Virginia Hall in 1944 on this day set up a safe house in Le Chambon sur Lignon, south central France on the farm of Maurice and Léa Lebrat. In her own words:

My life in Haute-Loire was different and difficult. I spent my time looking for fields for receptions, bicycling up and down mountains, checking drop zones, visiting various contacts, doing my wireless transmissions and then spending the nights out waiting, for the most part in vain, for the deliveries.

Hall’s heroic and successful field work to defeat Nazism is captured by a famous painting donated to the CIA in a 2006 memorial.

The painting is named for one of her air drop code phrases “Les marguerites fleuriront ce soir” (The daisies bloom tonight). Depicted with Hall is Léa Lebrat’s cousin Edmund, credited with building and operating a easily-disguised hand-crank generator to power wireless signals to London.

March 1944 she sneaked into France by boat (Brittany coast) and began exfiltrating streams of intelligence as well as training three battalions with a Jedburgh Team to fight the Germans until Allied forces (following D-Day 6th of June 1944) were able to join her in August and take over in September. Again, in her own words (allegedly):

In 1943 I joined General Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services for more adventures with the French Resistance. I became proficient in Morse code and radio operation, which made me invaluable. During the day, I appeared to be a milkmaid. However, at night I directed the Resistance Forces under me in many acts of sabotage and guerilla warfare. I relayed important information from haylofts via my radio to London. I was always keeping ahead of the Gestapo, whose leaders knew of me and wanted me captured. I never gave them the opportunity, my spirit and devotion to the cause carried me on.

I said allegedly for the above quote as “made me invaluable” and “always keeping ahead” do not sound at all like Virginia’s voice, and I’ve been unable to source it as authentic.

She passed away in 1982, doing the hard work more than trying to gain recognition, and remained mostly unknown.

Senator Bob Dole in 2016 called out Hall specifically (“only civilian woman to receive the Distinguished Service Cross in World War II”) when he pushed the US Government to give a Congressional Gold Medal to OSS (awarded March 21, 2018).

Or as President Harry Truman put it, when General Donovan in September 1945 awarded her the Cross:

Miss Hall displayed rare courage, perseverance and ingenuity; her efforts contributed materially to the successful operations of the Resistance Forces in support of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in the liberation of France.

The National Archives have a copy of the “Memorandum for the President from William J. Donovan Regarding Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) Award to Virginia Hall, 05/12/1945″

Further reading:

• https://www.cia.gov/static/91e2f189e07819d7932b0b6d4875067b/Woman-of-No-Importance.pdf
• https://www.cia.gov/static/7851e16f9e100b6f9cc4ef002028ce2f/Office-of-Strategic-Services.pdf
• https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2020/04/16/the-secrets-of-the-office-of-strategic-services-personnel-records/
• https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=%22Virginia%20Hall%22&f.oldScope=(descriptions%20or%20online)&f.locationIds=33&f.recordGroupNoCollectionId=226&SearchType=advanced

Kosta Derpanis posed this question on Twitter:

Did you know ConvNets were initially patented by AT&T Bell Labs? Source.

Then Yann LeCun, following up a 2019 podcast, replies in an awkward nine part Twitter thread about intentionally violating IP restrictions. Since this thread could disappear any minute, and in the spirit of LeCun’s own violation mindset, I’ve posted it here for analysis/archival sake):

There were two patents on ConvNets: one for ConvNets with strided convolution, and one for ConvNets with separate pooling layers. They were filed in 1989 and 1990 and allowed in 1990 and 1991.

We started working with a development group that built OCR systems from it. Shortly thereafter, AT&T acquired NCR, which was building check imagers/sorters for banks. Images were sent to humans for transcription of the amount. Obviously, they wanted to automate that.

A complete check reading system was eventually built that was reliable enough to be deployed. Commercial deployment in banks started in 1995. The system could read about half the checks (machine printed or handwritten) and sent the other half to human operators.

The first deployment actually took place a year before that in ATM machines for amount verification (first deployed by the Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne in France). Then in 1996, catastrophe strikes: AT&T split itself up into AT&T (services), Lucent (telecom equipment), and NCR.

Our research group stayed with AT&T (wih AT&T Labs-Research), the engineering group went with Lucent, and the product group went with NCR. The lawyers, in their infinite wisdom, assigned the ConvNet patents to NCR, since they were selling products based on them

But no one at NCR had any idea what a ConvNet was! I became a bit depressed: it was essentially forbidden for me to work on my own intellectual production (Loudly crying face). I was promoted to Dept Head had to decide what to do next. This was 1996, when the Internet was taking off.

So I stopped working on ML. Neural nets were becoming unpopular anyways. I started a project on image compression for the Web called DjVu with Léon Bottou. And we wrote papers on all the stuff we did in the early 1990s.

It wasn’t until I left AT&T in early 2002 that I restarted work on ConvNets. I was hoping that no one at NCR would realize they owned the patent on what I was doing. No one did. I popped the champagne when the patents expired in 2007! (Bottle with popping cork Clinking glasses)

Moral of the story: the patent system can be very counterproductive when patents are separated from the people best positioned to build on them.

