Thank you very much for coming out for our talk. I actually am very glad that we got to follow Samira Hayat because you got to see some of the promise of the future of drones and what possibilities may exist.

And I want to make it actually very clear to people that the video that you're watching, which lies in the future, is not the same as the kind of drones that the U.S. military uses. So, for example, the video that you saw, which was really kind of a beautiful depiction of how to rescue victims, used a quadrocopter, and the kind of footage that you saw was

taken from actually quite a low height. What the U.S. military uses is drones that fly at greater heights and use different technologies, which I'm about to demonstrate to you. And I think it's important to bear in mind the difference, and one of the critical differences here is the fact that this is part of a network system, and I'll get into that in a little

bit. So this is our new report, which will come out at the end of the month. And I just want to summarize what the U.S. military does, because what they say is they track terrorists, they only kill when absolutely necessary, and innocent people are almost never killed. And so the question you may ask is how.

Well, most people actually don't ask that question, but the reason you're here, I imagine, is because you want to know how. So with apologies to the President of the United States, I want to tell you how. We only use the best technology, the best. We only use the smartest soldiers. They are very good, very smart.

Trust me. And finally, we have magic. Now I'm being a little sarcastic here, and the reason I am doing this is not because I don't think the soldiers are doing their best or because the technology isn't amazing, but because I think we believe in magic. We believe when we see videos like the video of people being rescued, that that is the

kind of technology that can find a terrorist on the field, anywhere in the world, track them down and kill them. So this is the equipment that we actually use in the war on terror, and I say we because I'm a British citizen, I live in the United States, I pay taxes, and therefore I'm part of this problem.

And I don't want to get into the detail of it because this isn't going to be a very long talk. We only have about 15 minutes, and I want to show you a video of what it's like to be a drone soldier, and I want to put in those quotes, the smart soldiers, because I think people need to understand what a soldier is in the United States.

A soldier is typically somebody aged 18 to 24 who was put in front of a computer or given a gun and sent to war, typically now in the drone war, because it takes place from the United States, they're not actually present in the field, so they're not in Pakistan, they're not in Afghanistan or in Iraq.

What they are is they're in something called a ground control station, and these ground control stations are little containers, they look the same wherever they are in the world, they actually transport them on planes, unpack them and set them up, so wherever you are in the world, you are in exactly the same setup. This is the kind of footage that they would see, but most important, I want to go back

a little bit, is not actually the plane itself, but what's underneath it, this ball over here, the sensor ball, and what it contains, and it is a video camera, it contains a laser eliminator by which you can point at a target, and a thermal imaging device, and finally, on the plane itself, it also has a phone tracking system.

These are the kinds of technologies that are used, and these are the sort of technical terms they use, full motion video, thermal and infrared imagery, synthetic aperture radar, this is a short talk, I can't get into the detail of it, normally this is an hour long talk with another hour of Q&A,

so I want to get into some of the explanation of how the system works, it's not the drone itself, it's actually really important to understand, the drone is one element of a bigger system, a military system that is global, and there's a commander in the US military who uses this description that I really like, his name is Deptula, he's now retired, and he says, when we think of drones,

you must understand the drone is simply a piece of fiberglass in the sky, they're mostly made of fiberglass, with sensors, and what's important is not the drone, but the sensors on it, and the fact that they feed into something called the distributed common ground system, and Lisa actually worked on the distributed common ground system,

so she'll tell you more about it. Now, in the very short time that I have, I want to demonstrate to you the difference between the footage that you saw from Samira, and what soldiers actually see, so this is actually the quality of the video footage, and I apologize, because obviously we're not in front of a screen, I'm projecting it so there's more compression and things like that,

but this is roughly the quality of what they actually see, on a predator, and the newest videos, they can see something of this quality, now of course you're perhaps further down in the hall, but it should be pretty obvious to you it is not possible to figure out whether these are men,

women, or children, and you could easily be fooled, and in fact the military is a system to try and figure out how good the quality of the imagery is, and it's called the near system, the video near system, and typically the predator carries equipment that can see a large truck, if you have a high definition and faster moving thing,

you can see an individual moving through a market, and it's only if you have something that's a very high quality, what's called nears eight, that you can actually make out somebody holding up a gun, so the reality is in fact from a predator, which is flying about three kilometers up in the sky,

the quality that you can actually see is only able to make out individuals, as opposed to the specific people that they are, this is more detailed, I won't bore you with it, those are the kinds of actual cameras they use, but what's most important is this thing over here, and unfortunately got a little cut off, and this little number here is the speed of the transmission,

and so one of the things that's really important in a drone is not the quality of the camera, but the quality of the transmission, because that video has to go via satellite, all the way across the other side of the world, and a predator can only actually transmit about three megabytes per second, and therefore you can only see truck size objects,

it's only once you get to a reaper that you can really make out individuals, you cannot see people's faces, you cannot make out whether or not they are holding a cell phone, this is the quality, this is high quality imagery, nears eight, so that's the best they can do, so what does the military do, they rely on, and we talked a bit about video,

