Specifically, the drone atomises the pesticides into micron-level droplets, so the chemicals can evenly adhere to the surface of maize plants with higher coverage rate. The strong downdraft generated by the propellers can significantly reduce liquid drifting and increase pesticide deposition, which means that both sides of the leaves and the central part of crops can be more precisely targeted. Such mechanism can not only increase fall armyworm’s exposure to chemicals but also cut down a large amount of pesticide use and better conserve the beneficial insects.
Targeting sounds like it’s more of a “bracketing” spray than an injection into each worm on a leaf, although the drone company suggests they are looking into worm-recognition capabilities.
Targeting the individual worms instead of plant-level dosing still seems cost-prohibitive in this story. To achieve that accuracy I think we’d be talking Integrated Pest Management (IPM) with technology-augmented insects, or micro-drones, instead of these sprayers.
Perhaps soon there will be Integrated Drone Management (IDM) appearing in agricultural operations centers where augmented bugs are deployed from drones like static-line parachute jumpers.
Many years ago when we were starting research on how to stop drones setup as biological weapons, we looked at them as flying bombs in the same way the Italian fascist military dropped mustard gas on field-hospitals and ambulances.
Chinese agriculture, however, clearly is being driven to develop more highly-efficient low-dose toxin delivery at a micro-target levels. That kind of emphasis in tooling accuracy means drones soon may advance past U.S. bladed assassination missiles, innovating so quickly we will have to update the risk discussions.
To be fair, five years ago any kind of anti-drone methods to stop weaponized versions meant a specific audience where examples needed to be general. Today it seems a general audience is open to hearing what harms may be ahead and more specific examples are more welcome.
Unfortunately what I must emphasize most today isn’t just how drones rapidly move towards highly-targeted assassination methods for something labelled pest. I must also point out members of our security community actively have been found labeling non-whites as pests. Beware people advertising themselves as deserving authority to protect humans from harm, who may in fact be enabling and promoting harm through technology.
Meanwhile, in Japan, a drone is being created to replace pesticides at a more macro level. Ducks have been used to eat weeds and pests in rice paddies, avoiding the need for toxic chemicals. So someone decided they would attempt to replace the ducks with a robotic one.
Immediate downsides that come to mind are 1) the lack of fertilizer byproduct from robot collecting instead of digesting the weeds and bugs and 2) the lack of meat byproduct from eating the ducks before rice harvest (ducks have to be removed anyway or they’ll eat the rice).
DEFCON always has been for me about meeting with the Federal Government. Since the mid-1990s it has felt like the place government staff come to party with reduced accountability and oversight.
This year I stepped into the “Ethics Village” and listened to Joshua Steinman present his vision. To be honest in my decades of experience in security and working with the government I never had heard of Josh. When he began speaking I kind of realized why. He said very emphatically to the moderator:
Please don’t ever say cyber security. It’s just cyber.
This was like telling us don’t ever say “Internet security” because just saying Internet somehow magically implies security is there. Yeah, not going to happen. Say cyber security if you care about security.
Few things self-reveal someone inexperienced in security like their overuse of the term cyber, leaving off modifiers needed to clarify, or lacking a sense of irony.
He also gave an intro of his background where he claimed to be a world-class expert on Al Qaeda before 9/11, issuing a national security report based on all available evidence (I later found out this was just a short paper he wrote in high school, and I am not kidding).
Let me say that again. He wrote a paper in high school and, based on that alone with nothing more, claimed publicly to be a world expert on Al Qaeda.
He also said he was a big supporter of the Republican candidate for President and that pulled him straight into the White House after victory.
And finally he called himself entrepreneurial (I later found out he started a knitting company to make socks for men, and again I am not kidding).
While he puffed himself up like a giant balloon that believes he is on the right side of history and ahead of his time, something about this wildly self-promoting character was off… especially compared to the quality of other speakers in prior sessions in the Ethics Village.
For the next 30 minutes or so Josh rattled randomly about personal life philosophy. He suggested hanging around the coffee station or water-cooler is his management strategy. And he was surprised to find out an 1800s-era White House is physically small.
I’ve since been told “water cooler talk” is a dog whistle for closed door meetings where minorities who deserve equitable treatment are intentionally excluded.
For someone repeatedly claiming he was able to see into the future, everything said was the opposite of substance or prediction. Imagine traveling all the way to a conference, sitting down to hear the “head of cyber” for a national government, and getting a presentation that sounded like this:
Usually I like to stand around in the break room area by the coffee. That’s where I hear conversations others are having and can find out what’s happening in the White House. Sometimes I join their conversation.
