DRONE, Inc.: Marketing the Illusion of Precision Warfare
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Chatterjee, Pratap
Ling, Lisa
Barreto, Diani
Pratap Chatterjee will present his new report that exposes the contractors, technology and flaws behind the U.S. drone war in Afghanistan, Pakista, Syria and Yemen that has killed thousands of people.
... Please call. Please call... Thank you. Hi. Thank you very much for coming out for our talk. I actually am very glad that we got to follow Samira Hayat because you got to see some of the promise of the future of drones and what possibilities may exist. And I want to make it actually very clear to people that the video that you're watching, which lies in the future, is not the same as the kind of drones that the US military uses. So, for example, the video that you saw, which was really kind of a beautiful depiction of how to rescue victims, used a quadcopter, and the kind of footage that you saw was taken from actually quite a low height. What the US military uses is drones that fly at greater heights and use different technologies, which I'm about to demonstrate to you. And I think it's important to bear in mind the difference, and one of the critical differences here is the fact that this is part of a network system, and I'll get into that in a little bit. So this is our new report, which will come out at the end of the month. And I just want to summarize what the US military does, because what they say is they track terrorists, they only kill when absolutely necessary, and innocent people are almost never killed. And so the question you may ask is how? Well, most people actually don't ask that question, but the reason you're here, I imagine, is because you want to know how. So with apologies to the President of the United States, I want to tell you how. We only use the best technology, the best. We only use the smartest soldiers. They are very good, very smart. Trust me. And finally, we have magic. Now, I'm being a little sarcastic here, but the reason I am doing this is not because I don't think the soldiers are doing their best, or because the technology isn't amazing, but because I think we believe in magic. We believe when we see videos like the video of people being rescued, that that is the kind of technology that can find a terrorist on the field, anywhere in the world, track them down and kill them. So this is the equipment that we actually use in the war on terror. Because I'm a British citizen, I live in the United States, I pay taxes, and therefore I'm part of this problem. And I don't want to get into the detail of it, because this isn't going to be a very long talk. We only have about 15 minutes. And I want to show you a video of what it's like to be a drone soldier. And I want to put in those quotes, the smart soldiers, because I think people need to understand what a soldier is in the United States. A soldier is typically somebody aged 18 to 24, who is put in front of a computer or given a gun and sent to war. Typically now in the drone war, because it takes place from the United States, they're not actually present in the field. So they're not in Pakistan, they're not in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. Well, there is then something called a ground control station. And these ground control stations are little containers. They look the same wherever they are in the world. They actually transport them on planes, unpack them and set them up. So wherever you are in the world, you are in exactly the same setup. This is the kind of footage that they would see. But most important, I want to go back a little bit, is not actually the plane itself, but what's underneath it. This ball over here, the sensor ball. And what it contains in it is a video camera. It contains a laser illuminator by which you can point it at target, and a thermal imaging device. And finally, on the plane itself, it also has a phone tracking system. These are the kinds of technologies they're used for. And these are the sort of technical terms they use. Full motion video, thermal and infrared imagery, synthetic aperture radar. This is a short talk. I can't get into the detail of it. Normally this is an hour long talk with another hour of Q&A. So I want to get into some of the explanation how the system works. It's not the drone itself. It's actually really important to understand. The drone is one element of a bigger system, a military system that is global. And there's a commander in the US military who uses this description that I read, like his name is Deptula, he's now retired. And he says, when we think of drones, you must understand the drone is simply a piece of fiberglass in the sky. The most you made of fiberglass with sensors. And what's important is not the drone, but the sensors on it, but the fact that they feed into something called the distributed common ground system. And Lisa actually worked on the distributed common ground system. So she'll tell you more about it. Now, in the very short time that I have, I want to demonstrate to you the difference between the footage that you saw from Samira and what soldiers actually see. So this is actually the quality of the video footage. And I apologize because obviously we're not in front of a screen. I'm projecting it so there's more compression and things like that. And roughly the quality of what they actually see on a predator. In the newest videos, they can see something of this quality. Now, of course, you're perhaps further down in the hall, but it should be pretty obvious to you it is not possible to figure out whether these are men, women or children. You could easily be fooled. And in fact, the military is a system to try and figure out how good the quality of the imagery is. And it's called the Nier system, the video Nier system. And typically the predator carries