Brookings: Topics - Law and Security

Eyes in the Sky: The Domestic Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems

John Villasenor — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:56:00 -0400

Editor's Note: On May 17, John Villasenor testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the important topic of privacy and unmanned aircraft systems, often referred to as drones.

Good morning Chairman Sensenbrenner, Ranking Member Scott, and Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify today on the important topic of privacy and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).^{^[1]}

I am a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. I am also a professor at UCLA, where I hold appointments in the Electrical Engineering Department and the Department of Public Policy. The views I am expressing here are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of the Brookings Institution or the University of California. Portions of my testimony today are adapted from a law review article I recently published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.^{^[2]}

UAS, often referred to as “drones,” can be employed in an endless variety of civilian applications, the overwhelming majority of them beneficial. However, like any technology, UAS can also be misused. The most common concern regarding domestic UAS relates to their potential impact on privacy. This is a legitimate concern. Existing laws and jurisprudence provide an important foundation, but they also leave many questions unanswered.

For non-government operators, determining when UAS use violates privacy involves the tension between First Amendment freedoms and common law and statutory privacy protections. With respect to government-operated UAS, the Fourth Amendment is of course central to the privacy question. While the Supreme Court has never explicitly considered warrantless observations using UAS, a careful examination of Supreme Court privacy jurisprudence suggests that the Constitution will provide a much stronger measure of protection against government UAS privacy abuses than is widely appreciated. The Fourth Amendment has served us well since its ratification in 1791, and there is no reason to suspect it will be unable to do so in a world where unmanned aircraft are widely used.

This does not mean that there is no need for additional statutory UAS privacy protections. However, when drafting new laws it is critical to adopt a balanced approach that recognizes the inherent difficulty of predicting the future of any rapidly changing technology. Although unmanned aircraft pose real and increasingly well-recognized privacy concerns, they also offer real and much less widely understood benefits. A dialog conducted with full awareness of this balance will be much more likely to lead to positive policy outcomes.

[1] The acronym “UAS” is also sometimes expanded to “unmanned aerial systems.”

[2] John Villasenor, Observations From Above: Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Privacy, 36 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 457 (2013).

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John Villasenor

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

President Obama’s Visit to Mexico: Key Anti-Crime Issues

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:57:00 -0400

Up to two weeks ago it looked like President Barack Obama would be going to Mexico with a very strong hand. Had the gun control measures, which the Obama administration pushed as one of its key domestic issues in the second term, passed in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. President could have arrived in Mexico next week having delivered on a sticky bilateral issue: For more than a decade, successive Mexican presidents have been demanding greater weapons checks and tighter gun control from the United States, with the hope that such measures would reduce the excruciatingly high criminal violence in Mexico.

Mexico’s other long-term demand has been immigration reform: increasing legal job opportunities for Mexican workers, reducing deportations, and allowing Mexican families to travel and connect without great personal security and legal risks. President Obama might yet be in a position to remove the immigration thorn from the U.S.-Mexico bilateral relationship. Clearly, any immigration reform will not pass before he goes to Mexico next week. But he can credibly indicate that his administration has made immigration reform a key domestic priority and that there is more congressional movement on immigration, including on offering a path to citizenship to the millions of undocumented migrants living in the United States, than there has been in years. And at least until the Boston terrorist attacks, it appeared that immigration reform would finally pass in the U.S. Congress. Those opposing immigration reform or demanding a tightening of borders and fail-proof screening that cannot realistically be achieved, are seizing on the Boston attacks as an excuse for derailing the immigration reform legislation. But the prospect of reform is still very much alive.

In addition to gun control and immigration, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will want to talk economics. Upon assuming office last year, he announced that he would like to break out of the Mexico-U.S. relationship being captured in the prism of the drug trade violence and collapsed into anti-crime cooperation, and to have the relationship refocus on global and bilateral trade and energy issues.

But security issues will inevitably be on the agenda, and the discussions may not be easy. For a long time, Washington was suspicious that if the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which President Peña Nieto leads returned to power, it might be tempted by its old ways —again lessening Mexico’s determination to tackle organized crime and its penetration into Mexico’s law enforcement and administrative institutions and its grip on large segments of Mexico’s society. Since being elected, President Peña Nieto has repeatedly disavowed any negotiations with criminal groups, but he has also maintained that the priority for his government will be not to disrupt drug flows to the United States (as his predecessor President Felipe Calderón sought to do), but to minimize the terrible drug violence in Mexico. Both the reduced focus on disrupting drug flows and the new emphasis on reducing violence, especially should it lead to changed interdiction and targeting patterns in Mexico, might be difficult to sell to Washington and would require the United States to abandon some of its established, albeit often ineffective and counterproductive, international anti-crime and anti-drug policies.

For its part, the new Mexican government has been surprised and made uncomfortable by the extent and tightness of U.S.-Mexico anti-crime cooperation that was established during the Calderón years. Not only has much of the strategic and tactical intelligence for interdiction and other anti-cartel operations come from the United States, but also, and in an unprecedented way, U.S. advisors have become intimately involved in helping to design and shape tactical interdiction operations of several Mexican entities used for anti-cartel law enforcement as well as in reforming law enforcement institutions in Mexico. Conscious of sovereignty, eager to establish tight control of these security institutions, and seeking to redirect Mexico’s security policy to reducing violence, the Peña Nieto administration has been mulling over whether or not and how to shape U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. It needs to take care not to throw the baby out with the bath water. U.S. cooperation, including intelligence provision and law enforcement reform assistance, continue to be greatly valuable for Mexico, and Mexico is hardly in the position to do without them.

For its part, Washington needs to recognize that seeking to reduce criminal violence, including killings, kidnappings, and extortion, is the right priority for Mexico, and indeed, should be a key goal for law enforcement in any country. The United States should wholeheartedly support that objective in Mexico. But achieving violence reduction in Mexico will not be easy, as President Peña Nieto and his security team have already learned in their first six months. Major questions remain about the details, operationalization, and actual implementation of the security strategy Peña Nieto has outlined. As I detail in my report Peña Nieto’s Piñata: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mexico’s New Security Policy against Organized Crime, many components of the new strategy, such as the organizational reshuffle of Mexico’s security institutions, the establishment of a new gendarmerie, or even the youth-crime prevention focus (important as the last element is for any sustainable long-term strategy to reduce criminality) do not easily, quickly, and directly translate into violence reduction in Mexico.

Paradoxically, the policy that is most directly available to Mexico to reduce criminal violence is the one for which it needs the most cooperation from the United States: changing targeting patterns. Instead of deploying the Mexican military or federal police or the gendarmerie (whenever it will actually become available) merely in response to wherever violence intensely breaks out and making cartel capo decapitation the core of its strategy, Mexico needs to prioritize targeting in a way that will reduce violence. That means abandoning both top-level decapitation and reactive deployment of forces. Instead, a wiser interdiction pattern would be more selective and based on an analysis of which law enforcement actions will stimulate what responses and actions from and among the criminal groups. The changed interdiction pattern can include focusing on the most violent group in a particular area and focusing on the middle layer, as opposed to the top capos, of a cartel. As I also explain in another report, Focused Deterrence, Selective Targeting, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime: Concepts and Practicalities, strategically choosing the basis of prioritized targeting and moving away from interdiction based only ad hoc on how intelligence becomes available requires careful calibration and an uneasy balancing of the pros and cons of each possible option for prioritized interdiction. It often entails uneasy tradeoffs.

Nonetheless, Washington should not define the prioritized interdiction approach (which can mean not vigorously going after some groups for a while) as yet another manifestation of the corruption of Mexican law enforcement institutions by organized crime groups. In turn, explaining to the United States that prioritizing law enforcement actions is smart policy, not weakness and corruption, requires that Mexico maintains extensive discussions with Washington.

What in the long term will increase the rule of law in Mexico is ensuring that communities obey laws, by increasing the likelihood that illegal behavior and corruption will be punished via effective law enforcement, but also by creating a social, economic, and political environment in which the laws are consistent with the needs of the people and allow citizens to embrace their police forces and state presence. Reducing criminal violence is a key element. Adopting a smarter interdiction pattern is an important first step.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Counterinsurgency, Counternarcotics, and Illicit Economies in Afghanistan: Lessons for State-Building

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Editor's note: The following excerpt introduces a book chapter produced by Vanda Felbab-Brown for the Center for Complex Operations volume, Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization, published in April 2013. In this chapter, Felbab-Brown analyzes U.S. counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan since 2001, how the Obama administration broke with the dominant counternarcotics framework, and the potentially problematic side effects of counternarcotics success.

Since 2001, Afghanistan has become synonymous with the narco-state and the spread of crime and illegality. In 2007 and 2008, the Afghan drug economy reached levels unprecedented since at least World War II. Although the drug economy has declined since, the decrease has largely been driven by the saturation of the global drug market and by poppy crop disease rather than the policies of the international community and the Afghan government. Although several other illicit economies thrive in Afghanistan including the smuggling of legal goods, narcotics receive by far the most attention because they generate the largest profits and the greatest international opprobrium.

Narcotics production and counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control there and worldwide, but also for security, reconstruction, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counternarcotics policies adopted after 9/11 not only failed to reduce the size and scope of the illicit economy in Afghanistan but also had serious counterproductive effects on peace, state-building, and economic reconstruction.

In 2009, the Obama administration wisely decided to scale back eradication efforts in Afghanistan, courageously breaking with 30 years of counternarcotics policies that focused on ineffective forced eradication of illicit crops as a way to reduce the supply of drugs and to bankrupt belligerents. But the effectiveness of its counternarcotics policies there—interdiction focused on Taliban-linked traffickers and alternative livelihoods efforts—has been challenged by implementation difficulties and is ultimately dependent on major progress in improving the security situation and governance in Afghanistan. As of fall 2011, governance in Afghanistan had been steadily deteriorating, with corruption and ethnic tensions rising and political patronage networks becoming more exclusionary, while any security improvements following the 2010 U.S. military surge remain extremely fragile. A civil war post-2014 remains a very likely outcome, with the corollary thriving of the drug trade.

This chapter first details the evolution of U.S. counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan since 2001, situating the changes in the policy within two conceptual frameworks. Next, it describes how the Obama administration broke with the dominant counternarcotics framework in an attempt to synchronize counternarcotics policies with its counterinsurgency efforts. That section also analyzes the implementation challenges President Barack Obama’s counternarcotics strategy encountered—from the side effects of its interdiction focus, to poor governance and the inability to decide whether and how to combat broader corruption in Afghanistan, to defining alternative livelihoods efforts as narrow buying support programs rather than long-term sustainable development. Next, the chapter considers the likely security and political conditions in Afghanistan after a reduction in U.S. combat forces there in 2014. Subsequently, it explores two oft-ignored but potentially problematic side effects of any future counternarcotics success in Afghanistan: what illegal economy may replace the opium poppy economy if it is reduced, and where the opium poppy economy is likely to shift. In conclusion, the chapter offers broader lessons for dealing with illicit economies in the context of counterinsurgency and state-building.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: Center for Complex Operations

A Discussion About Drones

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with Charlie Rose, Peter W. Singer joins Michael Boyle of LaSalle University, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, and Scott Shane of The New York Times to discuss the revolutionary nature of drone technology as well as the dilemmas—strategic, ethical, political—that they present. Read an excerpt below.

Charlie Rose: Peter Singer, put this in the context of warfare overall.

Peter Singer: Well you have a revolutionary change that’s happening in the technology of war. Now, the question here is, are we talking about war or counterterrorism—we’ve got things conflated. But when you look at the technology of drones, it’s a gamechanger in war. It’s something along the level of the introduction of gunpowder or the steam engine or the airplane. By that I mean it gives you a series of capabilities that we didn’t imagine we’d have a generation ago, but also it’s giving us a series of dilemmas that we also didn’t imagine we’d be having a generation ago. And they’re dilemmas that are political, strategic, tactical, all the way down to ethical and legal.

Now one thing that’s happening here I think that’s a challenge is that we’re seeing things conflated. So, just as the example that Scott gave of the conflation between the JSOC kill list and process—the Joint Special Operations Command on the military side—and the one that the CIA is doing, both of which are taking place in the shadow wars that are out there.

Peter Singer: Signature strikes is an illustration of this, where on one hand we’ve seen administration officials say either “we don’t do that,” and other times we’ve heard them say “we do do that, but this is why.” But then we also have a variety of tactics beyond signature strikes that, for example, in an overt military operation you would never utilize.

One’s called a 'double tap strike,' which is where you strike at a target and then you wait for the rescuers to come about and you strike again. Now that’s been something that we’ve pointed out that if adversaries did that in Afghanistan or Iraq we would say “how dare you, this is evidence of how bad they are.” Yet there have been reports that we may have conducted strikes in a similar manner. Don’t know whether they’re confirmed or not.

But what I’m getting at here is that a civilian, political appointee lawyer, operating under a very different set of laws and priorities, looks at that issue and the question of what tactics you might bring, what rules of engagement you operate under, very differently from how a military lawyer would. And that’s part of the importance of whether these do shift from intelligence agency to military, but also whether they stay in the complete black ops world or whether we own up to the fact that these are not covert operations anymore, they’re frankly not so covert, and we need to stop running away from them and embrace the fact that we are doing them and these are the rules we’re going to operate under and actually stick and follow those rules.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Charlie Rose

Image Source: © KCNA KCNA / Reuters

Still Knee-Deep In Poppy: The Evolution of Counter-Narcotics Policies in Afghanistan

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:20:00 -0400

Editor’s note: The following excerpt introduces a book chapter produced by Vanda Felbab-Brown for the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) volume, Partners for Stability, published in March 2013. In this chapter, Dr. Felbab-Brown explains how international and domestic counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan cannot be successful without first achieving substantial security improvements and good governance within the country.

