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tv   The Bottom Line  Al Jazeera  September 17, 2022 3:00pm-3:31pm AST

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for safety. mm hm. and then international anti corruption excellence award. boot. now for your hero. ah, with, [000:00:00;00] ah, i'm sammy's a dan, endow with a look at the headlines here now g 0. now ukraine's president says investigators
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have found evidence of torture among bodies founded a mass burial sites in the city of is you. hundreds of bodies were found after troops re captured the area from russian forces. the u. n. is sending human rights monitors to the city to assess evidence of possible war crimes, adaptive hamid has more ukrainians. i have the momentum. people are quite high spirited at the moment because it is really the 1st time since the beginning of the war that they feel that the army is able to counter attack. but officials are being cautious. oh, deputy defense minister just a few days ago when we were in ballard. clear was saying, let's not just let's just be cautious there. still 2500 kilometers of front line. we still can be out gun and outnumbered by the russians, and they have air superiority. he and her keep the air. simon goes on many times a day,
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and at night you hear loud explosions. these as the airstrikes are happening. a bit all over the country. russia has been able to hit critical infrastructure. this city at night is pitch black. there is no electricity in most of this city, and in many other areas here in the northeast and the east of the country. so yes, the ukrainians at the moment have momentum. the russians are, say, they are regrouping because president vladimir putin said that the, the main goal of this, what, what he calls a military operation is the, is the dumbass i but the battle there is still ongoing. it's been a war of attrition, a demo main, blair. i think what people are wondering really is what is going to be rushes at next move. dozens of people have been killed in fighting this week along the border between categor, down and to genius. that both countries accused each other of carrying out attacks
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from towns. no major incense were forced that overnight on saturday. could stand, has declared a state of emergency in the back, can border region armenia, and as of a john a blaming each other for a flare up in violence this week on their border. more than 200 soldiers have been killed in the fighting. russia mediate the seas 5, it appears to be holding. now we regret the re some fighting and of course the victims that occurred there. but also, and above all, under the influence of russia, this conflict was localized. i hope this continues to be the case, and here is the answer to the question about resources. and then we've still got enough of them. have a center on have they know that to investigate the death of a woman who died in hospital after being arrested. massa, i mean these families say she was beaten after being detained by so called morality . police. police say she suffered a heart attack,
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dosage or body has more from to her on her brother says that she was arrested by the morality police war known as gash. they are shot in iran, they have a specific kind of vehicle, a van that they have for detaining women who they deem to be dress inappropriately and uninstall mclee and having improper hedge ob, according to her brother, muscle, was taken into this van and then transported to a police station where she was held for a few hours. now we have seen footage cctv footage release by the officials that show while she was in detention in this police station and seemingly she seemed to have collapse when she during, at some point after her detention prisons. king charles, the 3rd is made a surprise visit to crowds waiting to view the queen's coffin lying in state. the king was joined by his son, prince william, as they greeted people,
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one by one thousands continued to que in london to pay their respects to queen elizabeth the 2nd awaiting time to see the coffin at westminster hall is now at least 16 hours and those the headlines, news continues here are now jazeera after the bottom line. stay with us. ah, hi, i'm steve clements and i have a question. drones equipped with facial recognition, bio weapons customized to one person's dna. how scary is the future of war? let's get to the bottom line. ah, when we think of war,
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most probably it's based on the images we see from ukraine's battlefields, tanks, soldiers, guns, plains, and bombs. but that's just what we see with our own eyes. and the ukraine war has mostly been a conventional war, at least thus far. it's more like the combat of the last century. but if you look just around the corner, you'll find a whole alarming world out there. and it's not science fiction. we're talking about assassination drones program to roam around, to find and kill a specific person. how about personalized bio weapons? yes, you heard it correctly. a virus that is targeted to work on the dna of one person. we saw that in the last james bond film, but i'm not going to spoil the ending for you. and on top of that, we have major advances information operations, cyber attacks, and even data breaches where our personal information is used against us. so what will the wars of the 21st century look like? today we're talking with mark goodman, a global strategist who's worked with the f. b i and interpol, and founded the future crimes institute at silicon valley's singularity university
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. he is the author of future crimes inside the digital underground and the battle for our connected world. mark goodman, it's terrific to be with you and i need to tell our audience that this is a conversation you and i have been having literally for more than a decade. and i want to put something up on the screen for our audience. from something you wrote in the atlantic a decade ago, and in it, it's called hacking the articles, co, hacking the president's dna. i'd loved our audience, they get a feel for you. what you feel are the greatest fragility right now as we look forward to technological advancement. how can these be turned around in very disconcerting ways? well, thank you, steve for having me on your show. it's great to reconnect again. in terms of your question, technology has always decided battles throughout history. the people who had the most ships, the people who had the best muskets, the people who had access to explosives and eventually chemical and biological weapons and even nuclear weapons. so technology is that the forefront of warfare.
