Hacker Cinema
Good Kill
2015 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Andrew Niccol
In the shadowy world of drone warfare, combat unfolds like a video game–only with real lives at stake. After six tours of duty, Air Force pilot Tom Egan now fights the Taliban from an air-conditioned bunker in the Nevada desert. But as he yearns to get back in the cockpit of a real plane and becomes increasingly troubled by the collateral damage he causes each time he pushes a button, Egan’s nerves—and his relationship with his wife—begin to unravel.
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8 comments on Hacker News
He is the subject of the Lord of War movie by Andrew Niccol, who made Truman Show (gaslighting), Gattaca (eugenics), In Time (immortality), Good Kill (drone pilots) and Anon (privacy/hacking).
There's crazy level's of PTSD in drone operators.
There's a really bleak movie called good kill that captures this in a military context.
And here's the real life version. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/former-drone-operator-says-hes-haunted-his-part-more-1-flna6c10221271
Anyway, this sounds like a very terrible idea.
There was a movie, Good Kill, that came out a few years ago. Its plot dealt with similar topics.
It think its completely short to blame or qualify ethical distinctions purely upon technology or innovation decisions. Whether those technologies are present or not it still doesn't immediately address more immediate ethical considerations. To solve for that you need formal policies, regulations, or laws in place to govern use, impose oversight, and provide review.
I recommend the movie Good Kill as a solid fictional example. The topic in the movie is morally ambiguous and that doesn't change through the movie. It starts out completely ethical, but the ethics go away once the governing processes are removed and consequences follow.
> but I don't see conclusive evidence of this in the article.
You are talking about something which is usually kept secret within the "state secrets" cabinet. Your expectations seem misconfigured for this topic. There's no way the CIA/DOJ/FBI would willingly allow that level of information to make it into wide circulation and the current administration has gone to unprecedented lengths to prevent further leaks.
I tend to agree with you that the media news coverage in the US tends to focus mostly on certain specific military attacks (where the US government claims we either hit or believe we hit a "top leader" in whatever group) or where the US military strike was on bad/stale information (eg. we killed western hostages or a Doctors without Borders hospital in Afghanistan). I am not conflating drone strikes with other military strikes -- I am combining them because I see them as part of the same issue.
I tend to see the media as willingly reporting only what little information is available from the only source, the White House via the US military. Journalists are reporting one very biased side of the story without making any significant effort to find other sources (because there usually are none). From a journalistic ethics standpoint, this _is_ malicious.
I view US drone strikes "on terrorists" within a context of (what I believe to be) known information about our CIA drone strikes (which, granted might be outdated or otherwise inaccurate and is basically unverifiable):
* "signature strikes" are designed to attack targets based on data points without knowing their identity * a "double tap" strike is when first responders are attacked immediately after a previous attack on the assumption that they know who was killed and care about the terrorist target and not the innocent victims of the first strike * weddings, funerals, and other public gatherings are attacked on the probability that terrorist or terrorist sympathizers will attend * an "enemy combatant" is any male of combat age (15-50, IIRC) [1] -- this is especially troublesome for US propaganda. See [1] for "deliberate intent to deceive the public in the media coverage of civilian victims of Western attacks". It might not even be "conclusive evidence", but I still think that standard is too high for any topic which is covered by national security where we will always be in an information "fog of war".
These items are all claimed / documented characterizations of CIA (or JSOC or other similar US government/intelligence/military agency) attacks, but clearly not verifiable (the nature of state secrets). They were all covered by the movie Good Kill[2] (Ethan Hawke plays a drone pilot in Nevada dealing with the human consequences of being a killer in the drone war).
[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/ [2]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3297330/
If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend the 2014 film Good Kill.
There was a Hollywood movie about the topic last year, GOOD KILL. It didn't get much attention or promotion and flopped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Kill
Andrew Niccol's other thought-provoking films include Truman Show (reality and free will), Lord of War (arms trading), In Time (immortality and currency) and Good Kill (drones), http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Niccol