We can infer that nobody would share details with him otherwise and probably too polite to refuse him joining their otherwise “inequitable” conversation format in the break room.
Think about this in terms of surveillance and confidentiality. What he is saying is he likes to insert himself into conversations in a manner most convenient to him, and such that he can interfere in a discussion without being formally invited; insider privilege because he has the key to the break room.
This was by no means a comforting talk to hear from the person purporting to be the policy making leader of our industry. I’m also paraphrasing here as Josh said several times “Raise your hand if you are a reporter. There are no reporters here? What I’m saying is off the record.” It appeared he was joking about this, although nobody laughed.
In retrospect I wish someone had said in response “how is being a reporter different from you standing around the break room and then telling other people what you heard?”
What caught my attention, among the rambling stories of hanging around spying on people and achieving nothing tangible, was that Josh proudly said with the utmost confidence “executive privilege is right there in the Constitution. Go read it to see for yourself.”
I’m no constitutional lawyer but as a historian who studied cold-war machinations of Presidents I’m well aware that the executive privilege line most definitely is NOT something you can read in the Constitution. Furthermore, as a security professional, I’m well aware of the danger of executive privilege being used to suppress evidence/speech and deny freedoms necessary to avert suffering at massive scale.
One of the great constitutional myths is the principle of executive privilege. Though the term is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, every President has called upon it when necessary.
I really have no idea why Josh would say “go read it” for something that doesn’t exist in writing. He’s supposed to be a policy expert. Moreover you can imagine there is a big issue with oversight for that qualifier “when necessary”, since it’s for a privilege that is going to be argued as above all oversight.
The alternative language used by Mr. Reagan’s lawyers appears to reflect a desire to avoid the negative connotation associated with the term, which over the years has come to be thought of by critics as a legal ploy invoked by Presidents seeking to deflect embarrassing inquiries.
The legal skirmish is taking place in advance of Mr. Poindexter’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on Feb. 20. He faces five criminal charges, including accusations that he obstructed Congressional inquiries and made false statements to Congress about the Government’s secret arms sales to Iran and about efforts to aid the Nicaraguan rebels, or contras, at a time when such assistance was banned by Congress.
That reference to legal ploy comes from Richard Nixon, who similarly claimed he had such an executive privilege to conceal his guilt. He thought he could block White House tape recordings being revealed during the Watergate Scandal.
During the Bush Administration, executive privilege was argued to be not only non-specific but also quite limited. Note the reference to Kavanaugh (now on the Supreme Court) lying to Congress.
Predictably, the White House is claiming executive privilege and refusing to cooperate with the legitimate Congressional investigations, one springing from Mr. Bush’s decision to spy on Americans without a warrant and the other from the purge of United States attorneys. The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. […] Nor can it be used to shield an official who might have lied to Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the Justice Department to investigate Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House official who told a Senate hearing on his appointment to a federal judgeship that he was not involved in forming rules on the treatment of detainees. Recent press accounts suggest that he was.
That’s a far more restrictive interpretation of executive privilege theory versus a Washington Post article from 1986 that spells out how proponents had wanted to use it under the Reagan Administration:
While serving in effect as lawyer for Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Cooper also advises the Justice Department, other federal agencies and inquiring members of Congress on a wide range of legal questions. Most of his opinions remain confidential, but some that have surfaced have generated headlines. In one opinion, Cooper argued that employers may fire persons with AIDS because of fear that the disease may be contagious, even if that fear is irrational. In another, he said that President Reagan must support an executive privilege claim by former president Richard M. Nixon to keep Nixon’s White House papers secret. […] In addition, department sources say, Cooper has been advising Meese on the U.S. decision to allow arms to be shipped to Iran in connection with efforts to free American hostages. Meese, in turn, has provided assurances to the White House that the shipments were legal.
Perhaps most importantly for this Ethics Village talk, that comment on AIDS is more significant than you might realize. Ronald Reagan claimed executive privilege could block the Centers for Disease Control from issuing a pamphlet on the AIDS crisis despite tens of thousands of Americans dying.
First, let’s set the context of how Reagan handled a threat to Americans that started in 1981. After it already killed nearly twice the number of 9/11 casualties Reagan used his authority to stay silent on the issue:
One of the most prominent stains on the…Reagan administration was its response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis as it began to ravage American cities in the early and mid-1980s. President Reagan famously…didn’t himself publicly mention AIDS until [Sept 17th] 1985, when more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease.
