaking about this conference for many years um is a consequence of the first
conference that we did in april 2015 that was called drone and at that time
we had as a keynote brandon bryant that is also coming back and for very long time i was thinking
that a follow-up of that conference was needed and especially i feel to thank
lisa ling and sean westmoreland because their wonderful chapter that is
published on our anthology whistleblowing for change is the one that gave the title to this event
and at the same time in between we know that
the dramatic situation in ukraine really escalated and we are in the middle of a war as
well so this conference became also very urgent and important to speak about war
at a global level and in these days we will also touch of course the situation of afghanistan and
we saw what happened last year when we had also this really difficult
conflict there and the people are still suffering for that so we have to say that we are
experiencing really war at the global level and that is also what we will
understand in these days by speaking about the kill cloud that we are going then to discuss more in detail
i want also to thank the audience that is following us online
and also want to say this would be a moment of sharing not only with us that we are
in berlin but also with them and i want to remind that we have a chat that they
can use so they can also ask questions to our speakers and during our events we will call them
uh to ask questions if they want to answer so just keep that in mind
and as i say this conference is also the second book launch of our book called
whistleblowing for change exposing systems of power and injustice that you
can find here at the reception at the entrance but you also can find online
for the people that are also following and also you in the audience of course if you want to support is great but
otherwise you can also download it for free on the website of our publisher
transcript for lag
and in this book we are speaking about the
wider effect of whistleblowing as an act of descent and we discuss the effect of
whistleblowing on politics society and the arts as i say inside the book there
is a really important piece from lisa ling and sean westmoreland but also a
chapter from brandon bryant and also a chapter from daniel hale so there is a
lot about the drone war and that we also thought that was important to have a
second event specifically about this topic because we also really care about
discussing these issues and in a sense we want to know what happened from the
time we we did the first event in 2015 to today what actually changed uh did we
achieve something also thanks to the actor whistleblowing of many courageous
people that speak out about the us drone program for example
so we will start with the keynotes of sean and lisa
that will be called network-centric warfare then they kill clouds and
but first i also wanted to thank the founders that have been supporting us
and i'm going to list all of them
so a thanks goes from the senate department of culture in europe in berlin the riva and david logan
foundation we are also supported by culture game and shaften of the german
federal culture foundation and the beka m german government commission for cool culture and the
media this is part of the noise start culture restaurant cultural program of the
cultural and media sector we are also working in partnership with the friedrich hebrew stiftung and we are
working in cooperation with global voices and in collaboration with transparency
international air wars and the research group inequality and digital sovereignty
of the weizenban institutes then a special thanks also at the school of machine making a make-believe that was
doing the first community event with us and departure venus constant kreuzberg betanian and nakuda mcnoy
uh for sure also the streaming boiling heads that has been doing the streaming with us and
for us for many years now and our media partner taj ilmith and our outreach
partner axioma
Program
a lot of papers and then we go now a bit more in depth of
the program of the days so today as i say we want to speak about the discourse
of the kill cloud and also go more in depth on the discourse of the network-centric
warfare but at the same time we also want to discuss on the use of ai and
satellite technology to enable targeted killing via drones and
we will then have a panel dealing with the discourse of killing robots and also with the importance to empower the civic
society also to fight this kind of development of the technology or try to
make them better to try to understand how to use technology for good rather than for killing people and tomorrow we
will give an insight into how atrocities such as the collateral bombing of
civilian without soldier can happen so we will have a panel that is also
dealing with the ethical illegal aspect of this then we will have the speech of
brandon bryant and the screening of the film national board by sonia kennenberg
and the question and answer after it but before we enter into the detail of
the keynote of today i wanted to call here on stage my colleague another bach that has been creating the community
program tools updates on what is happening on their site
hello hey okay hi thanks athena for the intro
Community Program
and uh yeah hello everyone i'm neda esthetiana mentioned and
yeah so we started with our community program a bit earlier than the conference and the community program is
an all year round iterations of meetups workshops and
other activities that kind of connect before and after the conference with our berlin-based community
so we are based sometimes here after the conference and also in other different
venues in berlin in collaboration with artists activists initiatives and groups
that are mostly based in berlin and actually for our opening meetup on
the 9th of march we have been collaborating with rachel oh who's also here with us artist educator and the
co-founder of the schools of machine and our meetup was called a drone as a drone where we met at a code
and it was a warm-up to this conference that we're having today and with rachel we investigated what does it actually
mean to hold the drone for some of us was the first time in a very controlled safe area and to have a moment of
reflection on what does this mean that a drone is a military invention and at the same time it's also a tool for
entertainment now filmmaking and other like uses in different industries
uh so thank you rachel also check her program signals artist and network intervention in june in au june center
in berlin here there will be a public program for that and for the two days after today and
tomorrow on sunday the 27th of march we are hosting
two workshops as also part of our community program the first workshop um will be also with
emily tripp and clive villa and they are both from the
the air wars team and we have developed this workshop together called collateral
damage monitoring civilian harm through all sorts and geolocation investigation
so air wars is a project that is based in the uk and they investigate
and evaluate and monitor civilian harm in conflict and war areas in iraq syria
somalia sudan and also now in ukraine
so a little bit um and on sunday we're going to work
together in a smaller group also here in studio one from 12 to 2 p.m
and we will first understand what is all source investigation and what is geo-location investigation and the work
that air wars have been doing and also have a more of a hands-on practice of how to identify civilian
harms in conflict areas and what are the best practices that can maybe be done
and in a sense from the title we have also want to understand what does actually the term collateral damage
means on the ground which is a term used by military usually when there's
civilian harm and targeted killing for civilians and in the afternoon from
3 30 to 5 30 we're going to have another workshop with our colleague anisa troki
she's our digital communication manager and also an educator and a writer her book is actually
on the cash desk internet monamour and along with jacopo anderlini we're to
have the workshop to play or be played uncovering gamification techniques
and together for this afternoon we're going to look at video games and how they are designed by default for
addiction that plays on vulnerability on different humans and in a sense we're gonna look at social media
as a platform that usually doesn't advertise itself as a game but it's actually somehow like has been built on the same
ways of addictive behavior and from that we're going to move to the game like the drone machine game and
actually how is this been also like developed based on gamification techniques and recruiting
gamers to actually become drone operators and um with the same like technique of being
gamers and the drone as a as a game in a sense sadly
then and last and then i'm gonna leave the stage as a last part of our
own legal clout program that we're going to have on the 12th of april at hauster statistic we're teaming up with the
berlin-based group of the search wing which is a project
developed by a group of engineers where they have developed their own unnamed aerial vehicle also known as
