Alexa, Drop a Bomb: Amazon Wants in on US Warfare
The acquisitive impulses of hundreds of millions of Amazon customers could
become the stuff of their imprisonment or death.
The acquisitive impulses of hundreds of millions could become the stuff of
their imprisonment or death.
Jared Rodriguez / Truthout
By Nick Mottern, Truthout Published December 16, 2018
Amazon is seeking to build a global brain for the Pentagon called JEDI, a
weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly
aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.
Founded in 1994 as an online book seller, Amazon is now the worlds largest
online retailer, with more than 300 million customers worldwide, and net
sales of $178 billion in 2017.
Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and
sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business
that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the
aforementioned brain that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise
Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars
acronym JEDI.
As of the October 12, 2018, deadline for submitting proposals for JEDI,
Amazon is the betting favorite for the contract, which will go to just one
bidder, in spite of protests by competitors, chief among them Microsoft and
IBM. The Pentagon appears likely to select a winner for the contract in
2019.
Jedi Powers?
In discussing JEDI, Pentagon officials refer to the need for efficiencies in
sharing data among its military branches, with the goal of increasing the
lethality of the US war machine.
JEDI is intended to not only improve information sharing, but to
dramatically increase the US militarys ability to collect and sort through
huge amounts of surveillance information from many, many sources on
individuals and groups governmental and non-governmental around the
world. This will be part of a process of using artificial intelligence and
algorithms to identify probable targets for killing.
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JEDI will do what is being done now on a less coordinated scale and with a
smaller volume of surveillance data, but JEDI, The Guardian reported
recently, promises to find those enemies faster even if all it takes to
be considered an enemy is exhibiting a pattern of behavior that a
(classified) machine-learning model associates with hostile activity. Call
it death by big data.
In addition, JEDI will very likely to be at the heart of managing the first
generation of operational US robotic land, sea, air and space weaponry.
Decisions on who and when to kill based on human and JEDIs massive,
fallible artificial intelligence will almost certainly be significantly
guided by the concept of pre-emptive killing that is, assassination or
larger attack based on suspected threat.
If Amazon gets the Pentagon contract, the acquisitive impulses of hundreds
of millions of people may well become the stuff of their imprisonment and,
in some cases, their deaths.
This concept, developed in latter-day warfare by Israel, is the premise of
the burgeoning US drone war campaign and possibly in more conventional war
to come.
Thus, JEDI will generate new levels of global fear, violence, repression and
conformity in the service of Western US corporations, following current US
policies. These policies are most evident in US intervention in nations like
Afghanistan, in which there is local resistance to Western efforts to
capture resources.
It appears very possible that if Amazon gets the Pentagon contract, the
personal profiles of its customers around the world, developed to stimulate
retail sales, will become, either individually or as aggregated, instruments
of these customers intimidation and control. In a real way, the acquisitive
impulses of hundreds of millions of people may well become the stuff of
their imprisonment and, in some cases, their deaths.
Further, JEDI as a global presence represents the creation of a weapon that
dramatically ups the level of global military rivalry and ensures more
global human conflict. JEDI demonstrates a new level of US determination for
global domination that can only be described as disastrous.
The US publics acceptance of rampant militarism, of which JEDI is a
manifestation, is clearly driven by fear of terrorism and racial, ethnic
and religious differences.
The creation of JEDI is further enabled by the public romance with
electronic technology, driven by an infatuation with conveniences that this
technology almost magically delivers. What could be bad about JEDI if it is
brought to life by Amazon, possibly the foremost purveyor of electronic
wonders such as Alexa, the genie-like virtual servant that it brings into
the home?
However, JEDI is about the bloody human reality of war, conquest and
repression. The question is: Should the creation of JEDI be permitted by
citizens of the US and the world?
To better understand the basis for the foregoing assertions, our current
situation and what we might do about it, it is necessary to understand why
Amazon is the frontrunner for the JEDI project, and then examine the
officially announced goals of JEDI.