Even in 1985, Roberts (now on the Supreme Court) wrote an infamous memo that recommended the President keep quiet for self-benefit, avoid reassuring people with science, and wait instead for hyperbolic commentators to be proven wrong by scientists.
I would not like to see the President reassuring the public on this point, only to find out he was wrong later. There is much to commend the view that we should assume AIDS can be transmitted through casual or routine contact…
AIDS can not be transmitted through casual or routine contact. It is known today as it was already known then.
After years of intentional silence on the subject by an American President the threat went on to be the greatest public health catastrophe of the twentieth century and kill approximately 650,000, the same as number of Americans estimated killed during the Civil War.
…for the first four years in office, the nation’s top health officer was prevented from addressing the nation’s most urgent health crisis, for reasons he insisted were never fully clear to him but that were no doubt political.
Imagine executive privilege being used to prevent experts from addressing the nation’s most urgent security crisis, then look at this graph of Reagan’s policy of censorship and silence on harms.
Data on American death was suppressed by Reagan until 1987. Source: National Center for Health Statistics
So this prompted me to ask Josh about the large and vague theory of executive privilege. Already we can see Josh was wrong about executive privilege being written in the Constitution. Now I wanted to know if he supported its use to block discussion of a bug that can kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
I stepped up at the end of his presentation and asked 1) where executive privilege was written and 2) whether Ronald Reagan’s interpretation of it would enable the White House to secretly harm Americans with backdoors in encryption, much in the same way he avoided public accountability for export death (illegal arms shipments to Iran) and domestic death (blocking AIDS scientific alerting).
As I asked my question he shook his head disapprovingly. Perhaps my question, like my blog posts, was rambling and lacked clarity.
I was thinking of how to ask about executive privilege in terms of the AIDS epidemic because in computer security terms it would be a virus that easily could be remotely controlled. If the executive privilege theory means the White House can block scientific discussion for political self-benefit, leading to masssive harms of citizens, is the White House cyber policy head also saying secret government backdoors in encryption could be within this privilege?
Josh didn’t answer directly and instead said in a long statement that encryption was complex as a topic, there were many sides, and the market would decide backdoors. He also invited everyone to speak with him after as he could easily show where in the Constitution executive privilege was written (it’s not).
When he finished and got up to leave I walked up to him and he quickly exited towards the back of the room, passing directly by me. Several people said “he must not have seen you” so I rushed out the door and caught him in the hallway. He looked me directly in the eyes, turned and ran away.
If only there had been a break room nearby so I could talk with someone else about it in order to entice him to spy on us and inject himself into our conversation.
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Many people reference this speech due to its stern warning against a congressional-military-industrial-complex diverting public funding to itself and away from education and healthcare.
People also tend to leave out the congressional role related to Eisenhower’s warning, probably because it was inferred and not explicit. Fortunately a professor of government explains how and why we still should include Congress in that speech:
When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”
Perhaps we can agree in hindsight that Eisenhower’s warnings were right. There is over-centralization in the American communications industry as well as a state of near-perpetual warfare. This means we should have also expected the “congressional-military-industrial-complex” to expand naturally into a “cyber” domain.
Of course, just like in 1961, we have more than one path forward. The tech industry should be moving itself away from power abuses and more towards something like Eisenhower’s prescient vision of globally decentralized “mutual trust” confederations.
Meanwhile, “For NATO, a serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5 of our founding treaty.”
It’s been interesting to read growing confirmations that Reagan was obviously a racist exaggerator and intentionally harmed Americans who did not have white skin.
One of the best explanations I’ve seen so far is how latent racism in Reagan’s campaigns elevated his popularity, while his opponents actually suffered when they tried to call it out without directly addressing Reagan as a racist.
Josh Levin writes about Carter being attacked for opposing racism, and also how Reagan escaped any condemnations at the same time.
Carter gave a Neshoba County Fair speech with some strong words about fighting hatred:
“You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi,” Carter said, adding that “hatred has no place in this country.”
You would think this would have elevated Carter for being against racism in America. Instead apparently he had to go on the defensive of such a position, even denying calling the racist Reagan a racist.
Meanwhile Reagan just went right on campaigning with “stirrings of hate…code words”:
While Carter was chastened, Reagan did nothing to modify his behavior. Just before Election Day, the Republican candidate appeared at a rally with former Mississippi Gov. John Bell Williams, an avowed segregationist. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, meanwhile, told a crowd of Reagan supporters, “We want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.” Reagan would be rewarded for the company he kept. He’d beat Carter by 10 points, winning every Southern state except West Virginia and Georgia.