drone where they where they work with uh search and
rescue missions at the mediterranean uh so we're gonna meet with them also as a follow-up to our conference for the next
three days um so that would be also understanding how they have built it and
what what does this like this kind of drone really helps in that very timely
sensitive missions of search and rescue and the mediterranean and the image analysis of the drone identifying both
an individual so organizations like seawatch or crm can can identify
their targets for search and rescue easy and after that we take a small break and
then we come back in may and june for our next program so follow us for more updates on our
smaller community events and hope i've only seen some familiar faces here today from the program and
see you again soon on sunday and we can say that there is still available places for the
workshop yes there is very few little places for the geolocation workshops for
air wars and and the play or be played are actually sold out and also for the
meetup on the 12th of april you just need to register it's a free meetup but for the sake of controlling the numbers
nowadays we just need to register online so thank you very much i leave you to introduce the keynote
so now we enter into the discourse of the kill cloud more in depth and
i want to introduce and welcome here on stage
lisa link sean westmoreland and daniel ericsson please come
Daniel Eriksson
i will introduce briefly daniel erickson and then i leave to him the duty to
introduce our speakers um i'm happy to have daniel here actually it's not the first time you
came at the disruption network club also i feel to thanks transparency international for the cooperation we had
for many years in several events here at the disruption network club
daniel ericsson is the ceo of transparency international secretariat in berlin
after serving as a military peacekeeper in the conflict in former yugoslavia he
has worked with sustainable development in africa asia and the middle east
redirected his focus towards corruption as an obstacle to human development
daniel is a certified information systems security professional and he has
a bc in information system analysis from lean shopping university in sweden and
the phd from coventry university thank you very much daniel thank you lisa and sean and the
stage is yours thank you tatiana thanks for having me
[Applause] it's truly a pressure to be here and and
Lisa Ling
a really exciting community program being presented by nada and the whole event the the the dnl events they're
always professionally produced so i'm looking forward to the day these days and to our session and now as well
i would like to introduce lisa ling who joined the u.s military in the 1990s as
a nurse if i'm not mistaken and have since had a long career in various parts
of isr that's intelligence in
reconnaissance and surveillance we'll try to avoid as many
acronyms especially military ones as possible today but we might fall into a couple of traps
and after her service i'm told that she as a civilian visited afghanistan to uh
to first hand experience the country herself um
and yeah we'll just go over to sean westmoreland as well who's also
a u.s military veteran a u.s air force and
you [Music] served in afghanistan in 2009 and i
think you joined 2006 in the air force if i'm not mistaken as such
and i also read in the book that your performance report has you as
supporting 200 kills in your role in afghanistan which which is a scary number
um in summary it's a very capable and experienced
panel i have with me here today and i'm really looking forward to having an in-depth conversation of what is a very
pressing topic at the moment it's concerning from ethical perspective it's concerning from technological
perspectives as in where will this end these technologies and how can we ensure that
they don't spell the end to mankind so without further ado
um sean do you want to open up sure
what is this
wow this is being weird
i always have computer problems all right
that's okay
Astronaut Quotes
okay um so i just want to start and uh have everybody look at this planet
it's all ours um and uh
if you if you just observe the uh the atmosphere
it's about the thickness of a grape relatively
and i got two quotes from two astronauts
one is from edgar mitchell apollo 14 astronaut he said you develop an instant global consciousness in
reference to the overview effect it's an experience that astronauts have when they go to space
people orientation intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something
about it from out there on the moon international politics look petty
you want to grab the politician by the scruff of their neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles away away and
say look at that you son of a um i think we have uh similar feelings up
here and the next one is from muhammad ahmed ferris he's a syrian astronaut he said from
space i saw earth indescribably beautiful with the scars of national boundaries gone
so all life as we know it is related to other life in a state of flux
between conflict and cooperation every person that exists today will die
and in our place we will what we know is ourselves
will transform into something else every choice and every action or inaction will inevitably affect our
future and everything we leave behind every human is related and every mind no
matter how young or old privileged or poor melanated or white contains a capacity to choose to transcend its
limitations to make different choices to act in ways that nobody else
predicted it is our individual and collective choices as well as our ability to break
from norms that uniquely make us human every abstraction we humans have created
to include cultures dogmas traditions borders laws systems of governance and
conceivable limitations as a construction built upon our concrete environment
and the simulated boundaries of our minds individually and collectively
projected onto the world there are facts that act as reference points in
determining subjective understandings of truth as with individuals the character and
behavior of nations are shaped by our previous experiences the understanding of our world
that are passed on to us our previous choices our concrete and abstract environment
and the extent of options we are made aware of each new technological innovation
changes the fabric of our collective realities by enabling communities to develop towards new boundaries of the
imagination while also displacing those who cannot control it
for example roman roads provided infrastructure for armies to rapidly mobilize and police
distant boundaries while communicating messages to its capital they also allowed for the increase in
commerce between previously isolated groups which allowed people across the roman empire to mix and share ideas
of course all roman roads lead to rome and rome provided a common written
language and as well as a common belief system over time
these roads that required little maintenance over large spans of time facilitated a common roman identity
while also providing rome with a central control over its tributaries through
commerce through superior logistical capacities realm managed to rule europe for a
thousand years the airplane provided the capacity to move people and things across any
terrain during any season with speeds that are previously unthinkable with this it enabled military to destroy
entire populations within days instead of weeks the internet and computer not only
allowed people to collectively receive information instantly but interact with it and manipulate it
many thought it would bring the world together and in many ways it has social messaging applications have made
it possible for communities of like-minded people to develop globally cultural symbols and beliefs can
proliferate like viruses beliefs direct behavior therefore it is of great consequences to nations
companies and like-minded people to manipulate beliefs according to their interests we now consider these platforms
developed by private companies to be our new public squares and are surprised when uh the
information we find out is curated information has always been a domain of
conflict linked to communications infrastructure the ability to pass information securely
quickly and reliably has been a fixation of military since caesar uses codexes to
prevent messages from being intercepted or deciphered before information
the information contained could be executed upon control of the spectrums of
communication to spread or deny certain types of information to the correct parties has also been a fixation of
power new more bureaucratic forms of warfare developed to prevent individuals from
understanding the full picture of what was they were participating in
and to improve the speed at which decisions can be made algorithms are now used to curate
information on an individual basis across whole populations via search functions targeted ads etc
they influence how we vote they influence how we purchase goods and consequently they also influence how
we kill in 2001 i witnessed my father speak of watching missiles he helped order blow
