JEDI: Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure- the Force will be with you

JEDI is intended to not only improve information sharing but to dramatically increase the US military’s 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.

Call it death by big data.

excerpted from GroundZero Media- March of the Robot Tin Soldiers

According to a 2018 report by National Public Radio and Edison Research, 8 million Americans own three or more smart speakers, suggesting that they feel the need to always have one within earshot. By 2021, according to another research firm, Ovum, there will be almost as many voice-activated assistants on the planet as people.

It took about 30 years for mobile phones to outnumber humans. Alexa and other Smart speakered ilk may get there in less than half that time.

One reason is that Amazon and Google are pushing these devices hard, discounting them so heavily during last year’s holiday season that industry observers suspect that the companies lost money on each unit sold.

They are so desperate to get them into households that they are willing to lose money. They want full spectrum dominance and they will start with your home, office, and your car.

In the near future, everything from your lighting to your air-conditioning to your refrigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice.

In the future, the office assistants will be modified into robots, and they will be used to carry out tasks by voice as well.

If you are okay with that, the next step is to use modified versions of these innocent assistants to aid in security, law enforcement, and assisting in decisions in warfare scenarios.

You heard right, Alexa may eventually have command over her own army of tin soldiers.

Talk about your dark Christmas metaphors.

In fact, the Nutcracker character in the famed Nutcracker story is actually the story of a mechanical soldier that is the product of a clockmaker and tinkerer, who often gave the children wonderfully unique toys that moved on their own.

In the age-old tale set during the Christmas season, the clock strikes midnight, and the Nutcracker and the other toys come to life to go to war against the Mouse King.

At first glance, this story doesn’t seem to really tie into the Christmas season other than its setting. However, for the sake of the topic at hand, animated tin soldiers fighting a war could easily be updated into a future setting where a smart computer system animates robots to launch an attack against an enemy.

You may have heard of this story, it is called The Terminator.

In the film, The Terminator, a super surveillance system called Skynet becomes self-aware and sees humanity as a threat to its existence. It deploys an army of Terminators, anthropomorphic cyborgs against humanity.

Maybe it can be seen as a stretch to compare an army of animated tin nutcrackers to that of huge mechanical terminators – but there is an important message that can be gleaned from the comparison and that is Alexa wants to order the March of Robotic Tin Soldiers of the Future.

The robotic systems now rolling out in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than we realize.

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.

Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence programs to propel its retail business and now it hopes to use this capability to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create an artificial “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI a moniker that obviously tips its hat to the movie Star Wars.

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.

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 military’s 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.

JEDI will do what is being done now on a less coordinated scale and with a smaller volume of surveillance data, but JEDI, 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 JEDI’s 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.

Thus, JEDI will generate new levels of global fear, violence, repression, and conformity in the service of Western US corporations, following current US policies.

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 public’s acceptance of rampant militarism, of which JEDI is a manifestation, is clearly driven by fear of “terrorism” and racial, ethnic and religious differences.

The difficulties for the existing laws of war that this robotics revolution will provoke are barely beginning to be understood. Technology generally evolves much more quickly than the laws of war.

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 Pentagon’s Request for Proposals to create JEDI says the system must be able to provide information simultaneously to “all Military Departments, Army, Navy, Air Force, 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.

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.

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.

JEDI’s 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 is 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.

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 provider’s ambitions.

We all know of Amazon owner Jeff Bezo’s ambitions.

Jeff Bezos is 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.

This is what we get when we trade our humanity for convenience; it all begins as an innocent office assistant grows into a tool for war.

As military robots gain more and more autonomy, the ethical questions involved will become even more complex. The U.S. military bends over backwards to figure out when it is appropriate to engage the enemy and how to limit civilian casualties. Autonomous robots could, in theory, follow the rules of engagement; they could be programmed with a list of criteria for determining appropriate targets and when shooting is permissible.

Even if a robot has software that follows all the various rules of engagement, and even if it were somehow absolutely free of software bugs and hardware failures (a big assumption), the very question of figuring out who an enemy is in the first place—that is, whether a target should even be considered for the list of screening questions—is extremely complicated in modern war.

It essentially is a judgment call. It becomes further complicated as the enemy adapts, changes his conduct, and even hides among civilians. If an enemy is hiding behind a child, is it okay to shoot or not? Or what if an enemy is plotting an attack but has not yet carried it out? Politicians, pundits, and lawyers can fill pages arguing these points. It is unreasonable to expect robots to find them any easier.

This is the main reason why military lawyers are so concerned about robots being armed and autonomous. As long as “man is in the loop,” traditional accountability can be ensured. Breaking this restriction opens up all sorts of new and seemingly irresolvable legal questions about accountability.

Most people say that all of these decisions should be left for the technocrats to decide. However, everyone should be aware of what is happening.

It shouldn’t just be up to the scientists to make decisions, but everyone from theologians who helped create the first laws of war to the human rights and arms control communities must start looking at where this technological revolution is taking both our weapons and laws.