equipment that can see a large truck. If you have a high definition and a faster moving thing, you can see an individual moving through a market. And it's only if you have something that's a very high quality, what's called Nier's 8, that you can actually make out somebody holding up a gun. So the reality is, in fact, from a predator which is flying about three kilometers up in the sky, the quality that you can actually see is only able to make out individuals as opposed to the specific people that they are. This is more detailed. I won't bore you with it. Those are the kinds of actual cameras they use. But what's most important is this thing over here. And unfortunately, you've got a little cut off. And this little number here is the speed of the transmission. And so one of the things that's really important in a drone is not the quality of the camera, but the quality of the transmission because that video has to go via satellite all the way across the other side of the world. And a predator can only actually transmit about three megabytes per second. And therefore, you can only see truck-sized objects. It's only once you get to a reaper that you can really make out individuals. You cannot see people's faces. You cannot make out whether or not they're holding a cell phone. This is the quality... This is high-quality imagery, near the eight. So that's the best they can do. So what does the military do? They rely on... And we talked a bit about video. I want to switch now to talking about thermal imagery. So what the US military does is they use these ten different kinds of technologies, and they combine them. So if one is not perfect, they then take the second technology and the third technology. The problem with having ten bad technologies is you have what's called confirmation bias. If you have one error, it is compounded by the second error. And so this is actually from something called the Kirk 97 Strike, which took place in 2010. And I don't know if you can read it, but basically I'll read the sentences highlighted in yellow. And this is a sensor operator, the camera operator talking to the pilot. He says, the only way I've been able to see a rifle, if they move them around when they're holding them, when with muzzle flashes out, flashes out, or slinging them across the shoulders. In other words, when you're sitting in Nevada watching a drone feed in Pakistan, the best you can hope is to see somebody moving a rifle like this. You can't actually see the detail. You don't know exactly what they're doing. So much so that the US military has on occasion in the middle of a firefight killed US soldiers because they thought that they were the militants. And the US uses these predator drones on the border, and border guards have actually testified to say that they're not able to tell the difference between a US border guard and somebody crossing from Mexico. And these are uniform guards. So it is important to talk about the quality and the capability of the transmission. I want to move forward quickly to perhaps the most important technology here, which is the tracking of your phone. So one of the reasons, because the military can't see what they try to do is find your phone. Now a lot of people believe, if you have a smartphone, that since you know where you are, that means the government must know where you are. And they tell you that actually that's not true. The reason is a cellphone transmits just like a radio in a circle. And the only way to figure out where a cellphone is, is you have to have two locations or three locations ideally, as you can see, where you can actually see where the two of them overlap. This is something called triangulation or trilateralation, where if you get three different signals and you get them to intersect, you can see where the individual is. But you have a bigger problem, which is the fact that in order to know where the phone is, you have to monitor it either from a fixed tower or, in this particular case, from a drone, but the drone is moving. And the drone knows its location only in reference to its GPS signal, which is sometimes not of very high quality. So I think I only have a couple of minutes left. So I want to try and rush through this. And I wanted to show you actually a demonstration of what the US military thinks of the quality of its... three minutes of the quality of the equipment. This is actually a secret document, quote-unquote secret, but you can get it on the Internet, that's where I got it. It says for official use only. It's the handbook that predator pilots use in Nevada. And I picked out two sections from it, and I listed each of the technologies that we talked about. The electro-optical, the video, the infrared, the synthetic aperture radar, which I didn't get into, and finally the ground-moving target indicator, which is another radar system. And you'll see as you lit up in yellow that each of these technologies, by the definition of the US military, doesn't work. The US military itself realizes the technology is only possible to track large objects, and therefore they're relying on... I want to go back to where I started. They're relying on these 18 to 24-year-old soldiers to interpret that imagery. I'm going to conclude with a few quotes from US military soldiers, and then we'll switch to the perspective of the soldiers in an animation that I made, and then Lisa will speak from that point of view. So here are some quotes from the US Border Patrol using the same videos, same predator drones, and they figured it was actually cheaper and better to use piloted planes on the border of the US and Mexico than to use drones because of the poor quality of the technology. Here's a quote from somebody who actually is a manufacturer from BAE, and he says, it's one thing to get technology, it's another thing to actually analyze it. There's