Lifted to Dominance by Its Cloud
As Amazons online retail business grew from books to listing more than 3
billion products across 11 marketplaces, Amazon engineers created a massive
number of computer banks to store and sort data on orders, shipping,
inventory, and to do thousands of other functions. The system, which
utilizes robots, also had to have artificial intelligence (AI), a
rudimentary brain that would, for example, read customer product reviews
and, using a built-in sorting program an algorithm decide which reviews
are most helpful. The thinking of the AI brain depends, of course, on what
Amazon programmers tell it to look for.
JEDI is being created to dramatically increase the gathering and managing of
information to identify people to target for killing, and to increase the
speed of killing.
As this computer system and its artificial intelligence expanded, Amazon
executives realized that they had created a network of computer hardware and
software that would be useful to other businesses, to whom they could rent
operating capacity. This would, of course, save those businesses the time
and expense of creating their own systems from scratch.
The demand for these services led to the creation of Amazon Web Services
(AWS), which was launched in 2006. AWS services individuals, businesses and
governments. Notable clients include Airbnb, the Food and Drug
Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Netflix,
NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the United Kingdoms Ministry of Justice
and the Central intelligence Agency (CIA).
The $600 million AWS contract with the CIA intends to improve information
sharing among 17 intelligence agencies and dramatically speed up collecting
and analyzing an amalgamation of information from sensors, satellites,
surveillance efforts, open data repositories and human intelligence, among
other sources.
While Microsoft, Google, IBM and smaller companies offer cloud services,
Amazon is the worlds leading cloud provider. Google, for instance,
announced in February 2018 that its cloud business earned more than $1
billion per quarter, compared to AWS, which is netting over $5 billion each
quarter.
In cloud computing, Government Executive reports, theres Amazon Web
Services and then theres everybody else.
AWS is the most profitable of all Amazon businesses, including its online
retail business. It has developed into a global cloud network with
distinct individual operations in North America, South America, Europe, the
Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific. As of 2014, AWS had 1.4 million
computer servers in various parts of the world.
Amazon has also moved rapidly ahead with artificial intelligence in projects
such as Alexa, which, when combined with the capabilities of the AWS cloud,
allows Amazon to offer artificial intelligence options to its cloud
customers. This would presumably give the Pentagon increasingly
sophisticated ways of storing and analyzing visual, voice and positional
data on thousands upon thousands of potential targets and in launching
attacks.
Privatizing the Pentagons Brain and Central Nervous System
According to numerous reports, the JEDI project stems from the conclusion of
Pentagon officials that the US military needs a brain operating on cloud
technology. The Pentagons Request for Proposals (RFP) to create JEDI says
the system must be able to provide information simultaneously to all
Military Departments (Army, Navy, Air Force), DoD (Department of Defense)
Components, the Defense intelligence community, and the Office of the
Secretary of Defense; the US Coast Guard; the Intelligence Community;
international allies and partners; and contractors supporting defense
business and mission operations.
JEDI, the RFP says, is intended to enable our warfighters and leaders to
make critical data-driven decisions at mission speed.' It will offer
services, the RFP continues, at all levels of secrecy across the home front
to the tactical edge, including disconnected and austere environments
(combat zones of all sizes, from special forces operations to massed troop
and air operations).
We have to decide whether we will consume our way into a loss of democracy
as well as selfhood.
The Pentagon leaders have decided that the Pentagon is way behind in
developing cloud capability. So, rather than having the military build its
own brain, the Pentagon will pay to use and to expand the power of an
already existent corporate cloud.
We want to bend the Department of Defense around the commercial cloud,
said Chris Lynch, director of the Pentagons Defense Digital Service. I
cant make that point enough. We want it here, and we want it out in those
austere environments. We want to bring this to the warfighter.
Given the global scope of AWS operations, it is obvious why Amazon is the
front-runner for the JEDI contract.
What Will JEDI Know?
To understand the implications of JEDI, we must realize that the information
being gathered and sorted will inevitably be used for the targeting and
killing of not only opposing government-based military forces, but also
nongovernmental individuals and groups who are viewed as political or
potential military threats by the US. And this information will be gathered
on a global scale.
