Here is a copy of my presentation from a private engineering conference, where I was invited to speak about ML/AI security. It contains the history of police, street lights, and many more relevant past events that should inform our immediate future of machine engineering:

Abstract:

As the old saying goes from the digital prairie, if you see yourself as someone of influence just try ordering someone else’s robot around.

Given the automated platforms everyone has running right now, who is really able to account for what their learning machines are doing, let alone why and how they were authorized? And even if an accounting can be done for one or some robots, who is reliably able solve such questions at scale for increasingly ephemeral operations (assuming robots continue to allow us to terminate them)?

This presentation puts forward protocols and procedures for the idea that a foundation of ethics underpins the standards that will be used to create security solutions that both make intelligent machines more secure from us, as well as make ourselves more secure from them.

Copy of Presentation Slides: security-intell-machines.daviottenheimer.pdf (7 MB)

Twenty years after the American Embassy in Nairobi was bombed, a Memorial Park now sits at the junctions of Avenues named after Moi (2nd President of Kenya) and Haile Selassie (Emperor of Ethiopia).

A memorial wall commemorates names of the more than 200 who lost their lives, along-side a garden, a fountain, and a USAID-financed sculpture made from the debris of the blast. The visitor’s center says at least 12K people visit every month to recount the morning of August 7th in 1998 as well as “be educated about the futility of violence and the essence of peace”.

Local news reports how even today Kenyans and Tanzanians continue to discuss reparations from the US government, and whether there were obvious security failures at the Embassy.

Arguments in support of compensation to Kenyan victims are based partly on claims that the US State Department failed to properly secure the embassy building that stood on Moi Avenue in Nairobi.

Prudence Bushnell, US ambassador to Kenya at the time of the bombing, has said she repeatedly alerted officials in Washington that the embassy was vulnerable to terrorist attack. No action was taken in response to her warnings.

“As ambassador, I was responsible for security,” Ms Bushnell wrote in her contribution to a set of 20th anniversary reflections on the attack published in the Foreign Service Journal. “And while I had pushed and pushed to get Washington’s attention to our vulnerabilities, I remain keenly aware that I failed.”

This was the event that fueled Sheehan’s plan to fight al Qaeda with diplomatic pressure, which also was said to have “landed with a resounding thud” within US the government.

Sheehan secretly set forth specific actions the US must take toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, with Pakistan being the pivotal member to isolate the terrorist group. His plan wasn’t enacted. In retrospect now we look at what should have been done before 2000 when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, and before 2001 when the Twin Towers were bombed.

The premise of the Stanford graduate’s ruling, where he gave a Stanford student light sentence, was that the accused should be allowed a few more bad decisions before being reigned in:

…recalling a judge primarily based on one decision — that, for me, is a step too far.

Ooops, I’m sorry, that is actually the judge explaining why he should be allowed another chance after his own poor judgment. I suppose he also might have considered claiming that he was intoxicated on the bench as that seems also to be some sort of get-out-sentencing card to him:

Prosecutors had asked for a six-year prison sentence. But Persky sided with a recommendation from the county probation department, which said “when compared to other crimes of similar nature” the Turner case “may be considered less serious due to (his) level of intoxication.”

Is it just me or does this sound like someone is arguing that drinks are the cause of violent crimes, as if straight out of a prohibition pamphlet?

The judge’s reasoning seems seriously lacking, self-servingly biased if not just insensitive, and none of this has yet to rehabilitate Stanford’s image. The word in Silicon Valley continues to be that the school seems ethically challenged by design:

There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. […] The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

So the real headline is a Stanford man is dumped by voters, which may be a symptom of spreading consciousness about Silicon Valley political conservatism that ties back to the sadly racist and corrupt legacy of the school’s founder. Read carefully the 1862 Inaugural Address of Stanford after he bribed his way into office:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged, by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. Large numbers of this class are already here; and, unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question, which of the two tides of immigration, meeting upon the shores of the Pacific, shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration, when far more difficult than now of disposal. There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration. It will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action, having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races.