human beings to pieces from a video screen 3000 kilometers from where it occurred in the midst of a famine
the radio the rocket and the computer paved the way for the satellite
the satellite provided the means for militaries to communicate tactical information across the globe
wars can now be directed from the safety of the capital city next to a political authority
Afghanistan
so up here is that uh report you can see um
there are certain snippets from it when i was in afghanistan in 20 2009 i
set up a system that assisted aircraft and communicating images secure voice targeting information radar images and
wide area surveillance over a geosynchronous satellite to the combined operations center in qatar in order to
direct and assist units in maneuvering around enemies and blowing them to bits more efficiently using intelligence we
sent to the dgs-4 at ramstein air base to be assimilated
disseminated at to various locations around the us and to be analyzed in order to assist planners in qatar
aircraft and theater and units on the ground i watch air battle managers deciding
which aircraft to drop these bombs what their angle of approach should be and which ordinance to drop
i connected special operators to aircraft and mountainous areas which enabled them to call in airstrikes and
receive authorizations in a matter of minutes what i witnessed and was party to in
2009 was network-centric warfare and its adolescence the ability to coordinate units on the
ground and in the air to deliver munitions in real time the ability for an unmanned aircraft to
be flown by an operator on the other side of the globe and drop a bomb on a target without a single person on the
ground to verify who is being blown up the ability to wage war and destroy
networks of people based on cell phone sim cards or a suspicious pattern of activity
determined to be suspicious from a video screen at fifteen thousand feet
what we want you all to walk away with is viewing technology like the airframe of the drone not in isolation but as
part of an infrastructural network with global reach that has
a multitude of individual people dispersed among a multitude of locations with a soda straw view on the totality
and quality of information being processed outside their limited purview with each role being both equally
essential and the final decision being made yet equally replaceable and interchangeable
what we want you to understand uh this is individuals with accolades
to our participation and extinguishing human lives in my case over 200 people
200 people who i did not personally know were guilty of fighting against an
occupying force to their nation into their homes but could only extrapolate based on my
own research into the civilian casualties in our unit's area of responsibility that these figures
represented at least 300 civilian deaths we all need to be on the same page as we
begin to understand where this is going joint all domain command and control
Starlink
in december 2019 the us air force and u.s space force partnered with several companies including spacex to
demonstrate their advanced battle management capabilities in the exercise starling connected to an
ac 130 gunship and allowed the f-35 to communicate securely with a
f-22 the ultimate goal of spacex is to blanket the earth with 46 000 satellites
in lower earth orbit each with a max throughput of 20 gigabytes per second
currently there are roughly 2 000 starlink satellites in orbit and each user can expect to see speeds of 100 to
200 megabytes per second this matters because sensors and the computations needed to process this data
via ai requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth to transmit all of this to cloud servers
they'll be using krypton thrusters to avoid collisions and it's a cheaper fuel for ion thrusters
than xeon xenon and a laser interlink that constantly shifts signal pass
potentially in a manner similar to tor think fiber optics without the need of fiber
in separate exercise in august 2020 starlink was used to coordinate disparate ground in air forces in yuma
arizona from andrews air force base in washington d.c they were able to shoot down an object
simulated simulating a cruise missile with a paladin [Music] m109
a6 it's basic artillery with simple uh 155 millimeter howitzer shells
during this exercise it also used mobile 5g towers as well as a robotic dog made
by ghost robotics who have already began advertising it is a robotic sniper capable of carrying
accurately shooting over uh 1200 meters for perspective an m16a2 has an
effective range of 500 meters more recently the ukrainian government
has requested starlink terminals to which of course elon musk delivered now i didn't want to make this about
elon musk because it's not spacex is a military contractor like
lockheed boeing airbus or raytheon therefore all the advancements need to be viewed
as having military and therefore political significance
Commercial Communications
in 2009 i was well aware of the commercial communications satellites being utilized for drones due to the
limited bandwidth of wps military satellites which have a maximum throughput of
four gigabytes per second today there's plenty of documentation proving this
now i have to ask this what would it mean for europe or any other nation to know that nearly
50 of these satellites are going up per week with spacex on the cost of being the
first company to develop and deploy rapidly reusable rockets carrying up to 150 tons of cargo anywhere in the world
in 30 minutes what would it mean if spacex already had a contract with u.s transportation
command just do just this what would it mean for the eu russia
china or any other nation if the united states is able to deploy more infrastructure into space in one month
than the entire world has in all of human history what would it mean if the u.s is able to
do this two years ahead of the european space agency or anyone else what would it mean if the u.s became a
failed democracy or decided it needs more territories
is this more likely for this to be used as a weapon or
to be used to colonize mars a dead planet that takes months to get to
that you know we can only access every two years that's my question to you
thanks sean um over to lisa
[Applause]
no worries seeing that we're three tech geeks on
stage i'm sure we'll have tech problems
okay so um here we go microphone
do i have to does it work hello okay let's see if this will stay up here
um this is a very dense topic so uh this is the first time i've ever used notes so bear with me
so basically what is cloud computing and how does it work
Cloud Storage
there are cloud-based storage solutions like google drive icloud and others
dropbox in this example when we say organization this could be contractors managing the
cloud infrastructure service members corporations intelligence organizations coalition partners space force air force
army etc there are cloud-based software solutions like google apps microsoft office maps
Cloud Networking
google maps google earth and others cloud networking is a type of information technology infrastructure
where some or all of an organization's network capabilities and resources are hosted in a public or private managed
cloud platform that gives users access to information software services computing power storage or other
resources that are made available to users on demand with
some type of connection to service then enabling users to access use download or upload data from any chosen device such
as a laptop tablet or smartphone cloud users can also collaborate create edit documents simultaneously with other
users and this can be done anywhere there is a connection cloud computing relates to how software
programs and cloud networking concerns access how resources are delivered to the users
Whats Changed
we're all used to seeing pictures like this i'm not an artist so i just kind of put
it here but we all know that there's places where storage servers and all of those things we've seen these diagrams
on older networks newer networks the internet it's all pretty much the same stuff right
what's changed because now there are cloud-based solutions for analyzing targeting
and killing of course war is the gruesome business of killing
so what's happening today the same thing
only there's a little different iot or internet of things or peripheral devices
there's different data and object storage and contents there's different types of collaboration communication
it's different and in many ways pretty frightening
sitting at a diner a restaurant or somewhere together with friends everybody's on a phone
today many interactions with everyone are mediated by technology and we are all deluged by data i remember back in
the day when i typed up four memos it was a hard day's work that was back in the art dark ages with
the dinosaurs but to understand what we are getting at you don't need to understand the technology itself
you just need to know it exists i remember when we could call people and remember their phone numbers when we
were at a protest we didn't need to write them on our i remember when i knew friends addresses
