Drones, IBM, and the Big Data of Death

October 23rd, 2015

Awake Goy

Like a good poem, the ISR study has multiple meanings, and rewards careful attention and repeated reading. On its surface, it’s simply an analysis by the Defense Department’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the “performance and requirements” of the U.S. military’s counterterrorism kill/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen. However, it’s also what a former senior special operations officer characterized as a “bitch brief” — that is, a study designed to be a weapon in a bureaucratic turf war with the CIA to win the Pentagon more money and a bigger mandate. The study was also presumably an opportunity for IBM to demonstrate that it can produce snappy “analysis” tailored to the desires of its Defense Department clients, as well as for current Defense employees to network with a potential future employer.

But the presentation’s most compelling meaning is much deeper: It’s a rare, peculiar cultural artifact that opens a window into the deep guts of the military-industrial complex, where the technologies of assassination and corporate sales converge, all described in language as dead as the target of an ISR platform kinetic engagement.

Edge Methods

In 2010, IBM employees delivered a talk at IBM’s Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., titled “An Introduction to Edge Methods: Business Analytics and Optimization for Intelligence.” The audience was “the Defense and Intelligence communities,” and IBM’s goal was to explain to them how the company could help them with “managing large volumes of data” to derive “invaluable” insights. Among its already-existing governmental customers, IBM explained, was the ISR Task Force.

Although buried in reams of corporate management gobbledygook (IBM, it turns out, is “Mission Focused” and “Performance Driven”), the talk’s key theme was that IBM was offering prospective new government clients its “expertise in integrating business and technology services” using its “commercial consulting methods.” That is, IBM was bringing what it had learned from managing Big Data for corporate America to the military and intelligence worlds.

Keep that in mind as you examine the secret ISR study, and you’ll see that the Pentagon’s drone program uses data analytics in almost precisely the same way IBM encourages corporations to use it to track customers. The only significant difference comes at the very end of the drone process, when the customer is killed.

An Introduction to Edge Methods: Business Analytics and Optimization for Intelligence, page 4.

For instance, according to the ISR study, the drone program seeks to “find,” “fix,” and “finish” its “high-value individuals.” Meanwhile, in IBM’s description of Big Data for the private sector, there are precisely equivalent goals: to “acquire,” “retain,” and “personalize” a corporation’s “high-value customers.”

The drone infrastructure uses Big Data to “build target packages” about its high-value individuals, while corporations can “build profiles of the most profitable current customers.” Drones attempt “to maintain 24/7 persistent stare,” just as corporations need “to get a 360 view of the customer.”

The successful “finish” stage of a drone strike is termed a “jackpot,” while for businesses the “personalization” stage is where it all comes together, “converting insights into relevance to deliver targeted messages.” High-value customers receive an emailed coupon informing them that they haven’t bought new socks in nine months, whereas for high-value individuals the targeted message takes the form of a Hellfire missile.