Perhaps nowhere in the world have a country and the international community faced such a strong illicit drug economy as in Afghanistan. In 2007 and 2008, the economy reached levels unprecedented in the world at least since World War II. But neither opium poppy cultivation nor heroin production is a new, post-2001 phenomenon: each robustly existed during the Taliban era and before. Although opium production has declined in Afghanistan since 2008, the decrease has largely been driven by the saturation of the global drug market and by poppy crop disease, rather than being the outcome of the policies of the international community and the Afghan government.

Narcotics production and counter-narcotics policies in Afghanistan are of critical importance not only for drug control, but also for the security, reconstruction, and rule-of-law efforts in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, many of the counter-narcotics policies adopted during most of the 2000s not only failed to reduce the size and scope of the illicit economy in Afghanistan, but also had serious counterproductive effects on the other objectives of peace, state-building, and economic reconstruction. In a courageous break with a previous counterproductive policy, the Obama administration wisely decided in 2009 to scale back poppy eradication in Afghanistan, but it has struggled to implement its new strategy effectively. Although it backed away from centrally-led eradication, Afghan governor-led eradication persists. The interdiction policy adopted by ISAF at times approximates eradication in its negative effects on farmers’ well-being and their receptivity to Taliban mobilization, and rural development policies have failed to address structural drivers of poppy cultivation. Moreover, despite the surge in U. S. military forces adopted in December 2009 and important improvements in security in Afghanistan’s south, the 129,469 U. S. and ISAF forces deployed as of May 2012 have not stabilized other parts of Afghanistan, such as the east. The Taliban and related insurgencies have not been robustly defeated even in the south, and they maintain an important foothold in Afghanistan’s north as well. As U. S. and ISAF troops are preparing to depart Afghanistan by 2014, they are handing over an on-going war to Afghan security forces. Although both Russia and the United States have supported counter-narcotics policies in Central Asia, such as interdiction training, these efforts have achieved little systematic effect on either reducing illicit flows, the strength of organized crime, and corruption in the region or encouraging regional cooperation.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: German Council on Foreign Relations

Image Source: © Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

Indonesia Field Report IV: Wildlife Trafficking, Illegal Fishing, and Lessons from Anti-Piracy Efforts

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Cruel Wildlife Market

Hundreds of cages with birds, lizards, bats, and mammals were stacked upon one another, with tens or sometimes even hundreds of specimens crammed into one cage. Several dozen white-eyes (a bird genus) were squeezed into a cage appropriate for one canary. At least a hundred bats were stuffed into another container. In a cage atop this stack, more than fifty green agama dragon lizards, some dead, with their bodies rotting amidst those still alive, were desperately competing on the ceiling of their container for a little of bit space. Two baby civets, on sale for 400,000 Indonesia rupiah each (about USD 40) were shoved into an adjacent box. Like the rest of the unfortunate animals – squirrels, chipmunks, black-naped orioles, drongos, leafbirds, shamas, mynas, partridges, and the highly-prized and highly-threatened lories – the civets had no water and no protection from the full blast of the hot Indonesian sun. Many of the animals would die in this (in)famous Yogyakarta bird market before they were sold to new owners.

Meanwhile, however, the Yogyakarta bird market, like other wildlife markets in Indonesia and East Asia, serves as a perfect incubator for diseases that can mutate and jump among species, such as avian influenza and SARS. Such zoogenic diseases could potentially set off a catastrophic pandemic killing millions of people. The spread of the viruses to domestic animals and people is exacerbated by the trade in roosters for cock-fights, also on sale in the market amidst the wild-caught birds and animals. Even the animals sold before they die in the hands of their traders often do not survive as household pets – typically the fate of species such as woodpeckers, eagles, and owls.

The inhumane treatment of the animals in the many wildlife markets I visited during my research across the Indonesian archipelago was as heart-wrenching as the devastation this unmitigated trade in wild birds and other animals wreaks upon Indonesia’s ecosystems. Orange-headed thrushes and white-crested laughing thrushes, available in cages to eager buyers, are now exceedingly rare in the remnants of Indonesia’s forests, for example.

To reduce the consternation and criticism of international tourists, Yogyakarta’s wildlife market was moved more out of sight – away from its previous location next the frequently visited old royal palace. Nevertheless, enterprising Indonesian young men on motorcycles still bring Western tourists to the market’s new location. A young German woman, with a Lonely Planet Indonesia guidebook tucked in her purse, was eagerly taking photos of the cages, her very short shorts and tanktop as much an affront to Indonesia’s cultural sensitivities in this conservative Muslim city as the appalling conditions of the traded animals are to Westerners. An emblematic introduction to the fusion and confusion of conflicting values in this modernizing yet tradition-bound country?

Hunters and Buyers

In the Indonesian Market

Indonesian buyers and sellers rarely exhibit any qualms about the ecological impacts of the trade and the conditions of the animals. Wildlife trade, particularly in birds, is deeply entrenched in Java’s culture. A Javanese proverb states that every man should have a house, a horse (these days often interpreted as a car, or at least a motorcycle), a wife, a kris (a traditional dagger), and a bird. Because of this strongly-held tradition, at least one third of Javanese households keeps birds, I was told by representatives of a joint international-Indonesian environmental NGO, whom I interviewed on the condition of anonymity. Indeed, strolling through middle-class neighborhoods of Javanese towns reveals house after house with several cages of prinias, bulbuls, orioles, laughing thrushes. Eerily, however, there are precious few birds in the Javanese countryside, most having been caught by traders.

The bird trade is so culturally-ingrained that only some environmental NGOs operating in Indonesia dare oppose it. “Our current priority is to preserve and try to rehabilitate the devastated Indonesian ecosystems. The bird trade is just too difficult; too culturally sensitive. Attempting to stop it could get us shut down or hamper our other operations, such as trying to restore at least a tiny sliver of Indonesia’s lowlands forests. The Indonesian police are not interested in the bird trade anyway. We count ourselves lucky when we get law enforcement action against endangered mammals,” one of the NGO representatives told me after I repeatedly assured him that I would not identify either him or the NGO.

But even in this tradition-oriented society, tastes in the wildlife market do evolve. Unfortunately, in Indonesia and East Asia, wildlife tastes have been changing all too often toward a more expanded and voracious appetite for wild animals and wildlife products. One of the latest fads in Indonesia is keeping lizards; and young middle- and upper-class Indonesian men on the make now prefer them to birds.

Still, rare and highly-endangered birds, such as lories from Papua, or the Bali starling, continue to be highly desirable and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. A summer 2012 biological survey revealed that only 31 Bali starlings were left in the Bali Barat National Park, a conservationist involved in the survey told me. Then in July 2012, poachers coated a few trees with glue and captured six of the starlings in the park, eliminating one fifth of the population in the wild. A release of captive-bred birds is planned to boost the population of the species whose survival hangs on a thread as thin as the fishing nets that poachers also use to catch the birds. But without better law enforcement in the park and against buyers throughout the archipelago, and without a dramatic decline in the desirability of the Bali starlings by Javanese bird owners, will the released birds have any chance?

Some of the poachers are desperately poor. In the Moluccas or Papua, they are sometimes paid as little as a bowl of noodles for a day’s hunting, or a pack of cigarettes for a rare bird. But that pack of cigarettes can be enough to extirpate an endangered species. And traders can be shockingly frivolous in how many individual birds or animals they are willing to have killed for the survival of a few that would bring high profits on the international market. Ambonese hunters, mostly very poor, will be paid five dollars for a caught black-capped lori. In order to smuggle out the protected endangered and highly-desired species, traders will then shove the small birds into plastic bottles tied together, throw them into the sea, and fish them out miles away from the island and any possible law enforcement action. With the surviving birds fetching up to thousands of dollars, even a 95% loss of the captured birds (many would suffocate in the plastic bottles) will generate handsome profits. For a fistful of dollars, a species can be rapidly wiped out.

Keeping birds and consuming products from wild animals has a long history in Indonesia. The Dayak communities in Kalimantan, for example, have hunted hornbills for their feathers for centuries. In northern Sulawesi, the Christian community has had a strong taste for bushmeat, with anything that can be hunted often being highly craved for dinner (and very pricey in the Langowan and Tomohon bushmeat markets). One of the greatest delicacies—its consumption being a symbol of status and affluence -- is the black crested macaque, a primate endemic to Sulawesi. Over the past three to four decades, the species has been experiencing an 80% decline. Although deforestation in Sulawesi has eliminated much of the macaques’ habitat, hunting these days actually poses a far greater threat to the species. In addition to its highly-prized meat, its fur is used in traditional dancing to signify bravery; and its skulls decorate masks and costumes.

Protecting the threatened primate has become an environmental priority for conservationists in northern Sulawesi. In an inspired move, an NGO tried to reduce some of the hunting pressures on the macaques by producing artificial skulls looking identical to the real ones, so the replicas would be used for traditional costumes. Another NGO that is currently leading the effort to save the macaques near the Tangkoko Reserve – the Selamatkan Yaki project – has emphasized environmental education to explain to consumers that if they do not reduce the hunting to sustainable levels, all the macaques will be gone and there will be no more pricy meat or and no more fun of hunting the primates, a factor which many hunters identified as an important motivation. (Many of the wildlife traders I interviewed across the archipelago about the critical depletion of the species they were selling and the negative impact on their business if the animals were extirpated in the wild were shockingly unaware and indifferent. They would insist that the birds and animals would always be in the forest and dismiss my suggestions that the species could die out and their trade collapse.) As part of its environmental education and demand-reduction effort, the Selamatkan Yaki project has also tried to involve the local Christian church in the campaign for environmental conservation, as well as to get influential community leaders to declare that the macaque meat, unlike pork, is not crucial for celebrations. But these demand reduction efforts, as imperative as they are, are also very painstaking and slow-going. And for many species, the time is running out at a rapid pace.

In the Booming International Market for Wildlife

The portent of extinction has become all the more threatening as the volume of animals hunted for the local traditional markets is nowadays vastly surpassed by the volume of animals hunted for the booming international market. These international profits often dwarf those in the traditional trade, and international wildlife trading and trafficking are expanding at an exponential rate as a consequence. Many of the hottest wildlife markets are located in China and in East Asia.

Keenly embraced by East Asia’s increasingly affluent middle and upper classes, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) concoctions promising extraordinary curative powers, enhanced longevity, and increased sexual prowess are more popular than ever. So is the consumption of exotic bushmeat. These international wildlife-demand markets have resulted in extraordinary numbers of animals being hunted, sometimes in the millions of specimen per year. The toll on genera such as pangolins, seahorses, turtles, or civets has been huge.[1] Just over a decade ago, for example, Malayan box turtles, then widespread across Indonesia, as well as two endemic Sulawesi land tortoises, fell victim to the Traditional Chinese Medicine craze. So that they would be eventually shredded in blenders into TCM jelly and paste, villagers in Sulawesi would collect them everywhere and sell them for 5000 Indonesian rupiahs (about half a U.S. dollar) per turtle or tortoise. According to a biologist from the Pacific Institute in northern Sulawesi, a subsequent three-month field research project in the area in 2007 found only 2 specimens of what used to be several plentiful species, including some found nowhere else. The turtles and tortoises were literally eaten off the island.

One of the newer fads in the Traditional Chinese Medicine market I encountered during my research in Kalimantan was for hornbill tusks. In Kalimantan, the bills and tusks would fetch 2 million Indonesian rupiahs (roughly USD 200), making the beautiful and enigmatic hornbills a new favorite of local Kalimantan hunters. In the demand markets of China, Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong, the tusks would bring far more. The presence of well-heeled Chinese coal and timber companies in Kalimantan facilitated the trade, and the companies were often already paying off the Indonesian police, military, navy, and coast guard. Even without extensive bribes, stopping the trade in the tusks would be of far lower priority for Indonesian law enforcement agencies than interdicting artisanal illegal mining, for example, which the big mining companies have an interest in stopping and can financially motivate the law enforcement agencies to take action against.

Policy Responses

Reducing Demand for Wild Animals through Captive Breeding

Sometimes, a legal market in captivity-bred animals can greatly reduce pressures on the natural ecosystems and species. The prohibitions and restrictions on importing wild birds into the United States and European Union, coupled with a legal supply of desirable birds, such as parrots, from captive stocks, greatly reduced poaching for those markets. This legal supply of birds certified to have been bred in captivity have had a palpable impact in Indonesia too, where the bird trade to Europe and the United States dramatically declined, despite the fact that the trade had a centuries-old history, being established essentially at the time when Europeans first arrived in the Moluccas and Papua and saw the local exotic birds.

However, according to the environmental NGOs and conservation biologists I interviewed in Indonesia, bird-breeding facilities in Indonesia itself have not produced similarly positive conservation outcomes, and often serve merely as mechanisms for laundering birds caught in the wild. For a bribe, Indonesian officials often hand out fake licenses for such supposedly captive-breeding programs and the birds. For example, since selling wild-caught lories is illegal, traders often claim that they are captive-bred and produce fake documents to launder the birds.

Alternative Livelihoods for Hunters and Illegal Fishermen

These days hardly all hunters are desperately poor individuals. Nonetheless, even organized crime groups specializing in poaching frequently hire local people living on the edge or inside the forest as trackers, guides, and even shooters. In Indonesia, they can be very destitute individuals struggling to eek out a living and support their families, like those in the Moluccas, who will hunt endangered birds for a bowl of noodles a day. Providing them with an alternative means of livelihood is not only important from the perspective of human rights and human security, but also frequently critical for the success of conservation policies.