i knew when i could talk about an astounding number of facts without having to look at a screen
i remember when i could spell i remember when the computer didn't write a type of word
that it thought that i was going to say which was way out of the blue and then i had to put an asterisk in
front of the actual word i meant i remember those days
so this is the data section of what we're calling the kill cloud it's only a piece
Data Section
and just so that we can have like a an understanding that we we can agree with in general a framework is real
or it can be conceptual or it can be both what a framework is intended to support
or what it is intended to work with or accomplish is building something that
can expand the structure into something of benefit
so the under secretary of defense came up with this di-2e it's a component
of the descent defense intelligent enterprise that sucks up or ingest data
lots of data with coalition partners airframes
at home i could make my television talk to my toaster if i wanted to this is different it's much more deadly
um it provides the ability to integrate evaluate interpret predict
current and future operations in a physical environment that's military euphemi euphemism for
battlefield the bigger picture is not just a drone
so retired uh lieutenant general david deptula was the primary planner of the air campaign
he was the first in the first gulf war and the former first deputy chief of
staff for isr intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance part of what we're
talking about he was heavily involved in shaping and managing the us military use of drones
he calls what we have an enterprise a reference to a network socio-technical
assemblage that functions silently and in secret behind what we see the drone
the kill cloud as we call it connect sensors and weapons platforms drones to a globally distributed network of
devices software and a multitude of other nodes via satellites cables radio
and digital communications links that are accessed operated and maintained daily across all military branches
support agencies coalition partners by thousands of people around the world
this is what we refer to when we talk about network-centric warfare
ncw is the acronym for that one it's a means of navigating armed
conflict that relies on distributed networks to kill with impunity
up on the screen there's a couple of quotes here um everyone focuses on this little piece of
fiberglass flying around called an unmanned aerial vehicle but it's just a host for sensors that
provide data to this vast analytic enterprise we call the distributed common ground system or dcgs
i worked most of my time at dcgs2 formerly called dgs
it turns data into it which turns data into information and hopefully knowledge
that was in 2015. in 21
the key to preventing any such recurrence is intelligence and its proper application cultivating and
maintaining a deep understanding of what happens in the region to reinforce that objective requires a stepping up of the
use of unmanned aerial vehicles or uavs or drones such as the mq-9 reaper
and the rq4 global hawk which didn't have weapons it was just a surveillance drone
that are indispensable parts of our nation's persistent intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance isr
enterprise and then so now what sending tens of thousands of ground forces back into
region is off the table that was the center f piece of the failed american strategy the american
public and our elected officials have no appetite to repeat that error it's also depthula
basically what that means is we don't want to send people to war we're going to work on sending things
oops
murphy's law so all of this is happening right in front of us on public documents on this
document talks about artificial intelligence it talks about a whole lot of things
Kill Cloud
so why we're here is we believe that the focus on the drone is insufficient to address the massive weapon system being
controlled yet hidden in plain sight the dcgs and other over the horizon solutions
being built into what we are calling the kill cloud these are unprecedented changes for how
war is waged how data is collected stored and how people are surveilled hunted and killed
both inside and outside of traditional conflict zones
this weapon has been brought about with a kind of accidental intentionality that began with older disparate stove-piped
information systems the intelligence community and various commands wanted unfettered instantaneous unified access
to from there the system of systems has evolved in the same type of colonial framework
that saw the the evolution of the telegraph telephone and early electronic communications control
the ships and the seas today that same effort is being used to
exert control over every imaginable military domain this weapon and its use have effectively
blurred the line between collecting military and tactical data sets with
what has historically been the domain of corporate civilian and law enforcement entities
this data is then fused with systems used for military command and control
in the continuing global war on terror by the way this is a war that is not encumbered by
borders or even a single enemy
the united states divide despite its merits was born out of
colonization and its destructive of indigenous societies indigenous peoples
were labeled savages under the ideological framework of the discovery doctrine manif and
manifest destiny early in our nation's history this provided the moral impetus for settler
expansion westward disregarding the sovereignty of indigenous nations that came before
we often criticize authoritarian nations that submit their people to involuntary servitude to achieve civilizational
objectives and yet most of our initial infrastructure was built by african slaves chinese immigrants and indentured
servants like the lantern laws of the past today's surveillance technology surveils
innocent people of color innocent people everywhere today's ambitions for expansion
are the ideological underpinnings of the global war on terror
it is a technological approach to global dominance
over every spectrum of warfare so what do i want people to come away with
so when you see this the picture on the right
i don't want you to see just that airframe i want you to never forget
Conclusion
that it's the picture on the left that's guiding it that unplugged
it's a paperweight with a wingspan of about 66 feet
some of the technology and its use should be very familiar to everyone in the western world
it is after all a kind of internet with weaponized peripheral devices we know similar technology
there are going to be many outstanding speakers at this event far more knowledgeable about different aspects of
this massive system the law and the experience of those who lived where
drones are flown these are some of the most important voices to hear
anyway my hope is that you will get to hear all of them and after this conference
you will never look at a drone without thinking of all the machinations happening
all the entities and all the people all the corporations and all of the evolving moving parts again
i hope journalists will use this and dig in we're at a critical time
i don't think any of us can afford to do nothing when the implications of this system are not yet even known
dig deep my hope is that after this event you just won't look at this the same way
again thank you
[Applause] thanks liz
Summary
thanks lisa and thanks sean so if i make a stab at trying to summarize all
of this i think you your presentations were very telling but
from my point of view trying to to translate this into lay persons terms
the drones that we're seeing and and the robots that many are fearing
are dependent on data they're fed by data that data has to be collected
stored transferred and all of those activities behind the scene
are actually much more complicated and expensive than that pointy end of the
stick the piece of the iceberg that sticks up the uav the uas that we saw
the picture on earlier on here in in lisa's presentation
that information chain that exists behind the scenes that none of us
well lisa and sean have seen it but none of us have seen is actually
much more complicated and without it you're not going to have
an effective system for a drone to work on as lisa said it's going to be a big
flying paperweight because you will not be able to determine what it should target how it
should target when it should target those systems that infrastructure
is is the secret recipe secret ingredient to that recipe
and that is what you are calling the kill cloud
is that a an approximationally correct summary of the kill cloud
sean uh i think you're pretty right on yeah
and with with the kill cloud now obviously we're talking about the us here now
what other countries are there that can compete with the us in terms of this kill cloud
type infrastructure are there others that have something that that can compare themselves
if you know it's hard to say and so they actually do compete in a martial conflict
Competitors
uh china right now has uh the probably probably the the fastest the
best runner-up i would say but it also depends on infrastructure