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which changing though, is the amount of money you need to develop this, these weapons and the proliferation of technology. so you mentioned bio warfare, biotechnology, bio weapons is covered in my atlantic article and hacking the president and dna. but in fact, every technology and in terms of modern exponential technologies, think of robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, nano technology, genetic, synthetic, biology, internet of things, every single one of these devices can be used for a public good. but there's always the flip side of technology and that they can be used by criminals, by state actors and of course, by terrorist organizations. and is the price and proliferation of these technologies decreases the proliferation increases and the price decreases. there's
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a growing range of non state actors that can also get access to these tools. one of the things i thought about a bit as we've seen poisonings now used as an active state and you know to some degree terror. and we've seen accusations that rushes president vladimir putin has poisoned and killed both of radioactive elements and you know, other pathogens to do this. i guess my question to mark is, are we at the point where the vision you had 10 years ago is really here that we've caught up with that vision. and today we really do run the risk of an individual pathogen or a pathogen that's directed, you know, at a group of, you know, people with a certain characteristic. and what does that mean? well, i think that we are definitely there. you mentioned president putting in some of his activities, we've definitely seen it in terms of the chemical attacks with nova chuck against mr. skirt paul, the former russian officer in the u. k. and that caused a quite
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a chemical attack on the people of the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. we saw more recently with opposition leader and nevada, where they put a chemical weapon in his underwear, but ended up sending him to the hospital in germany. and almost killed him. so countries in general and russia and specific have been very aggressive about using these tools and the same things that you can do with personalized chemical weapons . you can certainly do with personalized genetic weapons. at that time, the 1st human genome was decoded nearly 2 decades ago. the cost of doing that was $3000000000.00 and took over a decade with a global and international effort to pull it off. today you can do the same thing and matter of hours or days for about a $100.00. so moore's law has held consistent throughout this whole process. and in fact, advances in synthetic biology and genetics are proceeding at
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a pace 5 times as rapidly as moore's law. and what that means is that our ability to use synthetic biology is g, synthetic biology and genetics for both good and ill is proceeding at an exponential pace. so it's kind of, you know, in a way a genetic arms race that i'm hearing from you. and i, and i guess my question is, who's best at this game? where are we, where is the united states visa, the russia, china, iran. i don't know france, england, other nations that, that look, you know, all warm and cuddly, but may in fact have capacities that we should be worried about. yeah, there, it's a simple answer to your question because it's indisputable. the world leader on this front is the people's republic of china. they have the greatest number of personnel dedicated to this effort, the greatest budgets dedicated to this effort. and they have something called the
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aging genomics institute, or b, g i, which is the largest nomic sequencing company in the world. i say company because then effect, it is a public entity. but it was created with the help and sponsorship of the people's liberation army. and so as citizens around the world, not just chinese citizens, but it doesn't say around the world, submit dna for medical tests or other purposes. huge amounts of it are being sent off to china without the knowledge, understanding or agreement, tacit agreement or informed consent. but the people who do it, i can give you 2 examples. one was, there is a test that can be given to pregnant women for genetic defects. and it was discovered that over 8000000 women around the world from 50 to a different countries had agreed to get this genetic test to see if their baby was going to have
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a medical issue. what they did not know is that all 8000000 samples were sent off to be g, i in beijing because it could be process there more quickly. b, g, i shared all of that information with the people's liberation army. the joint studies on it build up a huge bio data bank and have now gone ahead and publish numerous papers on it. i'll say that was just one example. one thing that is growing increasingly common, both in the united states, europe and other parts of the world is the concept of genetic testing. people ought to be tested both for medical issues to see if they have an underlying medical issue. and also for purposes of ancestry and 2 of the largest companies that partake these tests around the world, but 23 and me and ancestry dot com have also used genetic sequencers in china to help use this information. and so there are some risks there that are not widely understood by the general public. and in fact,