Occasionally, alternative livelihoods programs to reduce poaching have scored successes. On the Indonesian island of Seram, for example, twenty poachers of rare parrots were converted (through the work of Profauna, one of Indonesia’s NGOs most determined to fight against the illegal wildlife trade) into rescue-center staff and wildlife guides for tourists. As a result of this alternative livelihoods effort, poaching dramatically fell off. But the success depended on a steady flow of eco-tourists whom the newly-converted poachers could guide. For that, an international counterpart to the conservation effort helped recruit birdwatchers in the United States to travel to Seram. When that international supply of eco-tourists fell off, the income from wildlife guiding for the former poachers declined and the pressure to resume illegal hunting to generate livelihoods intensified once more.

The Seram story is a micro-example of the conditions on which successful alternative livelihoods depend. If poor poachers have an assured income from other sources, they are often willing to abandon the illegal hunting, even though poaching often brings more money. But their income from other sources needs to be steady and assured. The problem with many ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts is that the income fluctuates greatly and tends to be sporadic and seasonal. Often, for an area to draw a sufficient number of ecotourists to generate income, it needs to contain large mammals that can fairly easily be seen by tourists. Thus, eastern Africa’s savannahs tend to attract many more tourists than rainforest areas.

Moreover, success in bringing an alternative income to potential poachers depends also on the number of potential poachers. It is one thing to employ twenty hunters (like in the Seram example) and quite another thing to bring employment to several thousand people who may reside in or near an ecologically-sensitive area and can become poachers (as well as illegal loggers). The number of jobs generated by ecotourism is often far lower than the existing local needs for employment and the number of illegal poachers, illegal loggers, and pastoralists who encroach on forests. Moreover, whether such ecotourism takes the pressure off poaching is also dependent on whether eco-lodges and ecotourism companies capture the vast majority of profits or whether local communities do in fact get a sufficient cut from the profits.

Note that the above discussion has not taken into consideration whether or not the influx of humans through high-impact ecotourism generates even greater environmental damage than the previous hunting and more profoundly disturbs the entire ecosystem, rather than just particular species.

Income generated by non-ecotourism alternative livelihoods efforts, such as converting hunters into producers of ethnic crafts or honey and other renewable wildlife products, rarely does better than ecotourism alternative livelihoods. Mostly, such alternative economies generate incomes too paltry and sporadic to be attractive to local communities to sufficiently wean them off poaching. Success of such efforts mostly tends to be lower than even the infrequent success in converting illicit crop farmers to farmers of legal crops. In the case of wildlife poaching, legal agricultural production can sometimes reduce hunting – though once again, the question is whether the required land conversion and deforestation will ultimately devastate the entire ecosystem even more. Just as in the case of alternative livelihoods for illicit drugs, success is predicated on well-enforced property rights, the availability of microcredit, good infrastructure, and other structural factors. Crucially, it also depends on well-established value-added chains and assured markets, neither of which are developed easily in remote areas where forests or biodiversity-rich savannahs still exist. Thus on Indonesia’s Flores island, one of the sensitive land and marine areas, there may well be first-rate avocados, but because of a lack of infrastructure and value-added chains, farmers often feed them to pigs instead of exporting them. Flores’s four kinds of mangoes could well be successfully sold in many international markets, but those markets have not yet been developed. And if one day they are, it is critical that they do not generate new deforestation to clear the way for the mango trees, compounding the pressures on already devastated natural forests of the island.

In the Komodo National Park area, for example, inducing local people to switch from dynamite-fishing that decimates the area’s biodiversity-rich marine ecosystems to carving wood crafts for tourists has met with some successes. However, the former fishermen got used to taking wood from the park’s mangroves, replacing one negative ecosystem impact with another. Persuading them to use jackfruit timber instead has become the new imperative. Similarly, seaweed farming in the Komodo area and around Sulawesi has become a popular alternative to fishing, and one that currently has a thriving international market. But careful assessments as to whether the seaweed farming – and of what particular seaweed species and through what precise methods - is fully compatible with coral conservation have yet to be made.

Scuba diving tourism is thriving in the area, bringing with it a variety of positive spillovers for the local economy, such as new restaurants, lodges, and markets. But it is mostly concentrated in Labuan Bajo, not benefiting all parts of Flores equally and many not at all. Moreover, most hotels and dive companies are not owned by local people, with much of the profit leaving for Jakarta or abroad. And only very few of the dive masters are local people.

Improved Law Enforcement

Without alternative livelihoods in place or the ability to change the structure of incentives for the many types of actors who participate in the illegal wildlife trade – as well as without reducing demand for wildlife products -- law enforcement is rarely a sufficient answer. But it is a critical and inescapable component of such efforts.

In Indonesia, enforcement of wildlife regulations has a long way to go. The problem starts with the laws themselves. With few exceptions, such as in the case of kingfisher species which are not allowed to be hunted, Indonesian law does not prohibit the killing and trapping of wild animals in general, only those protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Unsustainable legal hunting, often poorly monitored to assess its true environmental impact, thus devastates species in Indonesia, with Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies having no interest or means to counter it. Even for wildlife protected by CITES, the Indonesian law sets as the maximum penalty five-year imprisonment or a ten thousand dollar fine. But poachers and wildlife traffickers rarely face law enforcement action, frequently bribing their way out of punishment in Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt courts. If they are sent prison at all, it is usually for a few weeks at most.

Nonetheless, improvements in Indonesia’s wildlife protection enforcement are under way. Many new commitments, efforts, training, and better practices are stimulated by ASEAN’s Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) and its international government and NGO partners. The United States government is actively supporting those efforts; and INTERPOL has also elevated wildlife trafficking on its list of priorities. In turn, the importance of acting against wildlife trafficking has also risen for Indonesian law enforcement agencies, though it still retains a much lower priority than drug trafficking, for example, and hence rewards (such as promotion in rank) are not come easily earned for interdiction of wildlife trafficking. Such increased law enforcement efforts are very important and welcome. Setting quotas for the minimum of wildlife cases Indonesian law enforcement officers must catch is hardly the optimal law enforcement approach but, arguably, it shows at least an increased awareness of the issue.

Yet as is the case with law enforcement against all kinds of illicit trade, sometimes increased law enforcement only makes the markets more hidden. Certainly in Indonesia, sales of more politically and legally-sensitive species, such as monkeys, that are either sold outright illegally or whose trapping generates strong criticism from environmental NGOs, has been driven from public view. Nonetheless, behind closed doors, these species are usually available in many of the country’s big wildlife trading places. When in the huge Jatinegara wildlife market in Jakarta, where supposedly any animal, no matter how endangered and enigmatic can be bought, I tried to pull out my camera, I was met with a great deal of hostility and protests from local sellers and was essentially chased out of the market. One representative of an Indonesian environmental NGO, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that tiger parts, rhino horns, or alive orangutans and Komodo dragons can all still be obtained in the Jatinegra market and from Indonesia’s other wildlife traders. Illegal pet shops in Jakarta boast that they can deliver any species within a week – and often the transaction is made over the internet.

Nonetheless, there have been some genuine successes in Indonesia’s law enforcement. In Bali, for example, the enforcement of the ban on catching sea turtles has been greatly strengthened. Used in traditional Balinese ceremonies, turtles had been caught at a rate many times surpassing the 1000 specimen catch per year allowed under local regulations. In 1999, 27,000 turtles, for example, were slaughtered. Profauna encouraged zero-catch quotas and pushed for greater law enforcement by the police and other law enforcement agencies, such as the Forestry Ministry. The fact that police units on Bali have a reputation for being less corrupt than elsewhere in Indonesia, and with greater international presence to help in the monitoring, the police confiscation of turtles increased significantly and the illegal catching decreased by 80 percent since.

The intensification of law enforcement interdiction in Indonesia has been critically enabled by the increase in animal rescue shelters. In the past, the Indonesian police often used the small number of available animal shelters as an excuse for not undertaking interdiction raids, claiming that they could not care for the rescued animals. Indeed, according to a very impressive young female Muslim veterinarian in Bali who has supervised some of the rescue shelters, about 95 percent of animals confiscated in wildlife markets or private collections are too sick and damaged to be returned to the wild. With few releases possible, because they might introduce new diseases that could devastate the wild populations, most of the recovered animals will have to be treated at the shelters for the rest of their lives or euthanized. Unfortunately, rehabilitation shelters in Indonesia have depended almost exclusively on foreign funding. Several important international donors have been disappointed with Indonesia’s performance in cracking down on the wildlife trade and have not renewed their donor commitments, leaving some of the shelters struggling to operate.

Challenges in Cracking Down on Illegal Fishing

To some extent, improvements have also been registered in Indonesia’s efforts to combat illegal domestic fishing in protected areas. The Komodo National Park provides an example. Fifteen years ago, dynamite and sodium-cyanide fishing, both extremely destructive to the marine ecosystem, were prevalent and perpetrated by local communities around the park and by fishermen from the eastern parts of Flores as well as other islands, such as Sulawesi and Sumbawa, as already mentioned above. When confronted by local communities trying to prevent the destructive fishing, fishermen from the eastern part of Flores and surrounding islands would often admit that the reason they were coming to fish in the Komodo National Park was the lack of fish available in their home areas, where local stocks were depleted as a result of the destructive fishing.

Pressure from international NGOs and intergovernmental agencies, such as UNESCO, on law enforcement agencies operating in and around the Komodo National Park stimulated better law enforcement action and diminished the dangerous illegal fishing practices. The fact that the Komodo National Park, including its extraordinary marine ecosystem, obtained high international visibility, and hence international pressure for protection, critically helped.

Surprisingly, because the issue can be construed as one of national security and certainly of national sovereignty, Indonesia has been far less capable of cracking down on illegal fishing by foreign fishing fleets, including Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Philippine, that invade its waters. Some of the Indonesian fishermen I interviewed about international illegal fishing in their waters maintained that they were afraid to confront the foreign fleets because the foreign fishing ships were presumed to be armed. They believed that the presence of guns on the fishing ships also deterred action by Indonesia’s coast guard. Some of the fear can perhaps now be offset by the creation of a community patrol “coastal watch” effort run by the Ministry of Fisheries, for which the U.S. government has installed a communications technology that allows the fishermen to report the presence of illegal fishermen in real time and thus enables a heftier law enforcement response.

Most of the interviewed fishermen, however, believed that the lack of robust law enforcement action had to do with large amounts of corruption money sloshing around in the international fishing industry which could easily buy off Indonesia’s naval and coast guard patrols. Church and NGO activists in Labuan Bajo, Flores, for example, recounted how they suspected that local police and navy officials were involved in the smuggling of the endangered Napoleon wrasse (also known as humphead wrasse), the trade in which is prohibited by several countries and whose possession in Indonesia requires special permits from the government. Nonetheless, the species is highly sought after in Taiwan, China, and other East Asian markets. Repeated tipoffs to local Labuan Bajo police and navy units regarding the illegal catching and smuggling of the wrasse fell on deaf ears, with the law enforcement agencies demanding proof from the activists before they would take any kind of law enforcement action against the identified smugglers. The activists thus invited local media to the port where the wrasse smuggling was taking place, and “by accident” spilled one of the boxes transporting the smuggled wrasses, forcing the police to acknowledge in front of flashing cameras that illegal fishing was taking place there. Nonetheless, a visit to the Chinese market in Labuan Bajo in October 2012 revealed Napoleon wrasse on sale. The trade in other exotic fishes, even if not necessarily protected species (CITES only prohibited the trade in some sharks and manta rays in March 2013), was thriving there. Local buyers were eagerly haggling with fishermen over lips from parrotfish, manta ray parts, and sharks fins.

Lessons from Indonesian Anti-Piracy Efforts for More Robust Law Enforcement Action against Illegal Fishing and Wildlife Trafficking

The anti-piracy efforts in the Strait of Malacca and around Indonesia can provide insight into the factors which can stimulate better law enforcement action by Indonesia. Before the frequency of maritime piracy spiked around the Horn of Africa and West Africa, pirate attacks on ships at sea in Strait of Malacca amounted to almost half of the world’s piracy incidents. Out of the more than 250 yearly attacks in the Strait and around Indonesia during the first half of the 2000 decade, the majority originated in Indonesia.[2] Indonesia’s archipelago provided many safe-haven opportunities for pirates, while law enforcement action against them both on land, such as on the Riau islands, and at sea was sporadic and limited at best.

As the frequency of pirate attacks kept growing, it came to present a threat to Singapore’s economy – critically dependent on the safety of its seaborne commerce and accessibility of its port, with more than 50,000 vessels carrying 40% of world’s trade passing through the Strait yearly. Backed by the United States, Singapore pressured Indonesia to take more robust action against the pirates and delivered a variety of financial incentives-- delivering technologies, patrol assets, and ultimately paying for much of the anti-piracy effort Indonesia mounted. Anti-piracy intelligence sharing among Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, previously inhibited by traditional rivalries, also increased, even though many of the proposed “joint” patrols among the three navies really amounted only to “coordinated” patrols. In the latter part of the 2000 decade, piracy in the Strait fell off by about three-fourths – even though the actual number of interdiction operations on the seas remained very small. Just the greater deployment of patrolling assets and importantly actions by Indonesia against the pirates on land created a robust deterrent effect.

The fact that Singapore mounted strong pressure on Indonesia is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that ultimately Singapore had to back up the pressure by extending various modes of assistance to stimulate greater law enforcement action against the pirates. What is more interesting is that in the case of maritime piracy, unlike in the case of its many other large-scale illicit economies, such as illegal logging and mining, Indonesia was able to overcome the corruption that has long plagued its law enforcement apparatus and undermined the interdiction and deterrence efforts. In other words, it was pressure from Singapore, underwritten by material assistance from that city-state, that stimulated Indonesia’s resolve to go after the pirates. But what accounts for Indonesia’s improved capacity to carry out the law enforcement effort?