and right now the us is best situated to be launching the most infrastructure
into space china is pretty advanced in space
they have a lot of technology for once they get there
but their capacity for reusability isn't quite there yet
um russia as far as i know also not there yet the european space agency i
think they're going to start tests in 2025 um so not there yet
so it's a matter of uh who can get there first who can establish a presence there
first and you know that'll determine who who really
controls the domain so the other thing too is like was just said that this requires data what china
Data
has is called the safe cities initiative that initiative sucks up data about people who live in china people who've
been to pakistan i believe pakistan also uses the safe cities initiative and basically the way that this data is
being sucked up is completely ubiquitous right today like in no other time in history
we basically go to the store and give up all of our information by using our credit card
that information can be requested and accessed by any corporation usually
some of it's free right on the internet and so without that data there is one thing that i'd say about
the flying paperweight without the connection it doesn't fly
not even it's just a paperweight yeah um on on on that note sean as well um
my concern in this context is that if if one country has such an advantage in
terms of the kill cloud is because in in
the extension of this situation you could say that as you said whoever gets there first get gets an advantage
that you have one country who will essentially establish
a form of hegemony uh a supremacy in this domain um
[Music] it's a like to if we in the 60s and 50s had a situation where only one country
had nuclear weapons is is that an analogy that that you can see in this context or
Weapons in Space
you can say that there's also a high incentive for countries that aren't there to initiate a kessler syndrome
which is you know once satellites start breaking up they
just fly everywhere and destroy all the satellites which you know most of our civilizations
pretty dependent on right now um it also means that the u.s could be
putting weapons in space i i know that uh there's a trump that uh ripped up the
outer space treaty um so i think we're we're in a uh
interesting position i mean when we're talking about weapons in space you know it could range anything from
what they call the rod of god or whatever which is it's a 20-foot tungsten rod that would just hit the
earth with the impact of you know like a multitude of hiroshimas
or it could just be a a spacecraft
that's meant to meet the same orbit of another spacecraft and just
push it out of orbit it could be anything it could be
an interceptor which could be meant to explode the thing because
it's safe to assume when when this kill cloud is in place which which it is and it's become such a critical
capacity whoever is opposing will try to oppose it in space as well and hence why there
is a space force in in the u.s armed forces now yeah yeah there's a space force in china
Space Forces
there's a space force i think in russia as well i mean it's just uh we've decided to separate the branches and i
think it has more to do with funding than anything i mean
well the other thing i mean the other thing that it has to do with is management of such a behemoth
there needs to be different kinds of management different kinds of procurement different kinds and and um
and uh there will be a speaker who can speak really
really good on that yeah giving giving a hint on upcoming events but obviously we're
right now coming back a little bit to reality or or grounding ourselves um
in in this in the horrific situation that we are here in europe now with with ukraine
um to which extent could a kill cloud like this
be lent or be used to support an ally of sorts
uh with is is that possible or is this some some kind of proprietary thing that
only one side can use or how would that work
so this is something that um both sean and i have taken a long look at and there are pros and cons to having
connectivity to the kill cloud um one of the cons is that you need the network you need the infrastructure and
you need everything else so what happened in ukraine recently um
which sean has taken a deeper look at is um all of the starlink satellites
that have gone there and you can talk about that i mean in the exercise there's two
dissimilar uh radio formats operating on different channels
and they were able to make those two aircrafts communicate securely so it's a
matter of encryption in order to do it securely and then it's
like technically possible but but but all of this lisa
doesn't introduce vulnerability as well aren't there more than just ethical disadvantages
with the kill cloud what is this pure strength on this well anything connected to a network as
Military and War
any network security specialist will tell you there's vulnerabilities
and it's how to best mitigate those vulnerabilities but basically right now as far as
military and war we're in an environment where nation states are risk averse
they don't want to send their people and we hear about these things from governance right that it's a good idea
to get this equipment that it's a good idea to get all these drones because they're going to make wars shorter and safer
but we could have asked afghans about that we could ask them was it any shorter and
safer for them there's the proof is out there that
there are some serious limitations to this technology and there's it's governed by a missile control regime
which isn't specific while they've made some updates it isn't specific to the technology that we're talking about here
so basically it is the wild west at this juncture um and i think that we're right at a
period of time where intervention is needed and it's going to take everyone to do it
and and that goes into the ethics and the integrity of these solutions as well um who is accountable for a kill
who pulls the button on these things obviously the the kill cloud in itself
is a facilitator that is required for that point the end of the stick the drone that we saw but how does the
accountability and the ethics works in all of this if somebody pulls the trigger and
they're not involved in analyzing and
judging the intelligence uh that's that's going into that process um
it's a it's a long process uh then how
you know responsible would you say that person would be because
the pilot doesn't know everything that goes into
making a kill decision they have to trust analysts sitting somewhere
a different part of the united states maybe in germany maybe who knows
south korea um and uh
there's no time uh it's it's not it's not limited
by time so you can have somebody from five years ago who wrote something about this person that person could be like
out of the military by then um could have been a total racist like who knows
could have just uh you know thought that all afghans should die so he's just gonna like you know
plug in a bunch of stuff and uh you know the the person who's currently
you know doing the analysis is acting upon whatever they provided so
uh that that is uh that's that's a challenge for accountability um and whether or not they can solve that
is a good question that should be a question the public is asking them
yeah ultimately the geneva conventions and the international humanitarian laws
were written many many decades ago and and clearly one of the asks
for for for us as uh citizens should be to ensure that those are updated to to
reflect this this new age of war um did you have any training on on the
international law aspects of the kill cloud and this kind of warfare
so um everybody in the us military gets some training on that
but basically it's what part of the system i worked on at dcgs so basically what that meant is that i
was a geek sometimes a data geek sometimes a hardware geek just basically a geek um
now there is somebody like brandon who you'll meet um he was a
sensor operator so basically what he did was he pointed the laser at the target that he was told to point the laser at
did he know who that person was maybe maybe not then there's the pilot who is really
focused on flying a plane think about flying a plane when you can't hear if there's or you can't feel if there's
turbulence you don't know of the many sensory things that a pilot needs to deal with
he's not dealing with the data that goes into who's that person but that's what brings us to the law
fair that is now a huge part of war i mean we didn't used to think of
lawyers as combatants back in 91 when i first joined the army i didn't meet a lawyer for
i don't know 10 years now law fair military law fair is
commonplace there's lawyers on the mission floor there's attorneys saying things about
whatever happens within a particular mission
is that a good thing or a bad thing lawfare is lawfare but if you don't have the
appropriate laws to cover the equipment or for example you don't sign on to the
icc or for example you really can't see if that strike was taken using artificial
intelligence or if a person analyzing the cultural context and everything else
made that decision i mean basically to look at it is you can't see it from here it would be like