JEDIs brain will almost certainly be fed a set of criteria commonly used by
governments for identifying potential threats, such as political ideology,
intellectual and religious pursuits, ethnic and racial origin, race, sexual
orientation and social relationships.
We will not know specifically all of the criteria that will be used to
define an enemy of the US, nor do we know specifically who decides on
these criteria. This type of information-gathering and target identification
are already a Pentagon activity used to target US drone assassinations.
JEDI would obviously benefit from having access to the millions of
personal profiles developed by Amazon and other major cloud operators and
any other personal information it can capture. Significantly in this regard,
there is nothing in the JEDI RFP that specifically addresses the issue of
privacy, an obvious human right, specifically defined as such in the UN
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As noted earlier, the long-standing Israeli state practice of preemptive
assassination that informs the US drone war program will almost certainly be
applied to all JEDI findings of potential threat, regardless of the gross
human tragedies caused by US killer drones.
A lack of official US concern about the legal and ethical concerns of
preemptive killing is evidenced in the way the US completely ignored a 2013
UN call for it to observe international law with respect to its drone
attacks, a watered-down plea that should have been a call for a total halt
in US drone war.
Amazons Prying Ears and Eyes
A recent report in The Intercept suggests that when it comes to privacy,
Amazon is highly suspect as a potential enabler of government snooping.
The report describes a patent that Amazon is seeking that will allow its
Echo voice-activated home computer to collect data on the users voice
features. Language, accent, ethnic origin, level of emotion, gender and age
will all be swept up into a file on the user, purportedly with the intent of
targeting advertising.
As the report notes, Amazon has been peddling its facial recognition
technology, called Rekognition, for government surveillance, including to
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. In June 2018, a group
of Amazon employees wrote a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos saying that they
refused to work on technology that empowers ICE.
Moreover, in a thorough discussion of the ethical issues facing Amazon and
other cloud makers, an Amazon employee writes:
The current political environment makes the idea of selling facial
recognition products to the government even more objectionable. Police have
stepped up spying on black activists, and the Trump administration is
continuing its all-out assault on immigrants. Supercharging surveillance is
not something we want to contribute to in any way. For Amazon to say that we
require our Rekognition customers to follow the law is no guarantee of civil
liberties at all its a way to avoid taking responsibility for the
negative uses of this technology.
What Does It Tell You When Tech Workers Rebel?
The call to conscience from Amazon workers is part of a spreading movement
among computer technicians, originating in the major cloud providers.
Concerns about the gathering and management of data for JEDI, and a smaller,
related Pentagon project called Maven, brought a rebellion from Google
employees that led Google management to drop out of the competition to
create JEDI, and it will not work on Project Maven after the end of 2018.
We are not bidding on the JEDI contract, a Google spokesperson said in
October 2018, because first, we couldnt be assured that it would align
with our AI Principles. The second reason, the spokesperson said, is
because some of the JEDI work would not be covered by its current government
certifications.
A petition circulated in mid-2018 by a group known as the Tech Workers
Coalition, addressed to Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM, the leading cloud
companies, stated:
We can no longer ignore our industrys and our technologies harmful biases,
large-scale breaches of trust, and lack of ethical safeguards. These are
life and death stakes. We risk potentially catastrophic outcomes if we
continue to deploy global technical systems without care, deliberation, and
a clear understanding of our significant responsibility.
In October, coinciding with the deadline for submitting bids to create JEDI,
Medium published an open letter from a group of Microsoft employees to
Microsofts management that concluded: Microsoft, dont bid on JEDI.
Amazon and Microsoft Bosses Ignore Worker Concerns, Pledge Pentagon
Allegiance
Coinciding with the submission of Amazons and Microsofts bids for the JEDI
project, the bosses of these companies found it necessary to publicly
discount the ethical concerns of their employees and to assert that their
companies will be, first and foremost, loyal to the military and social
goals of the US government, regardless of what they are.