To a great extent, the answer appears to lie in the low profits and un-institutionalized form of corruption surrounding maritime piracy in the area. Unlike in the case of piracy off the Somalia coast, the profits from piracy around Indonesia were fairly low, with attacks often amounting more to robberies on the seas and in ports, rather than to long-term hostage and cargo seizure with ransom payouts in the millions of dollars. (Indeed, the “pirate” attacks around the Indonesian archipelago that have taken place over the past three to four years remained mostly thefts and robberies when ships are anchored in Indonesia’s ports.) Consequently, the bribes from piracy paid to either Indonesian coast guard or navy officials or to local government officials on land in areas that the pirates used as safe-havens were not very large, nowhere on the scale of the bribes paid by illegal logging or mining companies. Nor have the Indonesian law-enforcement agencies become addicted to the piracy bribes for their institutional budgets, unlike in the case of bribes and problematic profits from natural-resource extraction on which Indonesia’s military and law enforcement agencies have come to depend for sustaining their operating budgets.[3] The political costs Jakarta had to absorb to make law enforcement agencies act against the pirates and the muscle it had to exercise to corral local officials into compliance were far lower with respect to piracy than the political costs would be for Jakarta to enforce compliance with resource-extraction regulations. The number of political and institutional actors with a vested interest in perpetuating piracy (because of the rent payouts it generated) was also much smaller than in illegal logging and mining, and the management problem for Jakarta therefore also much simpler. The resolution of secessionist militancy in Sumatra’s Aceh region, after the 2005 peace deal, is sometimes also put forward as a factor enabling the more robust law enforcement action against the pirates.[4] But there are limitations as to how far this explanation carries, given that most of the pirate attacks did not originate from Aceh and the area was not a prime safe-haven area for the pirates. (The fact that many of the former Free Aceh Movement combatants continue to be unemployed and economically-frustrated could easily make them an easy recruitment pool for pirate businessmen. Other illicit economies, such as marijuana cultivation, have in fact been thriving in the region.)

For combatting wildlife trafficking and illegal logging in Indonesia, the anti-piracy story has two implications. On the positive side, in the case of wildlife trafficking, the vast majority of the conservation actors and Indonesian government officials I interviewed agreed that corruption surrounding wildlife trafficking was not institutionalized. Nor was it believed to generate large off-budget income for the law enforcement institutions, like logging and mining. Tackling individualized corruption, as difficult as it is, is still far simpler than weaning entire institutions of illicit budgets.

On the negative side, the bribery profits from illegal fishing for Indonesia’s law enforcement agencies are considerably higher than those from piracy. For some agencies, such as the coast guard and the navy, the bribes may well constitute corruption payoffs akin to that from mining and logging that go beyond individual bribes. That is bad news for developing more robust law enforcement action.

The barriers to international cooperation against illegal fishing are also far higher than against piracy. Major fishing offenders such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam would have to take on their domestic fishing industries -- a high-cost political action they have not been willing to mount, just as Indonesia has not been able to effectively take on its logging industry, for example. Vietnam and Indonesia have announced joint anti-illegal fishing patrols, but whether these will amount to more than window dressing by Vietnam yet remains to be seen.

Beefed up law enforcement action against wildlife trafficking and illegal fishing is critical. Providing effective alternative livelihoods for poor hunters is a policy that enhances human rights and human security as well as greatly facilitates law enforcement. Unfortunately, alternative livelihoods efforts are rarely effective, with auspicious circumstances mostly lacking and structural problems difficult to overcome. Ultimately, there are great limits to what even much more effective law enforcement and much more effective alternative livelihoods can accomplish unless demand for wildlife products around the world, and particularly in East Asia, is rapidly reduced. So far, demand reduction efforts in the region for bushmeat and Traditional Chinese Medicine have registered thinner, even if somewhat improving, results than demand reduction efforts to reduce the consumption of illicit drugs. But time is running out for Indonesia’s magnificent biodiversity –both on land and in the sea.

[1] For details, see Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Disappearing Act: The Illicit Trade in Wildlife in Asia,” Working Paper No. 6, The Brookings Institution, June 2011, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/6/illegal%20wildlife%20trade%20felbabbrown/06_illegal_wildlife_trade_felbabbrown.

[2] “Piracy Down 3rd Year in Row: IMB report,” Journal of Commerce Online, January 23, 2007; and “Pirate attacks Up 14 Percent Worldwide in Jan-Sept Period, Maritime Watchdog Says,” Associated Press, October 16, 2007.

[3] See, for example, International Crisis Group, “Indonesia: Natural Resources and Law Enforcement,” Aseia Report No, 29, December 20, 2001, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/south-east-asia/indonesia/Indonesia%20Natural%20Resources%20and%20Law%20Enforcement.pdf; and Vanda Felbab-Brown, “Indonesia Field Report III – The Orangutan’s Road: Illegal Logging and Mining in Indonesia,” The Brookings Institution, February 7, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/02/07-indonesia-illegal-logging-mining-felbabbrown.

[4] Michael Shuman, “How to Defeat Pirates: Success in the Strait,” Time, April 22, 2009.

Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Image Source: © Chaiwat Subprasom / Reuters

Can Explosions Be a Blessing in Disguise in Resolving Turkey’s Kurdish Question?

Kemal Kirişci — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:00:00 -0400

Two minor explosions Tuesday night in Turkey’s capital city of Ankara come at a critical juncture. The Turkish government has been negotiating with the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, to bring an end to an almost decade long violence. These negotiations are taking place at a time when the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) have seen its support among Kurds diminish considerably. The Kurdish vote had played an important role in helping the AKP come to power back in November 2002. These votes have reacquired importance as the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, contemplates whether to take a new constitution that would replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a presidential one to a national referendum. The new constitution is expected to redefine Turkish citizenship in more liberal terms to the benefit of Kurds but also enable Erdogan to circumvent a self-imposed ban on serving more than three terms as a member of parliament. The negotiations are also seen as a means of addressing questions about the quality of Turkish democracy and concerns about rising authoritarianism. When these developments are put together with a growing recognition both among Kurds as well as Turks of the need to bring the violence to an end, it may well enhance the likelihood of this round of negotiations achieving where earlier attempts failed.

Öcalan had been leading a separatist insurgency since 1984 with the objective of setting up an independent Kurdish state in parts of Turkey and in neighboring countries populated by Kurds. Syria provided him with sanctuary until 1998, when he was forced out of the country following a threat of Turkish military intervention in Syria. After attempting to seek asylum in a number of countries, Öcalan was eventually caught in Kenya (with CIA assistance) and sentenced to life imprisonment on the island of Imralı near Istanbul. This was followed by a unilaterally declared cease-fire by the PKK and a difficult European Union (EU) led reform process which contributed to the granting of cultural rights to Kurds in Turkey. These rights ranged from the recognition of Kurdish identity, to the right to use the Kurdish language publically and in broadcasting. These were revolutionary developments in a country that had denied and repressed Kurdish identity since the early days the Turkish republic and had seen almost 40,000 people killed by violence since 1984.

The gradual emergence of new leadership from the ranks of the PKK, accompanied by a vacuum created by the U.S. intervention in Iraq led to the return of violence in the summer of 2004. This violence led to the deaths of an ever growing number of young Turkish conscripts, some of them inevitably of Kurdish origin, as well as PKK militants and coincided with a period when Turkey’s relations with the EU weakened. Nevertheless, in 2009, the Turkish government launched a “Kurdish initiative” with the intention of solving the “Kurdish problem” for good. The government did succeed in negotiating the laying down of arms by the PKK and their return to Turkey from northern Iraq where they continue to hold bases to this day. This initial step was meant to start a political process to “solve” the Kurdish problem in Turkey but it went haywire when militants put on a show of force as they entered Turkey from the border post of Habur in the fall of 2009. The pictures from Habur immediately provoked a nationalist backlash and Erdoğan, who had once adopted a reconciliatory discourse on the Kurdish issue chose to revert to a traditional anti-Kurdish populist stance used in the 1980s and 90s prior to the reform process. In sharp contrast to his 2005 position where he publicly acknowledged the sufferings of Kurds at the hands of the Turkish state and promised a political solution, Erdoğan argued there was no longer a Kurdish problem in Turkey. He argued that at most, there were problems experienced by individual citizens of Kurdish ethnicity, and that these problems would be addressed with increased ‘democracy and rule of law’.

These remarks led to a sharp decrease in popularity for the prime minister among Kurds and to the founding of the BDP, a Kurdish nationalist political party, which was elected to power at the local and national levels in 2009 and 2011. The rise of the BDP led to the virulent articulation of Kurdish political demands ranging from the use of the Kurdish language in the provision of local government services in Kurdish populated regions of Turkey to the introduction of education in Kurdish. These demands were also accompanied by increased calls for territorial autonomy for the Kurdish inhabited regions of Turkey which was also supported by Öcalan. Together with the explosion in violence, these developments led to the introduction of repressive policies by the Turkish government where an ever growing number of local Kurdish officials, politicians and journalists being imprisoned, deeply tainting Turkey’s democratic credentials. These developments created a very tense situation in Turkey at a time when the Arab Spring had just begun and Turkey was being presented as a model for the Arab world’s transformation by some, while others drew attention to Turkey’s inability to resolve its own Kurdish problem.

The pressure to address the Kurdish problem in Turkey was compounded by a growing level of frustration and fatigue from violence felt across the country as well as a constitution writing process that was going nowhere. It is against this background that the prime minister sought to bring an end to the violence with a cease-fire by authorizing the head of Turkish intelligence to hold secret talks with PKK counterparts in Oslo between 2008 and 2011. Opponents of the prime minister and this scheme, however, leaked records of these talks, provoking an abrupt suspension of the talks. The prime minister, having emerged triumphant from the national elections in the summer of 2011, persevered and in late 2012 he was able to engage the BDP in a similar but more open exercise that came to be known as the “Imralı process” which allowed repeated visits by BDP representatives and Turkish officials to Öcalan. An early attempt to derail talks by assassinating three long standing female PKK militants in Paris in January of 2013 failed as both sides of the process remained committed to it. The two explosions on Tuesday night clearly had the intention of undermining the “Imralı process” but also of preempting Öcalan’s long awaited Newroz announcement on Thursday. The question of who might have mounted these two attacks may very soon be revealed as the perpetrators have been promptly caught.

The fact that these attacks have only caused minor injuries to two individuals and some structural damage to the headquarters of AKP, may turn out to be a blessing in disguise as the initial signs appear to suggest that the “Imralı process’ will not be adversely affected. Actually, it does not look like that these explosions will unravel the negotiations. Instead they will remind the public once more about their revulsion against violence and are likely to reinforce both parties commitment to the process. Right now neither AKP nor BDP want to be seen as the spoiler. However, whether the “Imralı process” will finally lead to a political resolution of the Kurdish problem in Turkey beyond just another cease-fire is yet to be seen.

Authors

Kemal Kirişci

Image Source: © Stringer Turkey / Reuters

The Global Swarm: An International Drone Market

Peter W. Singer — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

"One plan was to use an unmanned aerial vehicle to carry 20kg of TNT to bomb the area, but the plan was rejected because we were ordered to catch him alive." This is what Liu Yuejin, director of China's public security ministry's anti-drug bureau, described of the manhunt for Naw Kham, the ringleader of a large drug trafficking outfit based in the Golden Triangle, who was suspected of killing 13 Chinese sailors. Ultimately, they got him via a cross-border nighttime ambush, the Chinese version of the Abbottabad raid.

This case, however, is useful to think about when talking about the global market for unmanned aerial systems (aka "drones") and where it is headed, a topic that got new energy last week with a New York Times report on the confusion as to whether it was American or Pakistani drones that carried out a controversial airstrike.

Too often in policy and media circles, we discuss a supposed American monopoly on drones that is potentially ending. Or, as Time magazine entitled a story, "Drone Monopoly: Hope You Enjoyed It While It Lasted." The article goes on to say,"It is going to happen; the only question is when."

The answer is: several years ago.

Read the full article »

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Foreign Policy

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

The Predator Comes Home: A Primer on Domestic Drones, their Huge Business Opportunities, and their Deep Political, Moral, and Legal Challenges

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:09:00 -0500

At the turn of the last century, a strange new technology began to appear in America. As a January 4, 1900 article about one of the very first sightings in the state of Florida described, “The Locomobile resembles a rubber-tired driving buggy in its outward appearance, except that no allowance is made for attaching a horse…A brake is attached to the rear axle that will stop the machine in a much shorter space than a horse can be stopped.”[1]

The locomobile, or “horseless carriage,” caught people’s fancy and powered a huge new industry. Businesses opened up in places that ranged from Basic City, Virginia, home of the Dawson Steam Auto-Mobile, a two-cylinder runabout with single chain drive and tiller rather than a steering wheel, to the Southern Automobile Manufacturing Company of Jacksonville, which assembled five cars a day that sold for a princely sum of $400 each.

Soon, the industry rippled out into all sorts of directions. It was only two years after the first car hit the roads of Florida that the first car dealership was created. This led to new endeavors in areas like the logistics and support “garages,” which had ripple effects out into other areas. For instance, just three years after the first news article on the locomobile appeared in The Florida Times-Union & Citizen, the very first newspaper advertisement for one appeared.

But this new technology also brought strange new questions, such as how to protect people from them. The first fine for “speeding” came just a year later in 1904, when a man was arrested for endangering the lives and property of pedestrians in downtown Jacksonville. He had exceeded the 6 mile per hour speed limit

The new technology also created new demands on governments, like an entire new type of infrastructure. Staying in Florida for the moment, it was in 1907 when the first of what we now call “snow birds” arrived via horseless carriage. Mr. Ralph Owen “accomplished the amazing feat of driving an Oldsmobile motorcar from New York to Florida in only 15 days.”