me saying you over there in the black shirt i'd like you to go just take that person away because
they're a terrorist go on just go no information
nothing but you have to trust that wherever that data came from was accurate and as we know historically
data's not accurate for example in my neighborhood what i jokingly call white world we got
our cameras in for surveillance the the license plate cameras six months ago
there's other cameras that have been in for like two decades right so what's going to happen when that data
is analyzed i live in a low crime neighborhood because nobody took a picture of it it
must not have happened or because there wasn't that many police force there
what the truth is is we didn't get caught yeah well predictive analytics which
opens another box but i was just thinking that maybe we could check if there's a question from the audience before we
we get carried away here seeing if there's um any hands
otherwise i'll just okay there is one hi this is working thank you so much very
enlightening very interesting i've got question i'm not sure if i've completely understood for the ukraine war do you
know of any you call them any drones or is there any of these
vehicles being involved at the moment do you know about this did you hear about it thank you
my what i heard i think it's do we know if there's any drone usage in the ukraine war
yeah or something similar do you want to answer that the turkish are using biractors
to take out tanks and other things i mean there are loitering munitions
being used the u.s just sent some loitering munitions to ukraine
which loitering munitions to remind you all is uh basically like flying landmines like you fly them above you
know an area and then whenever it sees whatever it deems as a target it you know
will crash down and they're quite cheap usually and uh you know it's
it's like a it's a hovering cruise missile i guess um
i mean we're definitely opening things up for inquiry
with with starlink and how that that could potentially be used uh i know global hawks early on were
were flown uh over ukraine and i just know that because i was watching flight radar
you know there's a there's a website you can go to and you can see uh aircraft that are flying over a given
area um i mean as far as like u.s drones being
directly involved in the fighting no there isn't yet because that would
trigger a response from russia yeah just add a little monkey wrench
there's also like consumer drones there with molotov cocktails on them and things like that and looking at stuff
like that so and all of those are well not the same their line of sight they are drones being used there
yeah most most certainly now we don't have any more intelligence than
anyone else on that topic but going to social media there's plenty of drones
of all sorts commercial ones being expired inspired by the the warfare in in syria
that drop hand grenades or munitions line of sight there is
no u.s drones but plenty of other drones on on both sides
there's even statistics on on how many that has been shot down by each side and there was a couple of weeks ago a
big case with a lost drone crashing in uh zagreb
quite far away from the conflict uh almost as far as as we are at the moment as a matter of fact
so there i mean there's plenty of drones but what lisa and and sean
have presented though is that for those drones to really be game changers
in in in in military terms force multipliers you have to have that kill cloud
they have to be able to exchange that data they have to be able to know more of what they're doing
in order to to hit where they're supposed to hit and and yeah
that's the sensitive topic in in in that regard that at least with that commercial drone you
have somebody looking at a screen deciding and pressing the button that this this is
where i want to let go of this device whatever it might be do you have any more comments on the
question i mean when you when you look at something like white area surveillance uh i mean you're
taking images of entire cityscapes and there isn't enough analysts in the world
to go through all that footage uh so you have to use certain things to uh to to figure out
what you know what uh to determine what might be suspicious
patterns of activity and then an analyst would go and look further into it um
i mean that's not full automation but that's conceivably a type of automation
that would would exist probably at this point
so i mean the other thing that um that we would need to look at with regards to
ukraine or anywhere else is that obviously where's the data going and and who's making the decisions and when
you're talking about line of sight data usually it's the person that's actually physically there at least physically in
the proximity and and the things that we're talking about is i was in california
consummating a war overseas so um
yeah when you talk about the kill cloud and you talk about all this a lot of it has to do with data and a lot of it has
to do with where where there used to be a separation between what the military was allowed to look at
what um different contractors were allowed to look at i mean there's funny things about data
right the appointments that are at the veterans administration are done by a military contractor who creates bombs so
data's a funny thing yeah they have one question there just before
that one just to give the audience a little bit of idea and what are the kind of sensors
that we're talking here because all of us three have dimension sensors what do we mean by sensors what are those can you give a bunch of
examples infrared is a type of sensor it can
detect uh heat like if somebody's digging up in an area to plant an ied it would show up
as a different temperature you can have lidar which
would you might use for uh you know determining the the height of
uh somebody who's uh flying you know at yeah which lidars and most new phones
now um and not just for the face uh like
i mean when it's when you're using the uh the facial recognition stuff on your phone it's basically making a terrain
map of your face um and uh you know that's that's what it
would be doing in the war zone uh and when you're pointing at a person because you're flying overhead you you
might need uh a different type of sensor to determine you know what the height of
that person is like and also just to like give some context here um during the initial iraq
war they had these um these devices that were the size of a suitcase
um that uh gave people gave people on the ground information and today they're
the size of a cell phone so that is how quickly that this technology is advancing and the other just to give an
example i believe his name was laporte somebody who ended up from italy getting
droned and there was one other person there there was a drone above them for many hours and we'd like to think that
because we have the sensor on this device that's loitering for extended periods of time that we will know who's
down there and what's going on and evidenced by um by the death of
laporte that's not true and you can look at case after case after case after case where
these intended targets that were disproportionately hit by missiles
were the wrong target or they were listed as killing killed twice and we all know you can only die once
and um and there are a lot of we we want to have a sense of security
that what we can see mediated by a screen in two dimensions is what's really happening on the ground and it
will give somebody at a distance situational awareness i'm a skeptic
i call bs there's electro optical sensors which detect electric uh electrical emissions
synthetic aperture radar there's mz catchers which police are
using now everywhere to basically behave as a fake
cell phone tower so that your cell phone pings a given area so they know which cell phone numbers are within a certain
proximity yeah and those cell phones can be triangulated and targeted so you know if
some person is working around with a cell phone to follow them along we had a question in the back
and there same cell phones can be spoofed yes hi liz and shannon thank you so much for
your presentation um i wanted to ask because you are rightly
asking us to think of all these as a network a complex network
composed by many pieces and if you can elaborate a little bit on
some of the components of this very complex network especially here in
europe if you could explain
simply what is the role for instance of ramstein here in germany or sigonella in
italy lisa you have been to catania with us during the conference that we organized three years ago
so uh just to give some concrete examples of also what are the components of these
system
so basically like what the slide showed
is that the components of the system are things that you see every day when you use google
when you use google earth when you use um you know i can say that i went to google in my military uniform
he worked next to google servers um the blurred lines between corporations
and everything else um yeah there are weapons there are sensors there are all those things but when you're talking about this
technology it's the internet
