Data-Driven Policing | Sex Trafficking Funds the Taliban | FBI Surveillance, and more
Working with the Devil? The Potential for U.S.-Taliban Cooperation against the Islamic State in Afghanistan (Jonathan Schroden and Alexander Powell, War on the Rocks)
During World War II, when defending collaboration with reprehensible regimes, President Franklin Roosevelt liked to quote an old proverb: “My children, it is permitted you in time of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge.” In 2015, the year after the Islamic State declared the creation of a “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq, Patrick Porter pointedly used the proverb in War on the Rocks to encourage reflection about how to respond to this group: Did policymakers deem the Islamic State sufficiently dangerous and evil to justify working with unsavory partners to combat it?
Today, the U.S. government confronts a different version of the same dilemma: Should the United States cooperate with the Taliban in order to counter the Islamic State in Afghanistan? When asked about prospects for that during a Sept. 1 press conference, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded, “It’s possible.” Given the 20-year U.S. war against the Taliban, Milley’s remarks made news and came as a shock to some observers.
House Homeland Security Committee Approves $865 Million for CISA (Frank Konkel, Nextgov)
The largest chunk of funds would go toward implementing a May 12 executive order focused on cybersecurity.
Data-Driven Policing’s Threat to Constitutional Rights (Ángel Díaz, Brookings)
Across the country, the tools that power modern police surveillance contribute to cycles of violence and harassment. Predictive policing systems digitally redline certain neighborhoods as “hotspots” for crime, with some systems generating lists of people they think are likely to become perpetrators. These designations subject impacted communities to increased police presence and surveillance that follows people from their homes to schools to work. The typical targets are Black and brown youth, who may also be secretly added to gang databases. Unquestioned reliance on data can hypercharge discriminatory harms from over-policing and the school-to-prison pipeline. Our elected leaders must uncover and dismantle these practices and recognize them for what they are: an attack on our constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law.
Loitering Munitions Show Autonomous Future of War (Kelsey Atherton, Brookings)
Loitering missiles operate from a simple premise: What if a missile could become more accurate by slowing down? For decades, loitering missiles have been on the forefront of autonomous lethality. Historically, loitering munitions were used to target things like radars but are increasingly being used to attack humans. And as they make this transition in targeting capability, loitering munitions represent a bridge between today’s precision-guided weapons that rely on greater levels of human control and our future of autonomous weapons with increasingly little human intervention.
How Sex Trafficking Funds the Taliban and Terrorism (Anne Basham and Clare Morell, Washington Times)
With the last U.S. troops now gone from Afghanistan, those left to the Taliban’s oppressive rule will soon fade from the news cycle and be largely forgotten about. Those now most vulnerable to the Taliban’s violence are Afghanistan’s women, especially to the violence of sex trafficking and forced marriages. It is imperative to proactively counter these crimes during the earliest stages of this new transition of power. In the last few weeks, numerous reports have come out about the Taliban’s rounding up young women in Afghan households to serve as sex slaves and forced brides for their fighters. The Daily Mail UK reports Taliban fighters have been going door-to-door and forcibly marrying girls as young as 12 and forcing them into sex slavery, viewing them as ‘spoils of war’ to be divided up among the victors. Last month, reports had emerged that Taliban fighters were asking for lists of all women aged 15 to 45 who were unmarried or widowed. However, reports are that this has now extended down to girls as young as 12. Offering “wives” or sex slaves is part of the Taliban’s recruitment strategy to lure militants to join the Taliban. Which only serves to solidify their rule further. Furthermore, the selling and trafficking of these women help to fund and fuel their operations.
How To Bury a Terrorist? Peru Debates What to Do with the Remains of Shining Path Founder Abimael Guzmán (Samantha Schmidt, Washington Post)
Days after the death of Abimael Guzmán, the mastermind of the guerrilla movement Shining Path, Peru’s young government now faces a critical question: What to do with the remains of a man who terrorized the country for much of the 1980s and ’90s, whose organization was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people? Under Peruvian law, authorities are supposed to turn Guzmán’s body over to designated direct relatives, the attorney general’s office said this week. In this case, that’s Elena Iparraguirre, Guzmán’s widow and second-in-command in the Maoist movement, who is herself serving a life sentence in prison. On Wednesday, a prosecutor denied her request for her husband’s remains, leaving them in the custody of the attorney general’s office. Politicians and public officials feared that giving the remains to Iparraguirre would lead to a burial site that would become a shrine for the Shining Path, whose factions continue to inflict violence on the country. The debate is forcing this South American country once again to confront the most brutal period in its past, one of the bloodiest internal conflicts of its time in Latin America. “Once and for all, what is Guzmán’s place in the history of Peru?” asked Carlos Meléndez, a Peruvian political analyst and researcher at Diego Portales University in Chile.
A Horrifying New AI App Swaps Women into Porn Videos with a Click (Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review)
Deepfake researchers have long feared the day this would arrive.