The Washington Post suggests in an obituary that the NY Daily News considered Michael A. Sheehan the “real-life Rambo”

Sheehan, who began his career as an Army Ranger, first took part in clandestine operations in Panama in 1979. Later, he was part of drug-interdiction and counterterrorism operations in Colombia, El Salvador and Honduras, scaling buildings and jumping out of helicopters as a “real-life Rambo,” in the words of a New York Daily News profile.

What’s suspicious about calling him Rambo, however, is how un-like that character he seems given his articulate criticisms of things like the military-industrial-congressional-complex:

Security checkpoints at airports did little to deter terrorism, he said, and only served to annoy the “white haired grandma” whose life was “turned upside down by overzealous airport inspectors.”

He pointed out that when he drove onto military bases, armed guards looked through the dirty laundry in his luggage – but the hotels next to the bases were completely unguarded because they weren’t funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

I’m no Rambo quotes expert. It just seems useful in terms of foreign and domestic policy to point out how grounded and completely opposite Sheehan sounds from the fictional movie character depictions when Sheehan talks about dealing with threats.

Consider, in comparison, this painfully stupid line from Rambo in “First Blood” (1982)

Trautman: Look John, we can’t have you running around out there killing friendly civilians.

Rambo: There are no friendly civilians!

Sheehan was saying things very much in the opposite tone for decades, repeatedly trying to prove that civilians matter and he cared that their lives be protected:

While serving in the Pentagon, I witnessed on tape just about every drone shot taken by the Defense Department outside of Afghanistan during my tenure. The degree of care in ensuring whom the target is — and in limiting collateral damage — is extraordinary.

During my time at DoD, I directed my staff to share these video feeds with Congress so they could tell their constituents about the precise nature of these operations, and dispel bogus claims by the Taliban and others about the massive collateral damage caused by these strikes. Drones and airstrikes cannot win terrain, but they provide a great, low-risk capability to degrade the enemy and support our allies in their ground campaigns.

Whether you believe him or not, clearly he struck (no pun intended) the opposite tone from a Rambo character. He goes on to say treating groups of civilians as the enemy is “ignorance of counterterrorism”:

There’s good news. Obama has built a very capable team, with experienced leaders at Defense, the CIA, U.S. Special Operations Command, the FBI and DHS. He now must direct (or unleash) them to expand the fight — innovate and take prudent risk. This is no time for caution.

At home, we can get the job done without resorting to extremes like registering all American Muslims, as Donald Trump recently suggested he would do, before partially walking away from his own comments. Still, his suggestion exposed his complete ignorance of counterterrorism operations. Such an elaborate tracking system is unnecessary, impractical to implement, counterproductive and, to boot, unconstitutional.

Three years after Sheehan retired from the military, and seven years after he worked for the US ambassador to the UN (another achievement that makes comparisons to Rambo appear unwarranted), Sheehan gave this simple advice for reducing terrorism risk:

“What works,” he said, is “sustained diplomatic pressure, political will and courage.”

I can’t imagine Rambo saying such sensible things. While superior athletic and weapons expertise may have earned Sheehan a sensational comparison to a fictional extremist militant character, I think he will be remembered most for his work on diplomacy, teamwork and skilled support of US allies, and maybe even for his care for civilians. It is sad to hear of Sheehan’s untimely death and an immediate jump to Rambo references hopefully bring to light more of his un-Rambo life’s work.

In terms of history, I suppose he also will be remembered for dissenting from conservative narratives in 2000 (e.g. Dick and Lynne Cheney insisted China was biggest threat and wanted military show-down). He instead loudly pointed to al-Qaeda, trying to warn the US and enact counter-measures after 1998 US Embassy bombing in Kenya, at least a year before USS Cole bombing and long before 9/11.

Mr. Sheehan’s plan “landed with a resounding thud,” one former official told The Times.

“He couldn’t get anyone interested,” the official said.

Mr. Sheehan pressed on.

“What’s it going to take to get them to hit Al Qaeda?” he asked colleagues in 2000. “Does Al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?”

The prescient and analytic Mr. Sheehan now has passed away, only days before the 20th memorial of the Embassy bombing that emboldened his warnings.