We are going to continue to support the DOD, and I think we should, Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos said in an October 2018 interview with Wired magazine. If
big tech companies are going to turn their back on the Department of
Defense, this country is going to be in trouble.
As for concerns about Amazons facial recognition technology being used for
immigrant surveillance, Bezos said:
Id let them in if it were me. I like em, I want all of them in. But this
is a great country, and it does need to be defended.
On October 26, 2018, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said in a statement
posted on the Microsoft website: First, we believe in the strong defense of
the United States and we want the people who defend it to have access to the
nations best technology, including from Microsoft.
Who Will Be in Charge?
The transfer of a massive amount of military information into a privately
owned and built cloud, as will happen with the creation of JEDI, raises the
possibility that the owner or owners of that cloud will because of their
knowledge of the cloud structure, capabilities and content become more
powerful than military and elected officials. Such a transfer has never
happened before, and the RFP for JEDI does not speak to the question of how
JEDI will remain in governmental control.
The degree to which the JEDI cloud provider may be willing to assert control
over US politics and military decisions in the absence of specific controls
may depend solely on that providers ambitions.
In the case of Amazon, we find in Jeff Bezos a person who has shown a
determination to be a very big player in Washington. He owns The Washington
Post and has become a formidable lobbying force. Amazon has increased
spending on lobbying from less than $1 million in 2000 to $13 million in
2017; so far, $10.6 million has been reported in 2018.
What Does JEDI Mean to the US and the World?
In A Theory of the Drone, Grégoire Chamayou observes that it is important to
understand how a weapon works in order to understand what its use will lead
to not only in their relation to the enemy but also in terms of the states
relation to its own people.
In the case of JEDI, we have a weapon that is being created to dramatically
increase the gathering and managing of information to identify people to
target for killing, and to increase the speed of killing.
In the current world of intensifying conflict over oil, gas, minerals,
agricultural land and water, the most likely targets for killing are
Indigenous people of color who are resisting extraction of their resources
by stronger military powers. These people will be known officially as
rebels or extremists. Think Afghanistan and Yemen.
As it gathers more and more information, JEDI will bring a major up-tick in
ongoing systematic global killing through assassination by drones, special
operations teams and, soon, robots. JEDI will mean an increased day-to-day
threat level for millions of people, particularly in the worlds poorest
places.
JEDI will further concentrate power in the hands of fewer people,
controllers of technology who already have too much economic and political
power. Giving these individuals control over such a powerful weapon, and
making that weapon so completely dependent on technology that these
individuals control it virtually ensures there will be no antitrust action
to break up those companies to reduce their monopolistic power.
And further, nothing will likely be done by Congress or regulators to
protect the publics privacy from these companies because of damage that
might mean to national security.
In the United Nations, the US will likely act to prevent any attempt to
limit global surveillance and high-tech assassination, as it has done in the
past.
In the US, the government and the corporations will continue to suppress
evidence of the human costs of US wars, will further encourage
compartmentalization of human emotion and intellect, and will seek to
sustain mass disengagement of conscience.
We must protect the warfighter will become the guiding social thought,
leaving the true nature of US wars, which is to benefit the wealthy few,
beyond the interest, knowledge and control of the vast majority of the
population.
JEDI, as a fear generator, is a weapon of conformity, control and theft,
hastening human demise, intimidating globally and suppressing diversity of
culture, thought and creative action.
JEDI is being visited upon the world for power and profit at a time when
what we need is less fear and more ethical behavior, leading to more
cooperation. JEDI puts us on the opposite path, and we have to decide
whether we will provide the data that will enable JEDI to do that, and,
moreover, as US citizens, whether we will allow JEDI to do that to other
people. We also have to decide whether we will consume our way into a loss
of democracy as well as selfhood.
Will we trade our humanity for convenience, including convenience in
killing?
Richie Marini of World Cant Wait and Marc Eliot Stein of World Beyond War,
graciously provided technical advice for this article, and Stephanie Rugoff
of World Cant Wait thoughtfully selected resource material.