The reason this took so long is that no one was ready for it, especially the government. There were no real roads, at least as we think about them now, and no truly reliable maps for the pathways that did exist. Indeed, as late as 1921 the Automobile Club of America recommended that motorists traveling from New England to Florida simply bypass the entire state of Virginia because of these problems.

It wasn’t just the poor state of transportation that required a network of roads and highways to be funded but also basic issues like what safety equipment the new technology required. For example, early horseless carriages often had headlights but no turn signals. Drivers had to use hand signals to indicate their intentions to turn or slow down. A new business started selling a seeming solution, Devilseye Reflector Rings.[2] Drivers would wear large red rings on their fingers at night so that when they held their hand outside the car the rings reflected other headlights and allowed other drivers to see the signal. Soon, this concept was replaced by the novel idea of requiring the reflector be embedded in the car rather than carried by the driver.

These stories of the early days of “horseless carriages” and “locomobiles” aren’t just fascinating but they should serve to help us frame the issues we face today in “unmanned systems” and robotics. They were a technology that once seemed alien but we figured it out.

Where are we now? Robots and War

While unmanned systems have a long history dating back to Da Vinci’s designs for a robotic knight, and first emerged in war with German remote-controlled torpedo boats in the First World War, it wasn’t until just a decade ago that they truly took off.[3] Advances in technology made unmanned systems more usable, especially through the incorporation of GPS technology that allowed such systems to locate themselves in the world. At the same time, the new conflicts that followed 9/11 drove demand. When U.S. forces first went into Afghanistan, the U.S. military had only a handful of unmanned aerial systems (UAS, also called “remotely piloted aircraft” or, more colloquially, “drones”) in the air, none of them armed, and zero on the ground. Now it has a force inventory of more than 8,000 in the air and more than 12,000 on the ground. Another example of how far the change has gone is that last year, the U.S. Air Force trained more unmanned systems operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

But when we think about technologies like the Predator or the PackBot, we need to remember that they are just the first generation, the Model T Fords and Wright Flyers compared to what is already in the prototype stage.[4] We are still at the “horseless” stage of this technology, describing these technologies by what they are not rather than wrestling with what they truly are. These technologies are “killer applications” in all the meanings of the term. They are technologies that advance the power of killing. They are also technologies that have a disruptive effect on existing structures and programs. That is, they are akin to advancements like the airplane or the steam engine in allowing greater power and reach in war, but they are also akin to what iPods did to the music industry, changing it forever.

What Next? The Robotics Revolution

While many are surprised by the existing use of robotics, the pace of change won’t stop. We may have thousands now, but as one three-star U.S. Air Force general noted in my book Wired for War, very soon it will be “tens of thousands.”[5]

But the numbers matter in another way. It won’t be tens of thousands of today’s robots, but tens of thousands of tomorrow’s robots, with far different capabilities.

One of the laws in action when it comes to technology is Moore’s Law, which states that the computing power that can fit on a microchip doubles just under every two years or so.[6] It has become an encapsulation of broader exponential trends in technology that have occurred throughout history, with technological power constantly doubling in everything from power to storage to broader innovation patterns.[7] If Moore’s Law holds true over the next 25 years the way it has held true over the last 40 years, then our chips, our computers, and, yes, our robots will be as much as a billion times more powerful than today. But Moore’s Law is not a law of physics. It doesn’t have to hold true. What if our technology moves at a pace just 1/1000^th slower than it has historically? In this slowed-down scenario, we’d only see a mere 1,000,000 times the change.

The bottom line is that what was once only fodder for science-fiction conventions like Comic-Con is now being talked about seriously in places like the Pentagon. A robotics revolution is at hand.

We should be crystal clear here. The robot revolution happening is not the Robopocalypse that Steven Spielberg was preparing to film.[8] It is not the type where you need to worry about the former governor of California showing up at your door, à la The Terminator.[9]

Instead, every so often, a technology comes along that changes the rules of the game. These technologies – be they fire, the printing press, gunpowder, the steam engine, the computer, etc. – are rare but truly consequential.

The key to making technology truly revolutionary is not merely its new capabilities but its questions. Revolutionary technologies force us to ask new questions about what is possible and consider things that weren’t conceivable a generation before. But they also force us to relook at what is proper. They raise issues of right and wrong that we didn’t have to wrestle with before.

The historical comparisons that people make to the robotics revolution illustrate this. When I conducted interviews for my book, I asked people to give historical parallels to where they think we stand now with robotics. As I noted earlier with the comparison to the “horseless carriage,” many of them, especially engineers, liken where we are now with robotics to the advent of the automobile.

If the horseless carriage is the parallel, think of the ripple effects that cars had on everything from our geopolitics to our law enforcement. A group of people who were, at the time, desert nomads became crucial players in the global economy simply because they lived over a sticky black substance previously considered more of a nuisance than anything else. The greater use of that same – now crucial – resource has changed the global climate. The growing use of cars, in turn, led to new concepts that reshaped the landscape, whether through highways and suburbia, or through new social notions, like dating (teens previously could only court on parents’ front porches).

And of course a whole new world requires the establishment of rules of the game, or rather new rules of the road. It wasn’t just a matter of fines for “speeding,” but also changes to the very structure of American law enforcement. The rise of easy cross state crime enabled by the speed and reach of horseless carriages, such as the string of bank robberies by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, helped lead to the rise of the then Bureau of Investigation, now the modern FBI.[10]

Others, such as Bill Gates, make a different comparison to the computer in 1980.[11] Much like robots today, the computer back then was a big, bulky device for which we could only conceive a few functions. Importantly, the military was the main spender on computers’ research and development and a key client driving the marketplace, again comparable to the development of robots.

But soon, computers changed. They got smaller. We figured out more and more functions and applications that they could perform, both in war and in civilian life. And they proliferated. It has reached the point that we have stopped thinking of most of them as “computers.” I drive a car with more than 100 computers in it. No one calls it a “computerized car.” I have a number of computers in my kitchen. I call them things like “microwave” or “coffee maker.”

The same thing is happening with robotics – not just the changes in size and proliferation, but also the reconceptualization. Indeed, if you buy a new car today, it will come equipped with things like “parking assist” or “crash avoidance” technologies.[12] These are kind ways of saying that we stupid humans are not good at parallel parking and too often don’t look in our blind spots. So, the robotic systems in our car will handle these things for us.

But again, just as the story of the automobile reveals more than just the shift from owning horse stables to garages, so, too, was the computer about more than never having to remember long-division tables again. What were important were the ripple effects. The game-changing technology reshaped the modern information-rich economy, allowing billions of dollars to be made and lost in nanoseconds. It led to new concepts of social relations and even privacy. I can now “friend” someone in China I’ve never met. Of course, I may now be concerned about my niece social networking with people whom she’s never met. It became a tool of law enforcement (imagine the TV show CSI without computers) but also led to new types of crime (imagine explaining “identity theft” to J. Edgar Hoover).[13] And it may even be leading to a new domain of war, so-called “cyber-war.”

This comparison is a striking one because it illustrates how bureaucracies often have a hard time keeping up with revolutionary change. For example, the FBI director was so averse to computers that he didn’t have one in his office and never used email as late as 2001. Sound amazing? Well, the current Secretary of Homeland Security, the agency in charge of the civilian side of American cyber-security, doesn’t use email today.[14]

The final comparison that is made is perhaps a darker one: work on the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Scientists, in particular, talk about the field of robotics today in much the same way they talked about nuclear research back in the 1940s. If you are a young engineer or computer scientist, you will find yourself drawn towards it. It is the cutting edge. It is where the excitement is and where the research money is.

But many worry that their experience will turn out just like that of those amazing minds that were drawn towards the Manhattan Project, like a moth to an atomic flame.[15] They are concerned that the same mistakes could be repeated – of creating something and only after the fact worrying about the consequences. Will robotics, too, be a genie we one day wish we could put back in the bottle?

The underlying point here is that too often in discussions of technology we focus on the widget. We focus on how it works and its direct and obvious uses. But that is not what history cares about. The ripple effects are what make that technology revolutionary. Indeed, with robotics, issues on the technical side may ultimately be much easier to resolve than dilemmas that emerge from our human use of them.

How Our Robots Are Changing

The first generations of aerial robots were much like the manned systems they were replacing, even down to some of them having the cockpit where the pilot would sit looking like it’d been painted over. Now we are seeing an explosion of new types, ranging in size, shape, and form. With no human inside, they can stay in the air not just for hours, but for days, months, and even years, having wings the length of a football field.[16] Alternatively, they can be as small as an insect.[17] And, of course, they need not be modelled after our manned machines, but can instead take their design cues from nature, or even the bizarre.[18]

The other key change is their gain in intelligence and autonomy. This is a whole new frontier. Traditionally, we’ve compared weapons based on their lethality, range, or speed. Think about the comparison between a Second World War B-17 bomber plane and a B-24 bomber plane. The B-24 could be considered superior because it flew faster, further, and carried more bombs. The same could be said in comparing the MQ-9 Reaper UAS with its earlier version, the MQ-1 Predator. The Reaper is better because it flies faster and further and carries more bombs. But the Reaper is also something else, which we couldn’t say about previous generations of weapons: It is smarter, and more autonomous. We are not yet in the world of The Terminator, where weapons make their own decisions, but the Reaper can do things like take off and land on its own, fly mission waypoints on its own, and carry sensors that make sense of what they are seeing, such as identifying a disruption in the dirt from a mile overhead and recognizing it as something that we humans call a “footprint.”

From these changes comes a crucial opening up of the user base and the functionality of robotics. Much as you once could only use a computer if you first learned a new language like “Basic,” so, too, could you once only use robotic systems if you were highly trained. To fly an early version Predator drone, for instance, you had to be a rated pilot. Now, just as my three-year-old can navigate his iPad without even knowing how to spell, so, too, can you fly some drones with an iPhone app.

The Civilian Side Opens

This greater usability opens up the realm of possible users, lowering the costs and spreading the technology even further. So, we are seeing the range of uses expand not just in the military, but also, once proved on the military side, moving over to the civilian world. Take aerial surveillance with UAS. It’s gone from a military activity to border security to police to environmental monitoring.[19] Similarly, the notion of using a robotic helicopter to carry cargo to austere locations was first tested out in Afghanistan, but is now being looked at by logging companies.[20]

A key step in moving this forward in the U.S. will be the integration of unmanned aerial systems into the National Airspace System (NAS) and expanded civilian use. While there has been a huge amount of energy around the topic of domestic drones, such that many politicians speak about them as if they are already “watching everything from above,” the present laws restrict civilian use. An ever growing number of special permits, however, have been issued to domestic operators, now summing 1,428.[21] These early users range from small police departments like Mesa County in Colorado, which found they cost over 90% less to operate than police helicopters, to universities conducting environmental research in Alaska.[22]

Congress has set a deadline of September 2015 for the Federal Aviation Authority to figure out how to make this happen on a more regularized basis, in essence opening up the national airspace to the civilian public and private sector use.[23] As part of this process, there are to be six test sites created around the nation, which some twenty states are competing to be awarded. While it is unclear if the FAA will meet the deadline, the step is coming, and with it, the next ripple effect outwards in the market.

Indeed, what the opening of the civilian airspace will do to robotics is akin to what the Internet did to desktop computing. The field was there before, but then it boomed like never before. For instance, if you are a maker of small tactical surveillance drones in the U.S. right now, your client pool numbers effectively one: the U.S. military. But when the airspace opens up, you will have as many as 21,000 new clients – all the state and local police agencies that either have expensive manned aviation departments or can’t afford them.

The scale of this market is estimated to be in the tens of billions in its first years, but it is frankly too early to know where it will end up.[24] If history is any lesson, we shouldn’t just focus on the sale of drones in roles we already know but recognize that there are many more ways we don’t yet know of where robotics might be applied to other fields. Who saw agriculture as a field to be computerized? And yet the application of computers has led to massive efficiency gains. So, too, is agriculture appearing to be an area in which robotics will drive immense change. Agribusinesses nationwide such as Monsanto are lobbying for the use of domestic drones in roles that range from the monitoring and surveillance of the fields to the crop-dusting to the picking and harvesting.[25]

Impact on U.S. military

There are a huge set of ripple effects that will emerge from the opening up of the airspace to domestic drones. One is a potential role reversal. What will be the impact on the U.S. military as a technology area that it once led in, blossoms on the civilian side?

Take the areas of acquisitions. What happens when manufacturers have a wider set of clients than just the DoD and therefore become less responsive to its needs? If the parallel is computers, microchips and IT networks, the U.S. military once was in the lead in the research and development and then purchasing of computing. Now it is often behind the civilian side and, indeed, in areas like microchips can’t get makers to shift to its unique demands.

Beyond the obvious applications moved over from the military side, the real change occurs when imagination and innovation cross with profit-seeking. This is where parallels to computer or aviation history hold most, as the civilian side then starts to lead the way for the military. For instance, the idea of moving freight via airplanes was not originally a military role. It started out in 1919 with civilians. Today, it’s both a major military role (the U.S. military’s Air Mobility Command has some 134,000 members) and an industry that moves more than $10 trillion in global trade.[26] And, yes, a number of airfreight firms are starting to explore drone air cargo delivery, from large-scale trans-oceanic movement to small movement of medical supplies or even fast food.[27]

Similarly, what will it mean for training, when more and more young service men will come in with experience using the technology at home, or even when they see more advanced versions on the market than what they get from the Pentagon? The bottom line is that discussions of the civilian side also matter to the military.

Economic Winners and Losers: Nations and Communities

A new industry raises another ripple effect: Who will be the winners and losers?

