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.”
…as of November 2018, fires broke out at no fewer than seven of the stores, forcing the disconnection of all the solar panel systems for the safety of the public…[because installed] haphazardly and as quickly as possible in order to turn a profit
Has Tesla released a transparency report on the total number of unexplained fires it’s caused? There are so many.
Even more concerning is how very little tangible response has come from the manufacturer, despite being cited as significantly worse than other manufacturers. For example:
…around 8:15 pm on Sunday night, the Tesla Model S is seen emitting smoke before suddenly bursting into flames. Further video shows the resulting charred wreckage, including that of two other nearby cars.
Once you realize the likelihood of a fire is unpredictable and could be increasing dramatically without explanation, the severity of these fires is also a major concern.
The fires seem to re-ignite unpredictably, are extremely toxic and, because of those two attributes, require expensive special training and equipment funded by tax-payers:
“With a gasoline fire, they know if they get enough water on it, it’ll go out,” [Peter Sunderland, a professor of fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland] said. “But with a deep-seated fire, it’s hard to spray the water deep enough into the battery to stop the fire.”
Slate reported that the firefighters who attempted to put out the 2013 Model S car fire in Seattle had trouble and “ended up using a circular saw to cut a hole that would allow them to pour water directly on the battery.”
In a fiery Tesla crash into a barrier in Austria, the car kept reigniting, forcing firefighters to battle the flames for hours. The car had to be put into quarantine for 48 hours to remove the chances of reignition, Jalopnik reported.
What’s more, lithium-ion fires can release high levels of “toxic gases” such as carbon monoxide, soot, hydrogen fluoride, and particulates of oxides of nickel; aluminum; lithium; copper; and cobalt, according to a Tesla Model X emergency response guide. As a result, firefighters need to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus and should use hoses that spray fog and special ventilation fans that push air out at a high velocity to protect bystanders downwind of the fire, according to the guide.
There are dozens of stories of Tesla fires not only being far less predictable, more expensive and more toxic than other products, they seem to not have any cohesive story yet of what to expect in the future.
In several cases the fires were extinguished at first encounter. Then had to be extinguished again on the tow truck. Then had to be extinguished again in the junk yard. That’s a multiplier effect for several reasons, not least of all because fires on tow trucks and in junk yards are not supposed to happen.
Tesla, without a question, has a way higher incidence of fire deaths than other cars.
Then the car manufacturer tried to pivot to an argument that their fire death statistics aren’t being separated from collisions, where occupants would have died anyway. This again ignores the fact that their fires are different in ways that increase the likelihood of fatalities, not only for occupants but also those responding to help.
Tesla’s CEO should not be allowed to misrepresent harm likelihood and severity of his products when clearly there is ample and growing data on sub-standard engineering practices and threat to society. WalMart is picking up a hot topic, to be sure.
The CEO’s “safer than what you can buy from others” false claim even seems to be turned into a joke by him in 2018, as you can see in his attempts at humor when promoting sales of a flamethrower:
A Boring Company spokesperson said its flamethrower is ‘safer than what you can buy right now off-the-shelf on Amazon to destroy weeds’.
If Tesla wanted to extol virtues of battery technology, it would be that the carbon footprint producing them is zeroed out in just a few years and they emit zero harms when operating normally. That would be a viable defense, while they work to improve engineering to reduce fire likelihood and severity.
However, instead we see a company try dismissive fallacies (false equivalence in fires) and make claims their products give better odds of survival than other manufacturers.
The data doesn’t support Tesla in this comparison, since likelihood and severity of their fires already appear to be higher and trending worse with minimal explanation and no recall.
Tesla had at least quadruple (5 observed fire deaths vs. 1.19 expected) the fire-related mortality of the average car from 2016 through 1Q 2019
In fact, arson soon could be added to increasing probability of Tesla fires as owners realize what spontaneous fire in an unexpected location can mean (e.g. parking garage near structural integrity of a building). Imagine investigators trying to ascertain whether a Tesla exploding within a building was predictable with intent or just another “safer that what you can buy from others” incident.
The infamously glib and unapologetic “everything’s better with fire” social media presence of their CEO suggests WalMart’s lawsuit declaring his product line to be a public safety hazard…may document how failures in engineering duty-to-care may even come from the top.
“Parked Teslas Keep Catching on Fire Randomly, And There’s No Recall In Sight” –TheDrive