I want to switch now to talking about thermal imagery, so what the US military does is they use these ten different kinds of technologies and they combine them, so if one is not perfect, they then take the second technology and the third technology, the problem with having ten bad technologies is you have what's called confirmation bias,

if you have one error it is compounded by the second error, and so this is actually from something called the Kirk 97 strike, which took place in 2010, and I don't know if you can read it, but basically I'll read the sentences highlighted in yellow, and this is a sensor operator, the camera operator talking to the pilot,

what he says is the only way I've been able to see a rifle if they move them around when they're holding them, when with muzzle flashes out or slinging them across the shoulders, in other words, when you're sitting in Nevada watching a drone feed in Pakistan, the best you can hope is to see somebody moving a rifle like this,

you can't actually see the detail, you don't know exactly what they're doing, so much so that the US military has on occasion in the middle of a firefight killed US soldiers because they thought that they were the militants, and the US uses these predator drones on the border, and border guards have actually testified to say

that they're not able to tell the difference between a US border guard and somebody crossing from Mexico, and these are uniform guards, so it is important to talk about the quality and the capability of the transmission. I want to move forward quickly to perhaps the most important technology here,

which is the tracking of your phone. So one of the reasons, because the military can't see, what they try to do is find your phone. Now a lot of people believe, if you have a smartphone, that since you know where you are, that means the government must know where you are, and I want to tell you that actually that's not true.

The reason is a cell phone transmits just like a radio in a circle, and the only way to figure out where a cell phone is, is you have to have two locations, or three locations ideally, as you can see, where you can actually see where the two of them overlap. This is something called triangulation or trilateralization,

where if you get three different signals and you get them to intersect, you can see where the individual is. But you have a bigger problem, which is the fact that in order to know where the phone is, you have to monitor it either from a fixed tower, or in this particular case from a drone, but the drone is moving,

and the drone knows its location only in reference to its GPS signal, which is sometimes not a very high quality. So, I think I only have a couple of minutes left, so I want to try and rush through this, and I wanted to show you actually a demonstration of what the US military thinks of the quality of its three minutes,

of the quality of the equipment. This is actually a secret document, quote-unquote secret, but you can get it on the internet, that's where I got it. It says for official use only, it's the handbook that Predator pilots use in Nevada. And I picked out two sections from it, and I listed each of the technologies that we talked about.

The electro-optical, the video, the infrared, the synthetic aperture radar, which I didn't get into, and finally the ground-moving target indicator, which is another radar system. And you'll see, as you lit up in yellow, that each of these technologies, by the definition of the US military, doesn't work.

The US military itself realizes the technology is only possible to track large objects, and therefore they're relying on, and I want to go back to where I started, they're relying on these 18 to 24-year-old soldiers to interpret that imagery.

I'm going to conclude with a few quotes from US military soldiers, and then we'll switch to the perspective of the soldiers in an animation that I made, and then Lisa will speak from that point of view. So here's some quotes from the US border patrol using the same videos, same predator drones, and they figured it was actually cheaper and better to use piloted planes on the border of the US and Mexico

than to use drones because of the poor quality of the technology. Here's a quote from somebody who actually is a manufacturer from BAE, and he says, it's one thing to get technology, it's another thing to actually analyze it. There's a whole software section for this presentation that I can't make.

A third, and then the final quote, is this concept, the idea that if you're sitting in a booth and you have magic technology available to you, you can transform the nature of war. And what Paul Van Ripper says is that's actually not true. War has not changed. Just because you have a piece of equipment

and you're sitting on the other side of the world, you cannot necessarily figure out who the enemy is, and that's the final quote. Oops, you'll just have to believe me. The final quote. Sorry, and then we'll play the video.

Okay, so this is, now I've made this presentation actually to somebody who worked in the National Security Council, and this person told me that the commanders would often come and tell the politicians that their technology, the politician would say, we want this drone to go to Syria

and show us something. And the commanders would say, well, we know this technology doesn't work. It's useful for certain things, but it cannot find a terrorist, find them guilty, and then be used to kill them. So, essentially that's what this says. Now, we're gonna switch to this two and a half minute animation,

then Lisa's gonna speak. And hopefully that will put it into some perspective. The drone is sedated, so we can beam data across the world to real time.

We can track down our enemies from the US and create less collateral damage. Sounds simple, right? Well, imagine for a moment that you were given in order to track down and kill a suspected terrorist. You'll be provided a name from a photo or a cell phone. You'll have his name written down and then the wrong name, the wrong photo.