These discussions and debates also need to be global, as the issues of robotics cross national lines. There are forty-three countries now have military robotics programs. Over time, some sort of consensus might emerge—if not banning the use of all autonomous robots with lethal weapons, then perhaps banning just certain types of robots such as ones not made of metal, which would be hard to detect and thus of most benefit to terrorist groups.

With JEDI we will have a weapon that will dramatically increase the gathering and managing of information to identify people to target for killing and to increase the speed of killing.

It gives me the creeps to think that all that has to be said is “Alexa Drop a Bomb” and the whole world meets its judgment day.

one if by land, three if by e

Via Ground Zero Media with Clyde Lewis

間諜

CYBER CHINESE LAUNDRY

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

When I was 17, I met a Linguistics Professor at BYU. At the time, I was taking German in high school and he asked why. I told him it was because of my heritage. I explained that my family migrated to Zurich from Germany to flee the Nazis. My aunt at one time lived in Munich and I wanted to impress her by speaking German. He said “A word of advice? Drop your German classes and learn Spanish – once you have mastered that language, learn to speak Mandarin Chinese.”

I asked him why and he told me that in the future he believed that Spanish would be the language of labor and that Chinese would be the language of future business.

Well, since then I have learned Spanish, lived in a Spanish speaking country, and now I am realizing that perhaps I should have learned Chinese when I had the chance.

I am not understanding what he was telling me; however, I do not believe that he realized that not only would Chinese be the language of business, but it would also be the language of government and e-commerce.

Analysts are saying the Chinese are looking at a window of about five years to 10 years to achieve world domination before they collapse under the weight of their own aging population.

However, what they cannot do in the real world they will do in the cyber world. It is very telling as to what their moves are with regard to the Internet of Things and quite simply they are outsmarting us at every move, from our economy to our elections.

And the media still is obsessed with Russia.

The media seems to ignore the fact that Soviet Russian communism fell with the Berlin Wall.

They obviously are forgetting to report that the biggest and soon to be the most powerful country on earth, remains unabashedly communist apart from its commitment to capitalism.

The only part missing is the democracy.

When analyzing the move of our adversaries, the media has failed to report on how the Chinese have now been able to successfully show the technocrats the most foolproof ways of using the forces of censorship to curtail freedom of expression.

The country’s government appears to have launched a new offensive, closing the social media accounts of some influential opponents.

Now keep in mind we are still talking about China; however, if you were half listening to what I was saying you would think I was talking about the United States and the efforts of tech platforms to run their operations in the same way China is running theirs.

The fact is that technocrats are very interested in implementing operations based on Chinese models and AI dependency.

With a $14 trillion GDP, China is predicted to account for over 35 percent of global economic growth from 2017 to 2019 — nearly double the US GDP’s predicted 18 percent.

And AI is responsible for a big chunk of that.

It may or may not alarm you that within 5 years, the Internet of Things may be operated by Chinese companies and regulated by Chinese technocrats.

By 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI.

Already, Chinese investments in AI, chips, and electric vehicles have reached an estimated $300 billion. Meanwhile, AI giant, Alibaba, has unveiled plans to invest $15 billion in international research labs from the US to Israel, with others following suit.

Beijing has now mobilized local government officials around AI entrepreneurship and research, led by billions in guiding funds and Venture Capital investments. And behind the scenes, a growing force of driven AI entrepreneurs trains cutting-edge algorithms on some of the largest datasets available to date.

As the tectonic plates of global politics shift, it is worth asking if we want the world to be led by a nation whose guiding principle is:

“We should not just mechanically copy the political systems of other countries. The CPC stresses the unity of Party leadership, the people running the country, and law-based governance. Party leadership is the fundamental guarantee for ensuring that the people run the country and governance in China is law-based; that the people run the country is an essential feature of socialist democracy, and law-based governance is the basic way for the Party to lead the people in governing the country. The system of people’s congresses must be upheld and improved to ensure the people’s exercise of state power.”

Or, do we want to live and defend our philosophy:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Well, call me old fashioned but life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is pretty stable and when applied can be quite palatable; however, it needs to be said that as we are failing in our educational systems and as we see the growing endorsement of communist and anarchist groups like Antifa – I worry that we are preparing for the ideological takeover of a new communism – one that has been put through the Chinese Laundry.

Perhaps China’s biggest advantage is the sheer quantity of its data. Tencent’s WeChat platform (their version of Facebook) alone has over one billion monthly active users. That’s more than the entire population of Europe. Take mobile payments spending: China outstrips the US by a ratio of 50 to 1.

Chinese e-commerce purchases are almost double US totals.

But China’s data advantage involves more than just quantity. As China witnesses an explosion of online-to-offline startups, their data is creating a new intelligence layer unparalleled in the West.

This should raise some concern.

After Facebook and Twitter have led efforts to purge what they call uncomfortable speech according to community standards – they also claim that they wish to also shut down what they deem to be “Russian agent” accounts that are said to be pushing Russian propaganda hell bent on meddling with our election process.

However, a bombshell new report states that China is using LinkedIn to attempt mass recruiting of Americans with access to government and commercial secrets.