One can certainly think about this issue on the global level. The U.S. faces a strange situation of trying to compete in a world economy, where technologic knowhow is a key differentiator, and yet has an education system that too often moves in an opposite direction. American high school students rank 23rd in science and 31st in math among wealthy nations, and 27th in college graduates with degrees in science and math. And the trends aren’t improving greatly. In 2004, the number of American computer science majors was 60,000. In 2013, it had shrunk to 38,000. (It is all not bad news, we are graduating twice as many journalists.) [28]

But the issue of winners and losers isn’t just a matter for Washington policymakers; it should have huge resonance for state and local leaders. That is, if what is playing out in the field of robotics is comparable to horseless carriage, who is Detroit, which became the epicenter of this industry for the 20^th century, and who are going to be like Basic City or Jacksonville that had early automobile companies around the same period? Or, if the comparison is to computers, who is going to be akin to Philadelphia, a key node in the early days of computing, and who is going to be the robotics version of Silicon Valley?

Answering this question turns on challenging a false notion that has taken hold, that in today’s world of globalization distance doesn’t matter. But despite our new technologies, we have repeatedly seen at the state and metropolitan level, success happens in clusters.[29]

As Maryann Feldman writes in her study Location, Location, Location: Creating Innovation Clusters, “Grounded in place, innovation and entrepreneurship rely on an ecosystem of firms (both suppliers and customers), universities and community colleges, government agencies, and trade associations, all systematically aligned to encourage creativity and experimentation. Once started, concentrations of industries within places become self-reinforcing as talent is attracted to opportunity, the flow of ideas increases, and their potential is understood and appreciated. With that dynamic, it becomes easier and less costly for entrepreneurs to realize their dreams.”[30]

The role of the government is central in developing these clusters. While entrepreneurship is a private-sector activity, it is public policy that sets the stage. For example, I am from North Carolina. Like that old Saturday Night Live joke, we were really happy there was a South Carolina and District of Columbia whenever the education rankings came out, as that meant we had someone to look down on from our lofty perch of 49^th in the nation.

Yet, when North Carolina’s textile manufacturing economy declined, the local government did something brilliant. It fostered a new “innovation cluster” centering around the Research Triangle Park that is now the home to more than 130 research facilities and helped North Carolina become one of the hubs of the biotech industry. This boom then benefited the rest of the state and made it one of fastest growing states in the nation during this period. The success didn’t happen overnight. As Feldman noted, the policy world can nurture these kinds of success stories via “…steady and consistent state policy, investment tax credits, and quasi-governmental, sector-specific agencies.”

Job Gain and Loss

The rise of domestic robotics use holds the potential to create a number of jobs. Indeed, the AUSVI industry trade group has claimed some 70,000 new jobs will be created in just the first few years once the airspace opens up, arguing (with an obvious self-interest) that the US loses some $27 million per day in economic activity the longer it waits to do so.[31]

This boom for the robotics industry, though, raises deep questions not just of which areas will win out, but also which individuals will win and lose.

Just as the horseless carriage made titans of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, computers created a whole new generation of billionaires and millionaires. But, of course, just like with the craftsmen before the first industrial age, there were also losers. For hundreds of years, there was a highly skilled profession of men who did mathematics for hire. They were well paid, many making the equivalent of $200,000 a year. They were called “calculators.” They have gone the way of so many other professions reshaped by new technology like the blacksmith making horseshoes or the elevator operator.

Indeed, robots have already and will continue to shape the economy both as an issue of growth and job loss. As a recent MIT study found, automation is "destroying jobs and creating prosperity," explaining both the gains in efficiency and the loss of as many as six million jobs over the last decade.[32] Robots are a large part of the reason the automobile companies of Detroit are back, but so many automobile workers are not back to work. (Already, one in ten has been replaced by a factory line robot, with many companies across a wide array of industries planning to fully automate their assembly lines.)[33]

Such trends mean that a part of our economy will make a great deal of money from robotics, which is why there is so much lobbying behind the area today. Last year, drone manufacturers gave $2.3 million in contributions to the House Unmanned Systems Caucus, while the industry’s trade group spent a quarter million lobbying for the FAA bill that opens up the airspace (the group proudly told donors that “Our suggestions were often taken word-for-word” in the language of the bill).[34] But these very same trends also mean the expansion of the industry will be seen as a threat to livelihoods, further stoking tensions and underlying suspicions of the technology.

Law and Privacy

One profession that will be busy, though, is the lawyers.

While some say drones are no different than manned planes or fixed surveillance cameras on the street, and so raise no new privacy issues, this is incorrect at face value. There are similarities but also fundamental differences.

To operate, a robot is always gathering and storing information about the world around it. Always. This is different from a regular plane, for example, where the human operator is gathering most of this information but cannot store it for playback. A robot’s operating requirements mean that even in the course of regular operations, it is gathering and storing information about everything that crosses its path. This gives robots an advantage over human operated planes, where a conscious decision to acquire and store data must be made. The other main advantage of unmanned systems is their ability to loiter for long periods of time, which again allows them to draw in more information, and as the ACLU's Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump have written, also allows them to “...pose a more serious threat to privacy than do manned flights."[35]

Taking in vast quantities of information even unintentionally is a key part of the concern. For example, a robot on a “Where’s Waldo?” mission to hunt down one person in a city will still be gathering data on the entirety of the city throughout the search process.

Visual information is not the only type of data being gathered. Unmanned systems also carry out electronic surveillance. A drone unveiled at the DefCon hacking conference in 2011 can crack Wi-Fi networks and intercept text messages and cell phone conversations – without the knowledge or help of either the communications provider or the customer.[36] This type of drone draws in electronic information on a wide group of people beyond the intended target – and, different from a computer, includes those who have not signed a user agreement or otherwise signaled they accept this intrusion upon their privacy.

Finally, the size and mobility of robotic systems is fundamentally different – many are being designed in increasingly smaller sizes, and they are able to move and track targets covertly when required. A robotic system can watch from above, but can also get up close and personal, unlike a fixed security camera or a high altitude spy plane.

These differences lie at the heart of a lot of the worries over domestic use of unmanned systems. Such suspicion has mobilized left wing groups like the ACLU, but also those on the right, such as the Tea Party movement, perhaps best illustrated by the speeches and legislation of Senator Rand Paul, who has attempted in the words of one article to launch “a Preemptive Strike Against Domestic Drone Use.”[37] While some 20 states from Nevada to North Carolina are competing to be the home of the six FAA drone test sites, the anti-drone movement has crystallized into efforts to ban the use of drones in at least ten state legislatures, ranging from Virginia to Oregon. Indeed, Charles Krauthammer, a right wing commentator on Fox News, even urged Americans to use their Second Amendment powers to shoot down drones (something already done by a group of hunters in Pennsylvania, who shot down a drone doing environmental monitoring).[38]

Building Code

With these concerns brewing, we are starting to see some steps forward to respond. For instance, an industry “code of conduct” has been put forward by the same trade group that prompted the current controversy over domestic drones with its successful lobby to open the airspace. The AUVSI code took on many of the concerns circulating, grouping them into three core themes of Safety, Professionalism, and Respect.[39] It laid out how the industry and users would "commit" to not operating drones "in a manner that presents undue risk to persons or property;" to planning for "all anticipated off-nominal events;" and to share such contingency plans with "all appropriate authorities." It made great sense and was reported widely.

The challenge for the robotics code of conduct, however, is much the same as other industries' attempts at self-regulation, ranging from banking to the private military industry. It's a laudable start, but it doesn't change the underlying issues and concerns. Like such other would-be "codes of conduct," it lacks a key ingredient: consequences.

It is a voluntary code with no results if one violates it. Indeed, much of what is laid out is actually restatements of responsibilities the firms and users already should abide by, regardless of any code. For example, the code says that the firms "will comply with all federal, state and local laws." So, before the code, they could violate the law at will? Of course not.

But more importantly, the code is not able to deal effectively with all the areas where the law is absent or vague. It says that "We will ensure that UAS are piloted by individuals who are properly trained and competent to operate the vehicle or its systems." Who will determine this, and what does "trained and competent" mean in a world where some believe drones should only be operated by rated pilots, even though new versions can be flown by teens using iPhone apps?

Likewise, the code pledges to "respect the privacy of individuals," which is a bold statement. But "Respect" could be anything from avoiding the monitoring of individuals without their express permission to showing them "respect" only in the public-relations sense.

Of course, these are thorny issues. Indeed, it's their very thorniness that is why an industry self-regulatory code is the beginning of the discussion, not the final answer

The Police Weigh In

The same could be said of a push by police chiefs, who have offered a code of conduct for their use of drones.[40] This effort asserted that police wouldn’t let any images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles be open to inspection by the public, and that the images would not be stored, unless they are evidence of a potential crime or part of an ongoing investigation. Of course, that’s a pretty large out clause.

More importantly, the police chiefs’ effort is a proposal, not yet policy, with some huge gaps. Even worse, it has a big dose of unrealism. For instance, it suggests that police would use a “Reverse 911 telephone system to alert those living and working in the vicinity of aircraft operations. If such a system is not available, the use of patrol car public address systems should be considered.”

In reality, such a system would be unworkable and even laughable. Each and every time a UAS flies, the police are going to call all of an area’s residents’ home phone (setting aside the growing number who only have mobile phones)? Or, alternatively, the police are planning to ensure public awareness of potential privacy losses by recreating the scene from the movie The Blue Brothers, driving through the streets yelling out on a car’s bullhorn?

Similarly, we have next order questions, like whether drones should be armed. This is cast aside quickly in the proposed codes, but again definition and context matters. Law enforcement in Texas has shown interest in unmanned aerial systems armed with a shotgun that shoots “less than lethal” rounds.[41] One person’s shotgun or taser is another person’s unarmed drone.

The bottom line is that, as with revolutionary inventions of the past, no amount of handwringing by pundits late to the game will see a technology of such great promise banned.

Instead, a revolutionized world requires the establishment of new rules, which in turn requires an understanding of the new technology. Much of the substance of these rules will likely come from both public discourse and the private sector. For example, the origins of the modern way we drive can be found in Rules of the Road, published in 1903 by William P. Eno. Known as "the father of traffic safety,” Eno’s book contained such revolutionary ideas as cars only passing on the left, stop-lights and one-way streets. (Ironically he never drove himself; he was always chauffeured).[42]

We are seeing a similar evolution now, whether in the development of industry codes of conduct or guidelines for university research groups. But much like the early “rules of the road,” these will need enforceable laws to make them real. Early cars and planes, for instance, needed more than Eno’s book – mainstream use of these inventions demanded the drafting of traffic laws and the creation of regulatory institutions like the Federal Aviation Administration. Similarly, the increasing use of unmanned systems has highlighted a gap at the state and federal level that demands action.

Where the Law Goes Next

As these laws are hopefully built by Congress, we need to recognize that much of what is written in the law is just the first draft. For instance, federal district court judges have spoken about how, much like with computers and the privacy questions they created, questions over the proper use of drones by law enforcement will end up as Supreme Court cases.

But even then what will the Court decide? A case that is frequently spoken about as a potential precedent is 2001's Kyllo vs. U.S.[43] In this instance, a federal government agent used a "thermal imaging device" to scan a home in Florence, Oregon. They did not have a warrant, but it allowed them to learn that marijuana was being grown.

When the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, the majority opinion, written by Judge Scalia, was that when the "government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search,' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

Many point to this as evidence that the Supreme Court will be less likely to approve domestic use of drones in an intrusive way by police. But they ignore the caveat. What about when a technology becomes in “general public use,” as drones are evolving to?

Similarly, last January in the U.S. v. Jones case, the Supreme Court ruled that placing a GPS tracking device on a vehicle is considered a search under the Constitution and required a warrant. Notably, though, it was the physical placement of the GPS on the vehicle that mattered most.[44] The Court said other evidence obtained without using the GPS device was admissible because the suspect had no "reasonable expectation of privacy" for a vehicle on the public streets. One way to read it is that your car can’t be tracked without a warrant; another is that your car can be tracked without a warrant, just as long as the police don’t place anything on the vehicle, which is no longer required with our current technology.

The underlying point is that the precedents cited with certainty by analysts and lawyers are often not as clear as they might be. And, when there are questions, or even potential abuses, it will be years before the legal system resolves them. The GPS case happened in 2005, but didn’t get resolved until 2012, well after the technology of a physical tracker was no longer needed. Moreover, just because the Supreme Court ruled one way, doesn’t mean it won’t rule differently on very similar issues, just at a different time. As everything from voting rights to abortion rulings demonstrates, all it takes to reorder the law is just a few seats changed on the court. Neither technology nor laws are written in stone, and justices don’t live forever.

User Questions

The innovation spread of robotics represents another trend of opportunity and peril. An ever-wider set of users is innovating for all sorts of positive purposes with robotics, from the great work being done by young students at robotics labs at McGill University to the team in Australia that built an autonomous drone to help find lost hikers.[45]

But not all of the people behind machines have only the best in mind. Take the traditional notion of using a robotic drone for surveillance. The new users have not just been militaries or police, but have also been civilians. These include news journalists who have reported on natural disasters with drones, as well as parents who want new ways to watch their kids.[46] A father in the U.S. gave new meaning to the term “helicopter parent,” using an automated quadcopter drone to escort his child to the school bus stop.[47]

The problem is that each and every technology has its darker side. The technology is enabling a new field of drone journalism (already taught at University of Nebraska and University of Missouri) that reports important stories with a whole new level of fidelity.[48] But the same phenomenon also advances the field of paparazzi. For instance, Gary Morgan, chief executive officer of Splash News, a celebrity-photo agency, has already said he’d like to be buzzing his quarry soon with silent, miniature drones mounted with tiny cameras: “It would strike fear in the hearts of every celebrity having a birthday party.”[49] And, one has the sense that the child may end up telling a therapist one day about his father loving him a bit too much, to the extent of following him with a drone.