a whole software section to this presentation that I can't make. A third, and then a final quote, is this concept, the idea that if you're sitting in a booth and you have magic technology available to you, you can transform the nature of war. And what Paul van Ripper says is that's actually not true. War has not changed. Just because you have a piece of equipment and you're sitting on the other side of the world, you cannot necessarily figure out who the enemy is. And that's the final quote. Oops. You just have to believe me. The final quote. Sorry. And then we'll play the video. Ah. Okay. So this is, now I've made this presentation actually to somebody who worked in the National Security Council, and this person told me that the commanders would often come and tell the politicians that their technology, the politician would say, we want this drone to go to Syria and show us something. And the commanders would say, well, we know this technology doesn't work. It's useful for certain things, but it cannot find a terrorist, find them guilty, and then be used to kill them. So essentially that's what this says. Now we're going to switch to this two and a half minute animation, and then Lisa's going to speak. And hopefully that will put it into some perspective. And we'll have intelligence disinterpreting. Technology was supposed to change our work. With drone surveillance, we can read data across the world in real time. We can track down enemies from the US and create less collateral damage. Sounds simple, right? Well imagine for a moment that you were given in order to track down and kill a suspected terrorist. You'll be provided a name for the photo. Give you a three minute warning, let's do it. Three minutes left. You'll have his name written down, and then constant surveillance. But what if you get the wrong name? You are a photo. You are a background. What if the time is literally that they're talking to women and have children? What if you can set the video camera and see the reasons, see the consensus for the relation trackers? And you are confident that you can find the right target. So this is a very common conversation. And so you can get data from a fundamental media question. But this is dependent on algorithms that are to be determined. Who lives, who dies? Algorithms they call when they make to the states. And given so just three forms of algorithms. So we are in time? We are in time? We are in time. Okay, good. But she has ten minutes, no? Okay, it's almost ended. We can now move on to the next question. We need to put it down in which case, I will put it down. Now you're on, so you get to speak to him. Hi, my name is Lisa Ling and I used to work on that system. I want to say something and make it pretty clear that I didn't give ProTap any classified information. He dug all of this stuff up on the internet without my help. However, what I would like to say is that what he was just talking about is technology. And technology is great, I love technology. I'm a geek at heart, I'm a hack. But what I want to say about technology is that what people miss in the conversation is the humanity. What we're talking about is a human life. So imagine you're sitting in your car and you're trying to find an ice cream parlor. You're trying to go get ice cream with your family and sometimes the GPF gets it wrong, right? Sometimes you end up in front of a burger joint or somewhere else, which is fine when you're looking for ice cream. But it's not okay when we're talking about human lives. It is absolutely not okay. It is not okay to have one technology that is not perfected and use it in an experimental way when we're talking about human lives. An American life is no better than somebody's life in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world. And the thing about all of this is that at least for us in America, we have to get out of this idea that if you come from a different country, if you wear a different dress, if you do a different thing, that you're a terrorist automatically. And we also have to understand that the laws of war, they're not straightforward. I went to Afghanistan and I went to a small community and there was a gentleman there and he was actually the police officer of the community and the thing about it is, is they dress in cultural clothing. And that cultural clothing, that the police officer in the community who carries a gun wears, is the same color clothing that the person who's the schoolteacher wears, that the child wears, that everybody else wears. So carrying a gun does not necessarily make you an enemy combatant. So one of my questions that I've had is, what are the rules of war anymore? What are they? What constitutes sovereignty if there's a device that can cross over borders? What are we talking about here when we're talking about human lives? What's important to us and where is the humanity in this conversation? Technology is awesome. I love it. But just because we have a hammer does not mean that everything is a nail. And what happened, even General McChrystal said, that pretty much when we drone one innocent civilian, that 10 enemies are made. And people are under the impression that there's this enemy, right? And that it's this finite number of people. And if we kill this many of that number of people, that eventually these wars will end. If what General McChrystal says, and every time we drone somebody, 10 new enemies are created, then how do these wars end? Ever. Well, I can tell you who profits. The banks profit, and the global weapons dealers profit. And humanity dies. Humanity fails, right? And a lot of the reason why we're here is because this is the fifth estate. And we're here because the fourth estate is failing us. The general news media, the people who get on television and give us our news are not talking about the humanity within the