i uh what she said but also i mean with uh ramstein like as far as a long-haul
perspective i mean they have systems like eagle eye that help integrate with commercial satellites
um so i mean that's another question you have to ask is like are commercial satellites a legitimate military target
for you know an adversary yeah and and also on that question i mean
remote work we've all been used to the last two years but military has been even longer
and with that remoteness you can be anywhere doing anything really there's no geo-location dependency on on on the
kill cloud so it's if i got the question correctly
i tell it commuted to three wars yes tatiana
maybe i use my mind and could we have these uh speakers a
little bit louder because we can't hear now with tatiana maybe but yes i have a question because
i think that if we think about the world implication of the
network-centric warfare as you say is also a lot of the collateral killing of the people
and i wanted to mention also daniel hale in this panel because also thanks to his
act of whistleblowing we were able to know even more about the
drone war and we will have tomorrow the screening of national bird and we will speak about
that but we are not on streaming so i wanted to ask lisa perhaps you can also mention a bit
what we learned from daniel and at the moment he is currently in prison so i think
we really need also to to speak a bit about his act
lisa can you daniel hale uh oh i'm gonna get teary-eyed um daniel hale is an amazing
young man you know there was one thing that he talked about there were a lot of people in the united
states that were on the no-fly list and they didn't know why and they didn't
know the process of getting on the list in the first place or getting off of it now this information was not classified
and when attorneys for people who were put on these no-fly list and their lives were interrupted
their attorneys didn't know how to fight as well because they didn't know the process
daniel hale released that unclassified information and care
an organization in the united states actually wrote an amicus brief for daniel
and in a book that was put out by the intercept he released some other information which
i won't talk about for many obvious reasons um but
he is sitting in a prison that is basically a prison that
is meant for terrorists that it blocks communications um
it's a controlled unit and um he's
pretty much stuck there for a couple more years
that document that was leaked to the intercepts has been out for years
and just last year uh i think was it around september or uh
the the last the last acts like of the us you know as they're leaving
um and trying to get people out on planes
in in afghanistan was was a strike that was on a humanitarian worker
and uh you know the us tried to defend it initially um they tried to say you know
we think we got the right guy but the only reason they figured that out that it wasn't was because there was a cctv
camera there new york times got a hold of it and they were able to you know
figure out that they you know they were just carrying water bottles because there's you know issues with water in
kabul um of course from like 15 000 feet looking down
uh you know somebody's in a like in a bit of a hizzy like trying to
you know get people out and they think there's going to be an attack on the on the airport imminently and
you know within a short amount of time i mean they're looking for anything they got some intel that there was a white
truck well i mean most of kabul drives white just white trucks everywhere
um and uh you know they were they were about to go to their graves to defend it
but you know they had they had visual evidence and you know they backtracked and they tried
to say well we followed the right procedures yes they followed the right procedures and that's the problem yeah they not
only said that they followed the right procedures they said that they followed the same procedures that they have
followed during the entire drone war and that this strike
was a caliph of somebody working for a california united states ngo
that was based about food you would think that they would have like a don't hit this target list or
something but apparently no um and daniel
basically said that there was a period of time where i believe it was 90
percent of the targets were the wrong targets and when i say targets
it's a euphemism for people blown to bits
by a missile a sing and and that leads people to wonder
like all of the wrong people how many innocent people were killed disproportionately by missiles and
daniel put that out there and not only that this was years ago and when you see the film national bird tomorrow you'll see
part of his story and you'll see a young man
who really has a solid conscience and i really urge you to read what he wrote in the book
yeah thank you thank you i'm looking forward to that movie tomorrow as well um
and what you said there lisa with with the 90 once again i keep thinking about
accountability and responsibility and who is there anybody that oversees this to
make sure that things are being done right and is it really working supposedly lawyers but i mean
they're defense lawyers i mean they're they're they're not there to scrutinize
they're there to justify and i mean
that's a huge issue as well do we have more questions from the audience or maybe online i don't know
yes online we have something
so well we have a question from the audience online um what to do when some gigantic
non-democratic country are fully dominated by high-tech modern ai based warfare
history goes in cycles what to what do we have learned
did you catch someone uh we didn't really hear they can yeah please do
what to do when some gigantic non-democratic country are fully dominated by high-tech modern
ai base warfare history goes in cycles what do we have learned from this
yeah that's a very relevant question like with all of this power there's a little bit how we started the panel if if one
country has all of this power what happens if that country becomes
non-democratic in it or populistic in one way or another
what then that's a good question that was quite more or less a question i asked but i
mean like most people when they think of a gigantic undemocratic country they could
possibly do this they think china and i mean we learn from people like edward snowden
is that uh you know we've had mass surveillance on people within the united states and in europe and other places
around the world for a while um and i mean
each like they they have wechat we have facebook
google you know any assortment of these these uh data
brokers i mean but at any given time nobody knows if they
they have back doors into these these systems any country can fall into
totalitarianism there is not a single country on planet earth that's immune come on now i mean
just because we have like i mean look at afghanistan in the 70s when it was the hippie trail and everybody went there it
was a peaceful nation and remember back in the day when afghans were not known as quote unquote terrorists when they
were actually known as the most hospitable people on earth living in the bread basket of
the world that's a while ago but it's the case that
i mean for me i'm a balance of power kind of gal we're humans we're flawed every nation
is a work in progress and to think that any one of us or any one of our nations
is going to be a democratic nation absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of its
institutional thought whether it's individual thought whether it's any of the above
fully agree lisa fully agree there's also just the issue is like i mean coders coders have a lot of power i mean
you you can write a code that bypasses the democratic process
that's a that's that's an issue too it's like i mean but but you don't see it you don't see it happening it's just
happening you know it's happening like um you know
everywhere i mean uh uh like with with cambridge analytica for instance i
mean you had this this company that was going around the world helping start revolutions
um and uh they used the ocean model which is like a measure of like
openness narcissism empathy all you know etc
and they lumped people into different categories based on their likes and like whatever
and they you know they were able to target ads to different people well
i mean if you have something like that you have an unfair advantage over the other
person that you know you're you're competing with so uh maybe
like if you're the only party doing that then you know that like
you're not seeing who the the the competition is or whatever
um there's there's a lot of ways that democracy can be undermined
a lot of ways because theoretically the kill cloud could be used for illicit influence on a
democratic election now because in the end all of these points are sensors and and there's different objectives it's not drones
flying around it's trying to convince people in a democratic society that should they should vote for what you
want and to a lot point to that actually already has happened in the world here
on on did we have more questions for online or
okay well should we take one so the second question is what do we do