Open Source

More seriously, just as software has gone “open source,” so has warfare. Robotics is not a technology like the atomic bomb or aircraft carrier, where only the great powers can build and use it effectively. Instead, just like with the “app” in the field of software, it is not just the big boys who control the field. The barriers to entry are not exceptionally high, and that means that bad actors will be able to gain and use this advanced technology.

If history is any guide, the repurposing of a low-entry revolutionary technology tends to happen fairly quickly. The first car bomb was set off as early as 1905, used in an assassination attempt on the Ottoman sultan. Similarly, the first hijacking of a plane took place in 1931, very early in civilian air travel.

A particular area of concern, then, is the use of robotic systems by terrorists and other non-state actors. Israel as a state has long used drones, and now so does its non-state opposition. Hezbollah, for example, is not a major state military, but it has already operated UAVs, as too has Hamas.[50]

The impact of this trend is twofold. The first is that it reinforces the empowerment of individuals and small groups against the power of the state. During the Second World War, for example, Hitler’s entire Luftwaffe could not manage to reach across the Atlantic to strike at Canada or the U.S. Just a few years ago, a blind 77-year-old man managed to build his own drone that flew itself across the Atlantic.[51]

And one man’s hobby may be another man’s plot. In 2011, the FBI arrested Rezwan Ferdaus, a man who wanted to recreate the 9/11 attacks (not so ironically, he had been angered by drone attacks in the Mideast intended to stop terrorism).[52] Unable to hijack planes, he instead obtained a large drone and planned to fly it into the Pentagon. Fortunately, he made the mistake of asking an FBI informant where he could obtain C-4 explosives. The plot was averted, but it showed we are now in a world where it is easier to get the drone than the bomb.

This greater reach and power may also see a lowering of the bar. One does not have to be suicidal to carry out attacks that previously might have required one to be so. This allows new players into the game, making al-Qaeda 2.0 and the next-generation version of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh far more lethal.

Just as car bombs are not the only way automobile technology has been misused, we should not make the mistake of only focusing on terrorism when it comes to the potential criminals uses of robotics. The early horseless carriage may have been reworked into a car bomb by turn-of-the-century terrorists, but the main illegal use was as a getaway device for criminals. Similarly, the best example of innovation in the field of robotics last year might be the team of thieves in Taiwan, who used tiny helicopters equipped with pinhole cameras to carry out a jewellery heist. They made away with $4 million worth of loot before being caught.

Accountability

The challenge for the law is not just how to prevent bad guys from doing bad things, but what to do when things go wrong without someone having bad intent, such as when the Google car was in a wreck in August 2011. Like most wrecks, the various sides involved blamed each other, just now they did it via online social networks.

Now take these issues and move them into the air. Congressional investigators report that there were over 200 drone accidents in Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of four years. This doesn’t include the many that happened in the not so covert world of strikes in Pakistan and Somalia. Perhaps the most amusing, but also maybe scary case took place at a base in Djibouti in March 2011.

As The Washington Post reported, a Predator parked at the Camp Lemonnier started its engine without any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel lines closed. “Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the “brains” of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem…“After that whole starting-itself incident, we were fairly wary of the aircraft and watched it pretty closely,” the Air Force squadron commander testified to an investigative board.”[53]

The issue here isn’t that Predators are poised to take over the homeland, but rather another vexing question of law, politics, and ethics. Robotics has a long history of what one Vice President of a technology firm described to me as “oops moments.” These are when things don’t work out with your machine as planned and you have to take it back from the field. With military robotics, the examples range from the machine gun armed UGV that went “squirrelly” and started spinning around during a demonstration to the automated anti-aircraft system in South Africa that had what investigators thought was a “software glitch” during a training exercise. It shot nine soldiers by accident in a real world version of the famous scene from Robocop.[54]

Today, these oops moments might even be intentionally caused by hostile man-made threats, including criminal or adversarial efforts at UAS communications interference or hacking. Here again, this scenario is not science fiction, but was recently demonstrated in a test in Texas, where a university team hacked the navigation system of a drone.[55]

The issues this phenomenon presents are not just how to avoid them through technology improvements and deconfliction protocols, but also more vexing questions of process, policy, and even philosophy. How do we investigate and apportion out accountability in a realm where more and more is happening outside our old concepts of control and responsibility?

For instance, aviation law and insurance right now focuses on determining if the problem was a hardware error (a widget broke), wetware error (the human pilot made an error), or spiritual (an “Act of God” caused the loss). Now we have much in between, the role that software plays. And in the software field, responsibility and accountability is not something easily assigned. It can be stretched over the long periods of time between design and use, over the large numbers of people involved in writing and selling and buying and upkeeping software, by a business approach that often intends to let the customer find the errors, and by the fact that software will repeatedly be put in real world circumstances for which it wasn’t originally designed. In short, we have to figure out how to catch up our 20^th century laws, with our 21^st century technologies.

The Psychology Side

The irony in all this is that while the future may involve more and more machines watching us, whether it is police watching city streets from above, or the NSA reading your email, or your phone letting Starbucks know you are walking nearby, how we react to it will still be driven by the very fuzzy combination of our human programming, our identity and emotions – our chemical makeup that drives human psychology.

So what then will be the reaction to this next level step in the surveillance state? Will we redefine our notions of privacy, reacting like how teenagers have handled their online behavior on Facebook and Twitter? Who cares if all my behavior is shared with the world? Instead, I’ll embrace a loss of privacy that would have shocked my parents generation, and even mock it. One can already see this in the new offerings of anti-drone “stealth clothing” for any “style-conscious” terrorists the U.S. seeks, as well as “fashionistas who value their privacy.” As its designer told the media, it also doesn’t fall along clear partisan lines, making it the “Project Runway” version of Rand Paul’s filibuster. “It interests people on the far right as much as it interests people on the far left. Ultra-conservatives see it as anti-government and ultra-liberals see it as anti-military.”[56]

Or will we fear it? And is this a good or bad thing? Some, such as one senior State Department official, believe that our unmanning of war “…Plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”[57] The carryover of this belief to the domestic side is the belief that a world of more drones will be a safer world, via a deterrent value. Where’s Waldo won’t mug me if he knows he’ll be caught on screen,

But the psychology of scaring people with technology is a tricky business. It’s the domestic version of the problem we face in our counterterrorism today. Abroad the U.S. government is wrestling with the robot’s impact on our very human “war of ideas” that we are fighting against radical movements. U.S. troops in Afghanistan describe having drones overhead as reassuring, saying they can sleep better as they feel like someone is always above, watching out for them. On the other hand, many civilians there say it’s intrusive, and creates a climate of fear and distrust. That is, on the domestic side, the risk is that robotic surveillance will instead be perceived as an intrusive “Big Brother” figure, as the Russian police who have already used drones to monitor protesters have been called.

The broader issue might not be one of fear, however, but a redefinition of how those who are watched look at the watchers. There is the potential that the drone could become emblematic of those trying to police people they don’t know, on the cheap, from afar. The drone becomes like the cameras favored by the disconnected Baltimore police force of the TV show The Wire, who watch a world of crime play out that they don’t understand.[58]

Conclusions

The ripple effects of robotics will continue to push out into all sorts of domains, in ways both expected and unexpected. Through it all, though, one fundamental principle will hold true as it has in the past: There are always two sides to technologic revolutions. From our new technologies we gain amazing capabilities that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. But from our new technologies we also gain new human dilemmas that seem like they are straight from science-fiction. Moore’s Law is operative, but so is Murphy’s Law.[59]

The issues of domestic “drones” all seem futuristic, but notice how none of the examples that were explored in this article were from the distant future. The questions they raise are fundamental policy questions of today. We can ignore them, or we can embrace and engage in the opportunities and dilemmas of these exciting times.

The above paper includes sections explored in the article The Robotics Revolution, for the Canadian International Council. The author would also like to thank the Christopher Newport University Center for American Studies.

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Authors

Peter W. Singer

Focused Deterrence, Selective Targeting, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime: Concepts and Practicalities

Vanda Felbab-Brown — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: The following report was first published by the International Drug Policy Consortium, as part of its ‘Modernizing Drug Law Enforcement Project,’ in February 2013.

Introduction

Extensive criminality and illicit economies generate multiple, at times intense, threats to states and societies – to their basic security and safety, and to their economic, justice, and environmental interests. High levels of criminality, particularly criminal violence, tend to eviscerate law enforcement capacities as well as the social capital and organizational capacity of civil society and its ability to resist organized crime. Especially in the context of acute state weakness where underdeveloped and weak state institutions are the norm, goals such as a complete suppression of organized crime may be unachievable. But even in countries with strong law enforcement institutions, law enforcement efforts to suppress the incidence of criminality, particularly of transactional crimes, such as drug trafficking (as opposed to predatory crimes, such as homicides) have at times not succeeded and have generated negative side effects and externalities, such as human rights and civil liberties violations and overcrowded prisons.

Zero-tolerance approaches to crime, popular around the world since the late 1980s, have often proven problematic. They have produced highly unequal outcomes and often greater police abusiveness. Particularly, in the context of weak law enforcement institutions and high criminality, zero-tolerance approaches have mostly failed to reduce crime, while generating new problems. Allocating resources to essentially repressive programs frequently takes place at the expense of investigative capacity. Critically, the lack of prioritization of crimes and criminal groups often diverts police focus from the most violent and serious offenses and most dangerous criminal groups.

Focused-deterrence strategies, selective targeting, and sequential interdiction efforts are being increasingly embraced as more promising law enforcement alternatives. They seek to minimize the most pernicious behavior of criminal groups, such as engaging in violence, or to maximize certain kinds of desirable behavior sometimes exhibited by criminals, such as eschewing engagement with terrorist groups. The focused-deterrence, selective targeting strategies also enable overwhelmed law enforcement institutions to overcome certain under resourcing problems. Especially, in the United States, such approaches have produced impressive results in reducing violence and other harms generated by organized crime groups and youth gangs. Such approaches have, however, encountered implementation difficulties elsewhere in the world.

This report first outlines the logic and problems of zero-tolerance and undifferentiated targeting in law enforcement policies. Second, it lays out the key theoretical concepts of law-enforcement strategies of focused-deterrence and selective targeting and reviews some of their applications, as in Operation Ceasefire in Boston in the 1990s and urban-policing operations in Rio de Janeiro during the 2000s decade. Third, the report analyses the implementation challenges selective targeting and focused-deterrence strategies have encountered, particularly outside of the United States. And finally, it discusses some key dilemmas in designing selective targeting and focused-deterrence strategies to fight crime.

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Authors

Vanda Felbab-Brown

Publication: International Drug Policy Consortium

Has the U.S. "Militarized the Battle" Against Illegal Drugs?

Andrés Rozental — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The whole issue of how the United States and other countries continue to spend these huge amounts of money to ensure that the fight against drug trafficking remains outside the United States needs to be re-considered, not only because the existing interdiction policy has been an abysmal failure, but also because the sale of large quantities of arms and other military hardware to governments in Latin America and the Caribbean has only made their own security and public safety situation worse. The amounts mentioned by the Associated Press are only a small portion of the total budgets spent on unsuccessfully trying to stop drugs from entering the United States.

The only smart solution to the illicit narcotics market is to face the unpalatable, but nonetheless real, fact that drugs—like alcohol, tobacco and other stimulants—are an integral part of social behavior in most countries and that they need to be differentiated, decriminalized, taxed and regulated just like prescription drugs, liquor, cigarettes and the rest. Until that happens, the shameful waste of resources being spent on a 'mission impossible' only fuels the criminal elements involved in the business and raises the associated social, economic and political costs being borne by producing, consuming and transit nations. This relates both to military as well as civilian spending associated with the drug trafficking phenomenon and in my opinion applies equally to the public and private sectors.

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Authors

Andrés Rozental

Publication: Inter-American Dialogue's Latin America Advisor

Kenyans Head to the Polls - and a New Displacement Crisis?

Megan Bradley — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:45:00 -0500

Last night, Kenyans across the country crowded around radios and televisions for the second round of Presidential election debates. With elections less than a week away, tensions are running high. This is no ordinary election. The country’s last elections, in 2007, unleashed a surge of violence that left 1,300 dead and forced 600,000 from their homes – including some of my family friends, who fled the village of Ahero in western Kenya and eventually found shelter in the soccer stadium in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city. One of the leading presidential candidates and his running mate have been charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for allegedly orchestrating much of this violence. Our friends have returned to Ahero, but scores of Kenyans will not be able to cast their votes on Monday from their home towns: an estimated 250,000 Kenyans are currently displaced. Some have still not been able to go home – or find a new home – after the last round of election violence. In 2012 alone, over 118,000 people were newly displaced by ethnically and politically charged violence.

On top of all this, in addition to a new president and MPs, Monday’s vote will see Kenyans elect representatives to a host of new positions created under the country’s 2010 Constitution. Chaloka Beyani, the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), points out that, “Elections this year are not only about national positions, but also about local ones. Power struggles over political representation at the local level have already resulted in new displacements in some instances.”

In order to ensure that Monday’s vote does not repeat the tragedy of 2007/2008, the government needs to ramp up efforts to prevent and prepare for potential violence and displacement. As the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, has noted, “Instances of localized violence likely to result in the arbitrary displacement of persons in Kenya have steadily increased in the run up to the elections.” To its credit, the government of Kenya has laid the foundation for this prevention work by adopting a new IDP Act in December 2012 and approving a comprehensive IDP policy. According to the Special Rapporteur, “The IDP Act clearly obliges the government and others to guard against violence and prevent internal displacement.”