drone program. There's a lot of talk about how, you know, a bunch of propaganda messes with elections. Well, if we had a functional fourth estate, the checks and balances that are required for any healthy democracy would be there. And it is up to all of us as individuals, because we all participate, and especially the people in Germany want to know, where does Ramstein fall in this? This is a distributed system. And what that means is that the responsibility and the culpability is distributed among all of it. People look at a drone and take that as separate, right? That would be like taking one weapon away from an entire brigade and thinking that that brigade and group of soldiers is now no longer a group of soldiers. The whole thing is a weapon system. It's a weapon. It spans the globe. And there are many military bases. There are many pieces of communication. There are many things that are encompassed in this thing. And every year when I pay my taxes and it goes into the military industrial complex, I am complicit. I think that we have to stop taking this apart and going, well, how much responsibility does this over here have? And how much responsibility does this over here have? And start looking at the people who are funding this, who are driving this. And that is the global arms trade. That is policy, politics, all of that stuff. And we need to put it together. If you have one communications cable that does one thing that goes to your country, through your country, and it ends up with one innocent Pakistani dead, that country is complicit. Whether or not there is a weapon or one single thing or one little thing here or there doesn't matter. If you are any part of this global system, you're complicit. And we all as human beings need to stand up and understand that, you know, this idea, terrorism is an idea. And the other thing that we need to understand is that from the ground, nobody knows when there is going to be a piece of ordinance falling from this thing that's been flying over them for days. Imagine right now if we had a drone flying under us, nobody is immune. If you're a doctor, you can be droned. If you're an infant, you can be droned. If you're a teacher, you can be droned. Imagine if there is a drone above us right now. I'd be terrified. That's called terror. So in my worldview, armed drones are terror, and we cannot fight a war on terror with more terror. It can't be done. We can't win a war on terror by being terrorists. We can't do it. So if we want these wars to end, we all need to stand up. And if all of you want to learn more about this, coming out here shortly on the 18th is the movie National Bird. Myself and two other whistleblowers are in that film, and if you want to hear our stories, I hope that you go see it, that you share it with your friends, and that we all start talking about the human beings in all of this. Thank you. Thank you.
...  Please call.  Please call...  Thank you.  Hi. Thank you very much for coming out for our talk.  I actually am very glad that we got to follow Samira Hayat  because you got to see some of the promise of the future of drones  and what possibilities may exist.  And I want to make it actually very clear to people  that the video that you're watching, which lies in the future,  is not the same as the kind of drones that the US military uses.  So, for example, the video that you saw, which was really kind of a beautiful depiction  of how to rescue victims, used a quadcopter,  and the kind of footage that you saw was taken from actually quite a low height.  What the US military uses is drones that fly at greater heights  and use different technologies, which I'm about to demonstrate to you.  And I think it's important to bear in mind the difference,  and one of the critical differences here is the fact that this is part of a network system,  and I'll get into that in a little bit.  So this is our new report, which will come out at the end of the month.  And I just want to summarize what the US military does,  because what they say is they track terrorists, they only kill when absolutely necessary,  and innocent people are almost never killed.  And so the question you may ask is how?  Well, most people actually don't ask that question,  but the reason you're here, I imagine, is because you want to know how.  So with apologies to the President of the United States, I want to tell you how.  We only use the best technology, the best.  We only use the smartest soldiers.  They are very good, very smart.  Trust me.  And finally, we have magic.  Now, I'm being a little sarcastic here,  but the reason I am doing this is not because I don't think the soldiers are doing their best,  or because the technology isn't amazing,  but because I think we believe in magic.  We believe when we see videos like the video of people being rescued,  that that is the kind of technology that can find a terrorist on the field,  anywhere in the world, track them down and kill them.  So this is the equipment that we actually use in the war on terror.  Because I'm a British citizen, I live in the United States, I pay taxes,  and therefore I'm part of this problem.  And I don't want to get into the detail of it, because this isn't going to be a very long talk.  We only have about 15 minutes.  And I want to show you a video of what it's like to be a drone soldier.  And I want to put in those quotes, the smart soldiers,  because I think people need to understand what a soldier is in the United States.  A soldier is typically somebody aged 18 to 24,  who is put in front of a computer or given a gun and sent to war.  Typically now in the drone war, because it takes place from the United States,  they're not actually present in the field.  So they're not in Pakistan, they're not in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.  Well, there is then something called a ground control station.  