You can trick the bigger cameras, the weaker systems, the weaker sensors, or the rotation track,

because soldiers just analyze vast amounts of video phone conversations. For this, it depends on algorithms that ultimately determine who lives, who dies. Algorithms, they often make major mistakes

and give the soldiers three false algorithms. So, we're on time? We're on time? We are on time? Okay, good. But she has 10 minutes, no?

It's almost ended, yeah, this is ended.

Now you're on, so you get to speak. Hi, my name is Lisa Ling and I used to work on that system.

I wanna say something and make it pretty clear that I didn't give ProTap any classified information. He dug all of this stuff up on the internet without my help. However, what I would like to say is that what he was just talking about is technology and technology is great, I love technology.

I'm a geek at heart, I'm a hack. But what I wanna say about technology is that what people miss in the conversation is the humanity. What we're talking about is a human life. So, imagine you're sitting in your car and you're trying to find an ice cream parlor and you're trying to go get ice cream with your family and sometimes the GPF gets it wrong, right?

Sometimes you end up in front of a burger joint or somewhere else, which is fine when you're looking for ice cream. But it's not okay when we're talking about human lives. It is absolutely not okay. It is not okay to have one technology

that is not perfected and use it in an experimental way when we're talking about human lives. And American life is no better than somebody's life in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world. And the thing about all of this is is that at least for us in America, we have to get out of this idea

that if you come from a different country, if you wear a different dress, if you do a different thing, that you're a terrorist automatically. And we also have to understand that the laws of war, they're not straightforward. I went to Afghanistan and I went to a small community

and there was a gentleman there and he was actually the police officer of the community. And the thing about it is is they dress in cultural clothing and that cultural clothing that the police officer in the community who carries a gun wears is the same color clothing that the person who's the school teacher wears, that the child wears, that everybody else wears.

So carrying a gun does not necessarily make you an enemy combatant. So one of my questions that I've had is what are the rules of war anymore? What are they? What constitutes sovereignty if there's a device pretty much without governance that could cross over borders?

What are we talking about here when we're talking about human lives? What's important to us and where is the humanity in this conversation? Technology is awesome, I love it. But just because we have a hammer does not mean that everything is a nail. And what happened, even General McChrystal said

that pretty much when we drone one innocent civilian that 10 enemies are made. And people are under the impression that there's this enemy, right? And that it's this finite number of people. And if we kill this many of that number of people that eventually these wars will end.

If what General McChrystal says and every time we drone somebody, 10 new enemies are created, then how do these wars end ever? Well, I can tell you who profits, the banks profit and the global weapons dealers profit. And humanity dies, humanity fails, right?

And a lot of the reason why we're here is because this is the fifth estate. And we're here because the fourth estate is failing us. The general news media, the people who get on television and give us our news are not talking about the humanity within the drone program.

There's a lot of talk about how a bunch of propaganda messes with elections. Well, if we had a functional fourth estate, the checks and balances that are required for any healthy democracy would be there. And it is up to all of us as individuals because we all participate and especially the people in Germany wanna know where does Ramstein fall in this?

This is a distributed system. And what that means is that the responsibility and the culpability is distributed among all of it. People look at a drone and take that as separate, right? That would be like taking one weapon away from an entire brigade and thinking that that brigade and group of soldiers

is now no longer a group of soldiers. The whole thing is a weapon system. It's a weapon. It spans the globe. And there are many military bases. There are many pieces of communication. There are many things that are encompassed in this thing. And every year when I pay my taxes

and it goes into the military industrial complex, I am complicit. I think that we have to stop taking this apart and going, well, how much responsibility does this over here have? And how much responsibility does this over here have? And start looking at the people who are funding this, who are driving this. And that is the global arms trade.

That is policy, politics, all of that stuff. And we need to put it together. If you have one communications cable that does one thing that goes to your country through your country, and it ends up with one innocent Pakistani dead, that country is complicit.

Whether or not there's a weapon or one single thing or one little thing here or there doesn't matter. If you are any part of this global system, you're complicit. And we all as human beings need to stand up and understand that this idea,

terrorism is an idea. And the other thing that we need to understand is that from the ground, nobody knows when there's gonna be a piece of ordinance falling from this thing that's been flying over them for days. Imagine right now, if we had a drone flying under us, nobody is immune. If you're a doctor, you can be droned.

If you're an infant, you can be droned. If you're a teacher, you can be droned. Imagine if there's a drone above us right now. I'd be terrified. That's called terror. So in my worldview, armed drones are terror,

and we cannot fight a war on terror with more terror. Done. We can't win a war on terror by being terrorists. We can't do it. So if we want these wars to end, we all need to stand up.

And if all of you wanna learn more about this, coming out here shortly on the 18th is the movie National Bird. Myself and two other whistleblowers are in that film, and if you wanna hear our stories, I hope that you go see it, that you share it with your friends, and that we all start talking about the human beings in all of this.

Thank you.