In addition to its obligation to prevent violence and new waves of displacement, the government of Kenya – and the international community – have a responsibility to hold the architects of the 2007/2008 crisis to account. Whatever the outcome of next week’s elections, this challenge must still be faced. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking of our friends in Ahero, hoping that the next time they visit the Kisumu soccer stadium, it will be to see a match and not to stay the night.

Authors

Megan Bradley

On FAA Announcement of Domestic Drones Test Sites

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:51:00 -0500

This week the FAA announced the selection process for domestic drone test sites. This is a key step in the opening up of the national airspace to unmanned systems, which has huge implications, from potentially determining which states might become the robotics versions of Silicon Valley to opening up huge privacy and legal concerns.

I gave a speech on these opportunities and challenges of the coming domestic drone boom, which might be of interest given this news.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Image Source: Reuters

A Killing Court

Paul R. Pillar — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

In John Brennan's confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, committee chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) said she would explore with Congressional colleagues the possible creation of a special court to review candidates for assassination by armed drones. The idea is worth exploring. Such a judicial mechanism could be a way of meeting the well-justified concerns of many that the drone program is too much a matter of executive discretion. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can serve as a successful model of how such a court might work. If we are to involve the judiciary before tapping a person's telephone (even when the target of the tap is a foreigner), why shouldn't we involve courts before killing the person?

Even if a drone court does not materialize, Congressional consideration of one would give a healthy boost to the hitherto insufficient discussion and debate about applying the rule of law to aerial assassination. Before establishing any such court, however, Congress should carefully weigh one other thing such a court would do and some things it would not do.

Creating the court would further institutionalize—in an even more prominent way than “playbooks” used within the executive branch—assassination of individuals overseas as a continuing function of the United States government. Is that something Americans really want to do, and is it consistent with what Americans think they stand for?

A court would not weigh the pros and cons of either individual killings or the entire program on any criteria other than those that could be made justiciable. Presumably the court would make judgments regarding whether evidence presented to it shows that a given individual is willing and able to participate in anti-U.S. terrorist attacks. One could not expect a court to weigh whether on balance the killing program is reducing the terrorist threat to the United States more than it is increasing it by stimulating more angry individuals to resort to terrorism. That troubling question has been hanging around now for years, going back to before armed drones were the heavily relied upon tool they have become and to when Donald Rumsfeld ruminated aloud about whether we were creating more terrorists than we were eliminating. We still lack a satisfactory answer to that question that would constitute a justification for the drone program. (It is presumably this lack that leads David Brooks to suggest creating, in addition to a court, “an independent panel of former military and intelligence officers issuing reports on the program’s efficacy.”)

A court also would not consider other damage (or conceivably benefits) to U.S. policy and interests that goes beyond terrorism and the creation of more terrorists. We were reminded of the broader consequences when the Pakistani ambassador complained publicly this week that drone strikes were a clear violation of international law and her nation's sovereignty and threatened U.S.-Pakistani relations. Of course, we need to apply many grains of salt to such a complaint from the envoy of the country where Osama bin Laden was living under official noses and where other reporting suggests that at least some of the drone strikes have been privately welcomed by Pakistani leaders even though they publicly complain about all of them. Nonetheless, widespread negative reactions to the strikes and their collateral damage affect popular attitudes, in Pakistan and elsewhere, toward the United States and ipso facto affect the posture of governments toward the United States.

A couple of years ago I gave testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which I mentioned the two-faced Pakistani approach on this subject, with private attitudes not always matching the public rhetoric. The one point on which the committee chairman, John Kerry, differed with my testimony was that he believed, based on his own conversations with Pakistani officials, that genuine attitudes toward the drone strikes were more strongly negative than I may have suggested. I take his comment then as a good sign that the new secretary of state will give proper attention to the broader consequences of the aerial assassinations.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

The Endless War

Paul R. Pillar — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

John Brennan, unlike Chuck Hagel, does not appear to have said things publicly that the Israel lobby has taken as a call to arms. Also unlike Hagel, he is not seen as a turncoat by diehard supporters of the Iraq War who are unwilling to admit a mistake. And so this week we will not see a repetition of last week's farcical circus that posed as a confirmation hearing. But there can be legitimate reasons for members of Congress to use a confirmation hearing to dwell on issues other than the nominee's fitness to fill the office for which he has been nominated. One such reason is that Congress and the public have been given no other good opportunity to examine the basis and rationale for a major program or policy, especially a controversial one. That is the situation regarding the use of armed drones to kill people.

A Justice Department white paper—leaked, not officially released by the administration—is the closest thing to an authoritative public look we have been given regarding the legal justification for the drone campaign. Despite repeated requests from members of Congress, the administration refused, until the evening before Brennan's hearing, to share with Congressional committees the more formal underlying legal memoranda. Some excellent critiques of the strained reasoning in the white paper have been written, including by James Joyner in these spaces and by Rosa Brooks. They have pointed out the vagueness and shakiness that characterizes the paper on matters ranging from what constitutes an imminent threat to who has the authority to issue an order to kill.

Without repeating the excellent points in the critiques, I would only note one of the implications about which Americans do not seem to be aware: that accepting this rationale for the campaign means signing up for a war that is endless in both time and scope.

The white paper returns again and again to the notion that the United States is “in an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida and its associated forces.” The idea, in other words, is that the United States is fighting a war against a supposedly coherent, identifiable enemy, just as when it fought wars against Nazi Germany or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Without that concept of a war, the whole legal case and everything it says about due process and rights of accused citizens and all the rest falls apart.

But whatever is represented by the term “al-Qa'ida and its associated forces” isn't anything like Germany or Iraq. It is a will-o'-the-wisp of an enemy. The original al-Qa'ida that Americans came to know and fear after 9/11 is a decimated residue in South Asia. Various other violent groups in other regions have, for various reasons of their own, decided to adopt the al-Qa'ida brand. That brand name represents not a coherent, identifiable enemy but instead an ideology, which isn't even necessarily the main driver of behavior for many of those who use the brand name. Al-Qa'ida is a variable and inchoate set of ideas that involve a mixture of Sunni radicalism and violence as political action, with a transnational tinge. Americans ought to be concerned about how—with the white paper stating that targets of the drones do not need to be directly involved in any known terrorist plots—the killing program comes close to the handing down and carrying out of death sentences, even on U.S. citizens, without any involvement of a court and at the say-so of “an informed, high-level official,” for holding a set of ideas.

Americans ought to be concerned as well about other things regarding the drone campaign; the endless and limitless nature of the program that is implied by the legal rationale for it is certainly one of those things. More groups can and probably will adopt the al-Qa'ida brand. Some of those groups may not have yet come into existence. And terrorism, which has been used for millennia, will be around indefinitely. Of course, most Americans did not think they were signing up for an endless war. But unless the basis for it is circumscribed and justified with more precision than it has been so far, an endless war is what they got.

The American public, and its habits of thinking about terrorism, deserve much of the blame for getting in this situation. Thinking of counterterrorism as a “war” is the original mistake. There were more parochial political interests that pushed this idea, but it resonated with the Jacksonian fibers in the American public, which readily adopted it especially after 9/11. The problems with the counterterrorism-as-war notion have been on display with the handling of suspects who are captured and incarcerated. They are also on display, as reflected in the Justice Department memo, with suspects who are to be killed.

Another unfortunate habit of public thought is the zero-tolerance outlook toward terrorism, which has motivated officials to push legal and moral envelopes, and to incur other costs and international political damage, in order to insure that even if they cannot prevent all terrorist incidents on their watch they at least can say afterward that they did everything possible to avoid them. Witness the uproar even after a non-fatal near-miss, such as the attempted attack by the underwear bomber in December 2009. This week's nominee was the principal official who after that incident had to go before the cameras and issue a mea culpa on behalf of himself and his colleagues.

Although public attitudes laid the groundwork for a limitless killing program, public attitudes are doing little or nothing to help impose better limits. This involves another respect in which the drone program is different from traditional wars: there are no direct American casualties (and even the monetary costs are very small compared to those traditional wars). Therefore, whatever concerns about the program get expressed at this week's confirmation hearing, they will not involve political forces anywhere near as strong as those associated with either the Israel lobby or cognitive dissonance about the Iraq War.

If a political motivation is to be engaged, it will have to involve senior people in the administration and especially the president himself thinking along a line suggested by Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. In an op ed calling for a newer and sounder statutory basis for activities such as the drone strikes, Goldsmith observes that the absence of such a basis, "is unfortunate for the president, not only because he increasingly acts without political cover, and because his secret wars are increasingly criticized and scrutinized abroad, but also because he alone will bear the legacy of any negative consequences — at home and globally — of unilateral, lethal, secret warfare."

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Strangeness at Guantanamo

Paul R. Pillar — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

During a hearing Monday to consider pre-trial motions before the military tribunal at Guantanamo that is handling the case of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other defendants charged with perpetrating the 9/11 attacks, the audio and video feeds that run from the courtroom to media rooms and are the only way for the outside world to follow the proceedings were mysteriously interrupted for several minutes. No one who is saying anything to the outside world seems to know the reason for the interruption. The colonel who is the presiding judge seemed not to know on Monday. A member of the prosecution team said she does know but, with the cameras and microphones back on, would not explain. The following day the judge seemed satisfied with whatever explanation he apparently got, but he wasn't talking either.

The mysterious electronic gap is a fitting sample of much that is strange about the detention facility at Guantanamo and what goes on there. Part of the strangeness is about Guantanamo itself; other parts are about things that are centered at, or symbolized by Guantanamo, including the basis for indefinite detention of people suspected of involvement in terrorism and the military tribunal system used to try some of them.

What is odd about the facility itself is its anomalous legal status, being on a U.S. military base with a long-term lease from Cuba. Decision-makers in the George W. Bush administration selected the place to establish a detention center that would be as much as possible out of the reach of anyone's law. The Supreme Court has frustrated whatever hope there may have been to keep it entirely outside the reach of the law, but the anomaly of the place continues to be a basis for the legal uncertainty of much of what goes on there.

One of the latest of the many legal uncertainties about the military tribunal system concerns whether it can be used to try defendants for anything other than crimes of war. There is disagreement about whether prosecutors can bring to a tribunal conspiracy charges of the sort that can certainly be brought in a civilian court. The Department of Justice says they can; the military judge in charge of the tribunals says they can't (while adding that this very disagreement demonstrates the tribunals' independence and by implication their fairness). Besides the uncertainty, there is an irony given how members of Congress who have forced the handling of terrorism cases out of the civilian courts and into military tribunals may have thought that this tough handling of the subject as “war” would mean greater power and freedom to punish terrorists without prosecutors' jobs being complicated by all the rules of evidence and whatnot that civilian courts have. With regard to something like the use of conspiracy charges, the move to military tribunals means less, not more, flexibility in what prosecutors can do.

Also in the news this week is the administration's announcement that the State Department official who has been charged with negotiating new custody arrangements for Guantanamo prisoners is being reassigned without being replaced. This move is being interpreted as a tacit admission by the Obama administration that it will not realize its goal of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo, although officially the administration says that is still the goal. Failure to meet that goal is partly due to facing the reality of each detainee's case being different and many of them being complicated. The failure is in large part due again to Congress, which has restricted movement of detainees both to the United States and to some of the key foreign countries. Thus another irony: the actions of those who think in terms of a “war on terror” with a beginning and an end have laid the basis for a supposedly temporary detention system that will have no end.

President Obama recently appointed former prosecutor Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. As U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, White's office successfully prosecuted several of the highest profile terrorism cases—the experience that most refutes some of the chief arguments made in favor of reliance on the military tribunal system. Although at the SEC White will be a regulator rather than a prosecutor, the administration's evident hope and message in making this appointment is that Wall Street crooks will face effective punishment. Maybe the United States will handle the cases of such crooks with greater rationality, consistency and effectiveness than it seems to be handling the cases of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

The Opportunities and Challenges of the Coming Domestic Drone Boom

Peter W. Singer — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: In his January 28, 2013 Alexander Hamilton Society Keynote Lecture at Christopher Newport University, Peter Singer spoke about the revolutionary effects of drones and the issues policymakers will face as such robotics become more prevalent. A portion of the speech is below; the entire speech is available via Vimeo.

In 1899, a strange thing appeared on the streets of Norfolk – it was loud, ungainly, and ugly. It was also the first of its kind. It was the first quote “horseless carriage” to appear on the streets of Virginia – a steam-powered car. It was also called a “loco-mobile.” Now, within a decade after that, there were more than 2,705 of these strange things. This strange new technology registered with the Commonwealth of Virginia, and by 1915 there were more than 37,000 of these now what we call automobiles in Virginia.

Now this new technology brought all sorts of new opportunity to the area. The first Virginia-made car called the “Dawson car” was built in Basic City, what is now called Waynesboro, in 1901. And the Piedmont and Klein car were manufactured in Lynchburg and Richmond respectively. Virginia manufacturers would make over 2,500 horseless carriages before Henry Ford shifted to the assembly line and basically moved the industry to Michigan.

Now this strange new technology didn’t just bring opportunity, it brought all sorts of new questions that nobody was ready for in Virginia – especially the state government. There were no real roads, there were no maps to the paths that existed, and indeed as late as 1921 the Automobile Club of America recommended that motorists driving from New England to Florida bypass the state of Virginia.

As with revolutionary inventions of the past, like the horseless carriage and manned airplanes, no amount of handwringing by pundits late to the game will see a technology of such great promise banned. That said, new technologies bring with them the need for revising old laws. Early cars and planes, for instance, led to the creation of newfangled things like "traffic laws" and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Watch Peter Singer's speech on the CNU Center for American Studies Vimeo page »

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Christopher Newport University Center for American Studies

Flowchart: How the Government Handles a Terrorist Threat

Benjamin Wittes and Daniel L. Byman — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 10:59:00 -0500