And these ground control stations are little containers.  They look the same wherever they are in the world.  They actually transport them on planes, unpack them and set them up.  So wherever you are in the world, you are in exactly the same setup.  This is the kind of footage that they would see.  But most important, I want to go back a little bit,  is not actually the plane itself, but what's underneath it.  This ball over here, the sensor ball.  And what it contains in it is a video camera.  It contains a laser illuminator by which you can point it at target,  and a thermal imaging device.  And finally, on the plane itself, it also has a phone tracking system.  These are the kinds of technologies they're used for.  And these are the sort of technical terms they use.  Full motion video, thermal and infrared imagery, synthetic aperture radar.  This is a short talk. I can't get into the detail of it.  Normally this is an hour long talk with another hour of Q&A.  So I want to get into some of the explanation how the system works.  It's not the drone itself.  It's actually really important to understand.  The drone is one element of a bigger system, a military system that is global.  And there's a commander in the US military who uses this description that I read,  like his name is Deptula, he's now retired.  And he says, when we think of drones, you must understand the drone is simply a piece of fiberglass in the sky.  The most you made of fiberglass with sensors.  And what's important is not the drone, but the sensors on it,  but the fact that they feed into something called the distributed common ground system.  And Lisa actually worked on the distributed common ground system.  So she'll tell you more about it.  Now, in the very short time that I have, I want to demonstrate to you the difference  between the footage that you saw from Samira and what soldiers actually see.  So this is actually the quality of the video footage.  And I apologize because obviously we're not in front of a screen.  I'm projecting it so there's more compression and things like that.  And roughly the quality of what they actually see on a predator.  In the newest videos, they can see something of this quality.  Now, of course, you're perhaps further down in the hall,  but it should be pretty obvious to you it is not possible to figure out whether these are men, women or children.  You could easily be fooled.  And in fact, the military is a system to try and figure out how good the quality of the imagery is.  And it's called the Nier system, the video Nier system.  And typically the predator carries equipment that can see a large truck.  If you have a high definition and a faster moving thing, you can see an individual moving through a market.  And it's only if you have something that's a very high quality, what's called Nier's 8,  that you can actually make out somebody holding up a gun.  So the reality is, in fact, from a predator which is flying about three kilometers up in the sky,  the quality that you can actually see is only able to make out individuals  as opposed to the specific people that they are.  This is more detailed. I won't bore you with it.  Those are the kinds of actual cameras they use.  But what's most important is this thing over here.  And unfortunately, you've got a little cut off.  And this little number here is the speed of the transmission.  And so one of the things that's really important in a drone is not the quality of the camera,  but the quality of the transmission because that video has to go via satellite  all the way across the other side of the world.  And a predator can only actually transmit about three megabytes per second.  And therefore, you can only see truck-sized objects.  It's only once you get to a reaper that you can really make out individuals.  You cannot see people's faces.  You cannot make out whether or not they're holding a cell phone.  This is the quality... This is high-quality imagery, near the eight.  So that's the best they can do.  So what does the military do?  They rely on...  And we talked a bit about video.  I want to switch now to talking about thermal imagery.  So what the US military does is they use these ten different kinds of technologies,  and they combine them.  So if one is not perfect, they then take the second technology and the third technology.  The problem with having ten bad technologies is you have what's called confirmation bias.  If you have one error, it is compounded by the second error.  And so this is actually from something called the Kirk 97 Strike,  which took place in 2010.  And I don't know if you can read it, but basically I'll read the sentences highlighted in yellow.  And this is a sensor operator, the camera operator talking to the pilot.  He says, the only way I've been able to see a rifle, if they move them around when they're holding them,  when with muzzle flashes out, flashes out, or slinging them across the shoulders.  In other words, when you're sitting in Nevada watching a drone feed in Pakistan,  the best you can hope is to see somebody moving a rifle like this.  You can't actually see the detail.  You don't know exactly what they're doing.  So much so that the US military has on occasion in the middle of a firefight killed US soldiers  because they thought that they were the militants.  And the US uses these predator drones on the border,  and border guards have actually testified to say that they're not able to tell the difference between a US border guard  and somebody crossing from Mexico.  And these are uniform guards.  So it is important to talk about the quality and the capability of the transmission.  I want to move forward quickly to perhaps the most important technology here,  which is the tracking of your phone.  So one of the reasons, because the military can't see what they try to do is find your phone.  