when it's big companies and not nation states ruled by any convention
what do we do if it's about big companies like big tech and other large companies that we're seeing becoming
bigger than nation states they are not necessarily uh subject to international law and so
forth what do we do then that's why things need to change i mean basically the list that was used in the
election that gave us trump um one of the queries was uh people who
were neurotic because facebook has that somewhere right um all of the answers when you get
those pretty facial like those pictures how old are you or you know all of those questionnaires and queries and stuff
like that there is a back end of that to where all of that data is going and so
if it's a corporation then countries need to like europe has the ecchr right that's what it's called
there's some regulation to corporations but really facebook has the power of a nation state twitter's getting there and
all of the social media platforms have actually the more power of a nation state because they're not constrained by
borders and um and they have uh exponentially more
quote unquote members yeah i mean in in general uh transnational
corporations are a bit of a challenge to democratic processes i mean when you have
automakers that you know have a large sector of the job market
and they don't want to pay taxes they can threaten to move to another country that has more favorable tax
regulations i mean it's happening all the time um so i mean
like the this is this is something that you know states have not been able to really grapple with like
uh you know what what happens when you know johnson johnson decides you know i would
like we don't want to follow the us anymore um you know we're just going to hire our
own private military and launch a award so that we can sell band-aids
yeah or chiquita bananas wanting to take over a country because they want to be the ones growing the
bananas i mean i'm not saying that it would be but um there's there's there's clearly an
aspect to that issue of big corporations just as well as a country if
this massive technology comes in the wrong hands and instead of
well it's already bad enough when it's used in warfare overseas but if it's actually used towards their own
population or in the case of of a corporation where it's used
to influence a country in one way or another we have crossed several ethical borders
and we cannot rely on lawyers to solve that well the other thing is
i mean it's one thing to see an automaker you can see a car you can watch them leave the problem with modern
technology is that you cannot see it you don't get to look at the code because there's not only different laws
with regards to copyrights and patents but there's all kinds of laws saying
that these things can be kept secret and it's ubiquitous and it's it's
something and so the question is really when you're talking about technology how do you govern what you can't see
what if that what if the people didn't come out from google and talk about things that shall remain nameless out of
my mouth anyway um but what so i think that some of the laws that we
really need to focus on are some of the changes we need to focus on are transparency
just like there are nuclear arms inspectors that go into different countries to see if there's nukes
then we should have certain inspectors that maybe are coders or maybe have a knowledge of the
technology that go in and inspect corporations or companies i don't know that's just a thought
yeah i mean i see what you're saying and privacy data privacy as being something that should be enshrined
really hard in in democracies because otherwise it could be used against the purpose of the democracy
yeah um did we have another one online you said it was three years yeah we're kind
of running out of time but we can make another one yeah so the last question is what are your
thoughts on the kill cloud and how it challenges the definition of armed conflict will indeed be perpetual
warfare with the dcgs lisa
that's obvious what have we seen in afghanistan iraq syria
i mean there's several things that also contribute to this there's no draft so
no mother has to pay attention to keep her kid from going to war there's no reason that people have to
pay attention to these things if they're not in close proximity and some of those
foundational aspects definitely need change and then there's the incentive of those
who sell those weapons it's it's not like they're crying if if they get used up they get to sell more
unfortunately which also needs to be regulated so are we approaching um
the end so five minutes okay well we we can jab her on then
for sure did we have a question from the audience before yes please
i don't know i'm not sure this is a question but maybe more like a a question that i
couldn't quite answer to myself is it seems like for this kind of remote killing to
happen you need air superiority but you don't quite have that for
example in ukraine right now i understand correctly and of course the us exploited their air superiority over
afghanistan and iraq and other places to be able to do this but land vehicles
don't seem to be be able to be covered like moved
in an autonomous fashion or remote controlled fashion like you have you can move drones
into the air refuel them you know fly back refuel fly back you can't do that with a tank for example
so i'm curious what you think about that and of course of course this will change i think you're also thinking that so i'm
curious what your thoughts on that are oh yes it's you can do it with your television
you can do it with your toaster you can do it with a tank a truck you can
you can do remote operations because remember this is the internet of things
as long as it whatever it is can connect which
is pretty much ubiquitous anywhere right you can remotely control it
as far as like air superiority and all of that in ukraine the us isn't is not
in um ukraine um and so i don't know i mean with if you
look at that from a military perspective based on what they're doing in the air anyway
that's not necessarily an attribute at this time i mean air superiority in ukraine from
the u.s side would imply that there's a no-fly zone and a no-fly zone would be a direct act of war
so uh of course there isn't the uh i mean you're probably not seeing a lot
of the stuff that could be uh there um and uh you know i i hope i hope to god
that that never happens because uh if it does i think the world's in in a
really bad situation i mean this this conflict itself is not just having repercussions on europe i mean you're
getting like three thousand three million refugees uh probably potentially i mean
uh there's also the issue of food insecurity there's the the
yeah wheat or the fertilizers that russia provides um you know there's countries that are
dependent on that are a lot you know they're they're much more vulnerable
than any of our western countries and you know they they don't have a uh a cap
on the price of bread like france does so there's you know
you know when people start getting hungry then people are gonna start getting pissed and
i think you know when we talk about this ukraine crisis we need to consider that it's it's hurting the world it's it's not
just ukraine it's not just russia and when people start getting angry then
you have fertile ground for populists and non-democratic actors but
my answer to that question if you don't have our superiority drones are great especially smaller drones loitering
drones because you don't really need air support to to to use a commercial drone
or a small drone and if for some reason it's shot down well you can easily pick out another one
obviously these big american platforms that's a different thing but air superiority is not needed uh
toaster and television sure right but you have ieds that can be remote controlled by a satellite and you can
use sensor platforms to sit and wait on the other side of the planet to press a
button when somebody comes driving past so there's there's plenty ways of of going around it and and i fully agree
sean the the situation in ukraine can easily become a global
issue that we have not seen for centuries in terms of its negative
impact thank you very much sean and lisa it was a great talk and i hope you
enjoyed it as well in the audience looking forward to the next next session and and the the upcoming events
thank you very much [Applause]
tatiana yes also i wanted to thank all of you
lisa sean and daniel and so i wanted to inform the
public that we have now 20 minutes break and we will go on with the next panel in
which i think is a great continuation from this because we will also speak about the private contractor and all
these implications of the network-centric warfare also coming from the private sector um and also speaking
about the discourse of ai and the killing robots so please come back in 20 minutes and thank you again for these
really great keynotes and remember to get our book at the counter in which you
can also dig more deeper about the discourse of the kill cloud and whistleblowing thank you
[Applause] thank you
you
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