Patents make sense for certain things, mostly physical things. But almost never make sense for “software”, broadly speaking.

Something sounds very wrong. When AT&T in 1996 spun out NCR as its computer division (and Lucent as its equipment and systems), patents on computer technology were separated from the people best positioned to build on them? Product sounds like exactly the right place for product. And then popping champagne for not being caught when illegally taking IP from a former employer?

The United Nations has this introduction to the subject of mines and disarmament:

Landmines come in two varieties: anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines. Both have caused great suffering in the past decades. Anti-personnel landmines are prohibited under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (or Mine Ban Convention), adopted in 1997. More than 150 countries have joined this treaty. Its positive impact includes a marked reduction of casualties, an increased number of mine-free States, destroyed stockpiles and improved assistance to victims.

The question becomes if land-mines are prohibited, aren’t drones aloft (loitering munitions of WWII that explode on some trigger mechanism) thus simply air-mines and prohibited already?

Israel’s recent use of drones is being described in Defense Update as an intentional move away from human oversight in anti-personnel explosives.

First, Israel is calling out safety and human oversight as too slow to engage in combat:

In recent years drones have proved essential for all military operations, providing critical intelligence and pursuing time-sensitive targets. As they loiter over the battlespace, drones can spot enemy activities on the ground, but transferring this insight into action may take hours as the call for fire is processed through the echelons until the order to fire is approved.

Empowering the company commanders with the means and authority to order and approve an attack by their organic weapons, supporting artillery, naval, or air support enables the IDF to engage targets having a short lifespan. These targets are often exposed by exploiting the friction created through the movement of manned or unmanned combat units in enemy territory.

That seems like a simple enough problem to solve, like giving orders to authorize a soldier holding a gun to use discretion when firing and not call for approval, unless a call is needed.

A Navy SEAL told me a story about this where he had given his men orders to immediately shoot anyone they saw pointing weapons at the American President — without delay and without need for approval.

Soon after a call came through for approval to fire at someone pointing a gun at the President. Confused by the request, he asked questions. The answer became a foreign soldier was pointing a large sniper rifle towards the President (ostensibly to help guard him by looking through its scope for targets). Obviously the SEAL leader said don’t fire.

Second, although Israel is emphasizing a chain of command and authorized discretion by a company, it is not clear that will continue to hold true.

This video makes the drone look very much more like a mine designed to be remotely staged, almost like planting to explode later on a simple wireless trigger.

Will swarms be converted by “efficiency” pressure (like how artillery shells became IED) into becoming airborne mines?

Here’s the conclusion of the Defense Update:

On May 6, 2021, as the fighting in the south erupted, the new S&D unit moved quickly to become the first military unit to operate drone swarms in combat. Within few hours, they deployed and fielded this brand-new system, seeking and destroying dozens of hidden enemy targets in complex terrain in rural and urban areas.

Within a few days, the new unit brought stunning results. A single company empowered by drone swarms, precision weapons, and comprehensive C4I delivered over 30 missions, destroying dozens of enemy targets several kilometers beyond the border. They were able to locate the enemy in complex urban and densely vegetated rural areas, designate targets, assess those targets at the company CP, strike the targets selected for engagement and perform battle damage assessment (BDA), all that done within minutes by drone swarms. Following the success of these S&D companies, the GFC recommended converting all combat support companies in regular force to S&D companies over the next year.

I read that as the only ethics/oversight gate remaining would be to “assess targets at the company CP and select for engagement”, unless you count BDA, while it’s all done within minutes”.

With that in mind, a problem of mines in the area is a story dating back to at least WWII.

The Arab Republic of Egypt is contaminated with mines and explosive remnants of war in the Western Desert, which date from World War II, and in the Sinai Peninsula and Eastern Desert, which are a legacy of wars with Israel between 1956 and 1973. […] The government has stated that some 17 million landmines were left in the Western Desert and another 5.5 million in Sinai and the Eastern Desert.

Some important lessons there, surely. What if drone swarms are left behind? What if they are commandeered or corrupted? Imagine a swarm being tricked into drifting backwards towards launchers and targeting owners, or just being left behind and then recycled into some future terrorism campaign.

The next question perhaps is blow-back, as old mines left in the desert during long-ago wars have been dug out and repurposed into modern IED by terrorists.

…these munitions have become part of a new and worrisome trend. As the Islamic State and other jihadi groups have grown throughout the region, sometimes roaming unchecked across long, porous borders, a few have realized the potential power of this massive cache of explosives, much of it buried here by the Nazis. Military and civilian officials in Cairo say ISIS and other groups have already MacGyvered these decades-old mines, using their components for bombs, improvised explosive devices (IED) and other instruments of death. “We’ve had at least 10 reports from the military of terrorists using old mines, says Fathy el-Shazly, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who until recently served as Egypt’s land mine clearance czar. “Even now, these things trouble us in different ways.”