Now a lot of people believe, if you have a smartphone, that since you know where you are,  that means the government must know where you are.  And they tell you that actually that's not true.  The reason is a cellphone transmits just like a radio in a circle.  And the only way to figure out where a cellphone is,  is you have to have two locations or three locations ideally, as you can see,  where you can actually see where the two of them overlap.  This is something called triangulation or trilateralation,  where if you get three different signals and you get them to intersect,  you can see where the individual is.  But you have a bigger problem, which is the fact that in order to know where the phone is,  you have to monitor it either from a fixed tower or, in this particular case, from a drone,  but the drone is moving.  And the drone knows its location only in reference to its GPS signal,  which is sometimes not of very high quality.  So I think I only have a couple of minutes left.  So I want to try and rush through this.  And I wanted to show you actually a demonstration of what the US military thinks of the quality of its...  three minutes of the quality of the equipment.  This is actually a secret document, quote-unquote secret,  but you can get it on the Internet, that's where I got it.  It says for official use only.  It's the handbook that predator pilots use in Nevada.  And I picked out two sections from it,  and I listed each of the technologies that we talked about.  The electro-optical, the video, the infrared,  the synthetic aperture radar, which I didn't get into,  and finally the ground-moving target indicator, which is another radar system.  And you'll see as you lit up in yellow that each of these technologies,  by the definition of the US military, doesn't work.  The US military itself realizes the technology is only possible to track large objects,  and therefore they're relying on...  I want to go back to where I started.  They're relying on these 18 to 24-year-old soldiers to interpret that imagery.  I'm going to conclude with a few quotes from US military soldiers,  and then we'll switch to the perspective of the soldiers  in an animation that I made, and then Lisa will speak from that point of view.  So here are some quotes from the US Border Patrol using the same videos,  same predator drones, and they figured it was actually cheaper and better  to use piloted planes on the border of the US and Mexico  than to use drones because of the poor quality of the technology.  Here's a quote from somebody who actually is a manufacturer from BAE,  and he says, it's one thing to get technology, it's another thing to actually analyze it.  There's a whole software section to this presentation that I can't make.  A third, and then a final quote, is this concept,  the idea that if you're sitting in a booth and you have magic technology available to you,  you can transform the nature of war.  And what Paul van Ripper says is that's actually not true.  War has not changed.  Just because you have a piece of equipment and you're sitting on the other side of the world,  you cannot necessarily figure out who the enemy is.  And that's the final quote.  Oops.  You just have to believe me.  The final quote.  Sorry.  And then we'll play the video.  Ah.  Okay.  So this is, now I've made this presentation actually to somebody who worked in the National Security Council,  and this person told me that the commanders would often come and tell the politicians  that their technology, the politician would say,  we want this drone to go to Syria and show us something.  And the commanders would say, well, we know this technology doesn't work.  It's useful for certain things, but it cannot find a terrorist,  find them guilty, and then be used to kill them.  So essentially that's what this says.  Now we're going to switch to this two and a half minute animation,  and then Lisa's going to speak.  And hopefully that will put it into some perspective.  And we'll have intelligence disinterpreting.  Technology was supposed to change our work.  With drone surveillance, we can read data across the world in real time.  We can track down enemies from the US and create less collateral damage.  Sounds simple, right?  Well imagine for a moment that you were given in order to track down and kill a suspected terrorist.  You'll be provided a name for the photo.  Give you a three minute warning, let's do it.  Three minutes left.  You'll have his name written down, and then constant surveillance.  But what if you get the wrong name?  You are a photo. You are a background.  What if the time is literally that they're talking to women and have children?  What if you can set the video camera and see the reasons,  see the consensus for the relation trackers?  And you are confident that you can find the right target.  So this is a very common conversation.  And so you can get data from a fundamental media question.  But this is dependent on algorithms that are to be determined.  Who lives, who dies?  Algorithms they call when they make to the states.  And given so just three forms of algorithms.  So we are in time?  We are in time?  We are in time.  Okay, good.  But she has ten minutes, no?  Okay, it's almost ended.  We can now move on to the next question.  We need to put it down in which case,  I will put it down.  Now you're on, so you get to speak to him.  Hi, my name is Lisa Ling and I used to work on that system.  I want to say something and make it pretty clear that  I didn't give ProTap any classified information.  He dug all of this stuff up on the internet without my help.  However, what I would like to say is that  what he was just talking about is technology.  And technology is great, I love technology.  I'm a geek at heart, I'm a hack.  