Evanina, who heads the U.S. National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center, has further called on LinkedIn to follow the lead of other online companies: “I recently saw that Twitter is canceling, I don’t know, millions of fake accounts, and our request would be maybe LinkedIn could go ahead and be part of that.”

LinkedIn has something approaching 600 million users on its site around the globe, including about 150 million members in the US.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn has responded to the allegations of US intelligence by noting it is increasingly aware of such threats and says it’s cooperating with authorities.

It has been confirmed that Chinese intelligence did use LinkedIn to successfully recruit a retired CIA officer who is reported to have been facing financial hardship at the moment he was contacted by what he thought was a Shanghai think tank looking for fluent Mandarin speaker.

Furthermore, reports state that “the targets include experts in fields such as supercomputing, nuclear energy, nanotechnology, semiconductors, stealth technology, healthcare, hybrid grains, seeds and green energy.

Some authorities fear that this is China’s first step in conducting espionage under the cover of cyber recruitment.

According to the FBI up to 70 percent of China’s espionage efforts are aimed at the American private sector.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center in its annual report ‘Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyber says that China is the most aggressive actor in collecting The United States most sensitive economic information, trade secrets, and technologies, particularly in cyberspace.

China, according to the report, has expansive efforts in place to acquire US technology to include sensitive trade secrets and proprietary information.

It continues to use cyber espionage to support its strategic development goals—science and technology advancement, military modernization, and economic policy objectives, the report said.

The report running into more than 15 pages said that while next-generation technologies will introduce a range of qualitative advances in data storage, analytics, and computational capacity, they also present potential vulnerabilities for which the cybersecurity community remains largely unprepared.

The solidification of cloud computing over the past decade as a global information industry standard, coupled with the deployment of technologies such as artificial intelligence and internet if things, will introduce unforeseen vulnerabilities to US networks.

Today’s companies are often faced with the complex decision of whether to use public cloud resources or build and deploy their own IT infrastructures. This decision is especially difficult in an age of mounting data requirements when so many people expect limitless access and ultra-flexibility. For these reasons, cloud computing has become an increasingly popular choice for many organizations.

With 5G on the horizon, most companies now are preparing multicloud IT infrastructures.

Cloud computing does present many drawbacks that often come back to haunt users, such as skyrocketing fees, poor performance and security concerns. The decision between using a public cloud versus owning your own infrastructure is not so different than deciding between renting and a buying a home. It is a choice between controlling your own environment versus living within someone else’s domain.

Users’ security can be automatically affected by anything that happens to their cloud provider. Additionally, anyone using a public or shared cloud can experience a data breach and information loss through no real fault of their own.

Cloud networks and Internet of Things infrastructure are rapidly expanding the global online operational space, and threat actors from China have already demonstrated how the cloud can be used as a platform for cyber exploitation.

I admit that this is not reported in the mainstream narrative frame, but this is the way China can invade the United States without even firing a shot.

China will continue to be a threat to US proprietary technology and intellectual property through cyber-enabled means or other methods, the report warned that if this threat is not addressed, it could erode America’s long-term competitive economic advantage.

The Daily Caller reported that a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails.

The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to sources at the Daily Caller, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.

The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company.

The FBI released a statement saying they had “not found any evidence” of an intrusion of Clinton’s server by the Chinese.

However, the English speaking Chinese newspaper, Epoch Times, reported a week ago that the Chinese have had plenty of practice hacking into and meddling with elections of foreign countries, including the United States.

Taiwan has accused China of meddling in their elections.

China regards Taiwan, a full-fledged democracy with its own constitution and military, as a renegade province that must be united with the mainland, by military force if necessary.

In July, the website of Taiwan’s ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party, was hacked. Taiwanese investigators believe the cyber-attack came from China, according to a report by the Financial Times.

President Donald Trump indicated in an August 18 Twitter post that there could be cybersecurity threats from China.

“All of the fools that are so focused on looking only at Russia should start also looking in another direction, China,” he wrote.

Echoing Trump’s remark, National Security Adviser John Bolton expressed concerns about foreign influences, including China, on the 2018 U.S. midterm elections in November, during an interview with ABC that aired on August 19.

It needs to be courageously declared that an unbiased revelation needs to prevail in the United States and the dialogue needs to shift to discussing where we stand in the development of cyber infrastructure.

The threat to our way of life goes beyond the political trappings of taking sides on the push button offenses that are manufactured by political pundits in the media.

We are all far to busy looking under rocks for Russians agents that we are unaware of the crisis happening with our intelligence and communication structures.

If China were to take our mainframe down or shut down our communication satellites, we would certainly have to surrender to their technological expertise. It is also important to say at this juncture that when satellites go down or are offline – things are moved into positions that they don’t want us to see—scrambling or shutting down a signal could indicate that a malicious actor could make a move.

It would be something that could be considered a cyber Pearl Harbor.

Put simply, the Intelligence Community within CIA and NSA would deaf, dumb, and partially blind.

This would be a perfect scenario to carry out a final blow event.