I believe this has been called something like the racists hate being called racist because they are racist. Carter should have just called Reagan racist and it’s a shame Carter lost trying to be diplomatic and fair (pun not intended) given how right he was.
It reminds me of the smooth language MLK used 9 October 1964 talking about Barry Goldwater’s run for President, which of course made MLK very unpopular at that time:
The principles of states’ rights advocated by Mr. Goldwater diminish us and would deny to Negro and white alike, many of the privileges and opportunities of living in American society.
MLK was absolutely right and Goldwater regularly engaged in racism using encoded signaling just like Reagan would do later, as reported even in Goldwater’s time:
…the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. …Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned ‘race’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘whites’ or ‘segregation’ or ‘civil rights.’ … He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, ‘bullies and marauders’ means ‘Negroes.’ ‘Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means ‘opposition to civil rights.’ ‘Women’ means ‘white women.’
MLK was assassinated in 1968. Goldwater continued being racist another three decades, expanding extremism and racism like his biggest fan Senator Thurmond, and died of natural causes in 1998:
…credited as a founder of the modern conservative movement and with contributing to Ronald Reagan’s [racist platform essential to his] rise to prominence and the presidency.
Goldwater’s failure, despite his “Aesopian” language, was taken by the GOP to be a result of his racism being too overt. This led to further encoding techniques by the time Reagan and Bush ran their campaigns.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who ensured George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential race’s success considerably by appealing to racism, explained that overtly appealing to racism backfired by the mid-1960s, “[s]o you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Back to Levin’s points about Reagan (similar to the present occupant in the Whitehouse), he was exceptional in that his racism gave Nixon’s racism the appearance of being less extreme, which is no small feat.
I thought of the Neshoba County Fair and its aftermath this week when the Atlantic published a previously unknown snippet of a conversation between Reagan and President Richard Nixon. On the morning of Oct. 26, 1971, Reagan, who was then the governor of California, told Nixon that African nations were to blame for the United Nations’ vote to eject Taiwan and welcome in mainland China. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in audio captured by Nixon’s White House taping system, “to see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon cackled in response. A few minutes later, the president called Secretary of State William Rogers to report, in the words of the Atlantic’s Timothy Naftali, “that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to.”
On that tape, Reagan’s racism is direct and undeniable. Nixon, whose own racism is extraordinarily well-documented, immediately rejoices in it, laughing as Reagan talks about African “monkeys.” In his call with Rogers, by contrast, Nixon distances himself from the racist commentary, attributing it to someone more prejudiced than he is. (He also tells Rogers, erroneously, that Reagan had called the African leaders “cannibals.”) At the same time, Nixon categorizes Reagan’s views as a valuable political data point, a sentiment that needs to be understood and nurtured, not rejected.
Doug Rossinow, professor of history at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of “The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s” puts it like this in his 2015 article called “…Face the Fact that Reagan Was Hostile to Civil Rights”:
Reagan rode the white backlash—along with other major issues, to be sure—farther than anyone else ever did in American history, before or since. It is long since time that historians of Reagan, Reaganism, and the 1980s overcame their reluctance to tell this basic part of that era’s history plainly.
…calling African Diplomats ‘monkeys’ is hella racist
In today’s terms, this analysis is not only historically interesting, it also impacts our debate about the safety of artificial intelligence. When machines use only straight reasoning, devoid of translation for Reagan’s true signaling and racism, they accelerate harms from encoded hate in the GOP.
In other words, admitting Reagan was racist is good food for thought both in terms of political history as well as big tech.
Update November 2020: New TV show and article released that explain “How Ronald Reagan’s Racism Helped Pave the Way for Donald Trump’s”
The “huge amount of dog-whistle racism that came from Reagan’s own lips,” [Matt Tyrnauer, director of Showtime’s The Reagans] says, “was under-reported in the time and has been virtually erased from the popular imagination.”
This deniability “becomes an essential part of dog whistling,” Berkeley Law professor and author Ian Haney López, who’s interviewed in The Reagans, tells Esquire. “It simultaneously involves appeals designed to trigger racist fears and also the denial that the person is doing any such thing.”
The list of Reagan’s under-recognized racism is a long one.
And yet somehow Americans “learned” sayings like “Shining City on a Hill” were meant to represent everyone despite all signs pointing to the kind of racism that would exclude non-white Americans from that city.
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