But what I want to say about technology  is that what people miss in the conversation is the humanity.  What we're talking about is a human life.  So imagine you're sitting in your car  and you're trying to find an ice cream parlor.  You're trying to go get ice cream with your family  and sometimes the GPF gets it wrong, right?  Sometimes you end up in front of a burger joint  or somewhere else, which is fine when you're looking for ice cream.  But it's not okay when we're talking about human lives.  It is absolutely not okay.  It is not okay to have one technology that is not perfected  and use it in an experimental way  when we're talking about human lives.  An American life is no better than somebody's life in Pakistan  or anywhere else in the world.  And the thing about all of this is that  at least for us in America, we have to get out of this idea  that if you come from a different country,  if you wear a different dress,  if you do a different thing, that you're a terrorist automatically.  And we also have to understand that the laws of war,  they're not straightforward.  I went to Afghanistan and I went to a small community  and there was a gentleman there  and he was actually the police officer of the community  and the thing about it is, is they dress in cultural clothing.  And that cultural clothing,  that the police officer in the community who carries a gun wears,  is the same color clothing that the person who's the schoolteacher wears,  that the child wears, that everybody else wears.  So carrying a gun does not necessarily make you an enemy combatant.  So one of my questions that I've had is,  what are the rules of war anymore?  What are they?  What constitutes sovereignty if there's a device  that can cross over borders?  What are we talking about here when we're talking about human lives?  What's important to us and where is the humanity in this conversation?  Technology is awesome. I love it.  But just because we have a hammer does not mean that everything is a nail.  And what happened, even General McChrystal said,  that pretty much when we drone one innocent civilian,  that 10 enemies are made.  And people are under the impression that there's this enemy, right?  And that it's this finite number of people.  And if we kill this many of that number of people,  that eventually these wars will end.  If what General McChrystal says,  and every time we drone somebody, 10 new enemies are created,  then how do these wars end?  Ever.  Well, I can tell you who profits.  The banks profit, and the global weapons dealers profit.  And humanity dies.  Humanity fails, right?  And a lot of the reason why we're here is because this is the fifth estate.  And we're here because the fourth estate is failing us.  The general news media, the people who get on television  and give us our news are not talking about the humanity within the drone program.  There's a lot of talk about how, you know, a bunch of propaganda messes with elections.  Well, if we had a functional fourth estate,  the checks and balances that are required for any healthy democracy would be there.  And it is up to all of us as individuals, because we all participate,  and especially the people in Germany want to know,  where does Ramstein fall in this?  This is a distributed system.  And what that means is that the responsibility and the culpability is distributed among all of it.  People look at a drone and take that as separate, right?  That would be like taking one weapon away from an entire brigade  and thinking that that brigade and group of soldiers is now no longer a group of soldiers.  The whole thing is a weapon system.  It's a weapon.  It spans the globe.  And there are many military bases.  There are many pieces of communication.  There are many things that are encompassed in this thing.  And every year when I pay my taxes and it goes into the military industrial complex, I am complicit.  I think that we have to stop taking this apart and going,  well, how much responsibility does this over here have?  And how much responsibility does this over here have?  And start looking at the people who are funding this, who are driving this.  And that is the global arms trade. That is policy, politics, all of that stuff.  And we need to put it together.  If you have one communications cable that does one thing that goes to your country, through your country,  and it ends up with one innocent Pakistani dead, that country is complicit.  Whether or not there is a weapon or one single thing or one little thing here or there doesn't matter.  If you are any part of this global system, you're complicit.  And we all as human beings need to stand up and understand that, you know, this idea, terrorism is an idea.  And the other thing that we need to understand is that from the ground,  nobody knows when there is going to be a piece of ordinance falling from this thing that's been flying over them for days.  Imagine right now if we had a drone flying under us, nobody is immune.  If you're a doctor, you can be droned.  If you're an infant, you can be droned.  If you're a teacher, you can be droned.  Imagine if there is a drone above us right now.  I'd be terrified.  That's called terror.  So in my worldview, armed drones are terror, and we cannot fight a war on terror with more terror.  It can't be done.  We can't win a war on terror by being terrorists.  We can't do it.  So if we want these wars to end, we all need to stand up.  And if all of you want to learn more about this, coming out here shortly on the 18th is the movie National Bird.  Myself and two other whistleblowers are in that film, and if you want to hear our stories,  I hope that you go see it, that you share it with your friends,  and that we all start talking about the human beings in all of this.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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