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the concern is so great that the military has issued a warning to all service members and the united states. strongly discouraging them for amusing companies like 23 me and ancestry until they can get greater clarity on what specifically is being done with their genetic material when they submit it. as a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. but let me ask you something about the u. s. side of this. you've talked a little bit about china being the leader in potentially weapon ising. you know, some of this dna information is a remarkable cable that we all came to see as a result of edward snowden revelations. and obviously, edward snowden is a complicated character up there. but nonetheless, we have him to thank for this top secret cable in july 31st of 2009, and it, and it is the reporting and collection needs at the united nations issued by then secretary of state, hillary clinton. and basically she instructed her team to collect biographical
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and biometric information on key permanent representatives to the us. i mean, are we part of the arms race united states because this memo basically says, we probably are. yeah, to your point. the u. s. definitely is a player in this field. let's remember that it was the united states, that dakota the 1st human genome, and we have some of the best genomic scientists in the world. there are many people out there like george church and many others that are, that are absolutely at the cutting edge of this type of research science. and the us, of course, is looking at the military implications of these tools that parents are the reason, but to be able to protect it. soldiers, if some other country or to develop a bio weapon that could negatively impact us soldiers posted abroad, us diplomats posted abroad or even the broader us citizen read the united states.
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government would be derelict in its duties if it did not understand the implications of the consequences. and though it may seem far fetched to think that somebody would launch a biological attack against the united states we thought 10 years ago, it would be improbable if not impossible, for somebody to launch a nuclear weapon or tactical nuclear weapon in the 21st century. and yet, here we find those issues very much up for debate and potentially to be put into effect by russia and ukraine and elsewhere. so warfare is tricky and it's changing all the time. so yes, the u. s. is definitely researching this. clearly if they put out that cable and i don't, you know, i've never seen the cable, it's classified. so i don't know what is said in it, except to say that i know it was part of the release of information out there. and you could understand that if you are the u. s. government or any government,
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you want to learn as much about your friends and even your enemies as you can. because if you're negotiating with the foreign leader, and there is genetics suggestions that they are mentally ill, have a sure life will have a short life, will have some sort of critical disease that very may very well play into your foreign policy or how you approach the leader, the one thing i will say about the united states versus china, for example, is that here we are not required to provide genetic information to the government upon our birth. but that is true in many countries around the world. denmark, 30 years ago instituted a genetic bio bank and they did it for the purposes of curing disease. but now 2025 years later, some of those infants have grown up. and that same genetic database can be used by the government of denmark and has been for the purposes of identifying criminals. the last thing i'll say about china is that it is an order of magnitude larger in
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terms of its databases. with 1300000000 citizens all required to submit german genetic material. they have a huge advantage on the positive side. they have a huge advantage for the purposes of developing medicines and uncovering diseases because we've now entered the age where you can mix not just genetic information, but artificial intelligence and machine learning to uncover traits and patterns that otherwise would have been previously impossible. due to computational limitations, so they have that benefit and of course, if they can do it for the purposes of good, they also can do it for the purposes of ill, including warfare. what we're seeing in warfare and hybrid war is not only the manipulation of our physical being of our genetics of our d, n a. of the creation potentially viruses. but the influence on our minds, the taking of data, the compromising across a lot, a lot, a lot of front in the,
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you know, i guess you'd call it the digital and, you know, cyberspace and, you know, one of the things it's been interesting is the cybersecurity cheap at twitter, the former cybersecurity chief. now a whistleblower has said, there's just a recklessness in the way that mass of amounts of data, personal data about people is being used. this personal ledges that there are many spies for india employed within twitter. we've had saudi individuals who previously worked for twitter, who were in fact convicted of spying for the, for saudi arabia. i guess my question is should we, any of us sleep well at night, given this vulnerability and we sort of see society as the responsibility of society, of a government is to create safe, safer and safer and better environments. but as i look at what's going on, i just sort of fear that so many of the areas that we've taken for granted as being safe or in fact, wobbly,
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fragile. and they create vulnerabilities for us. so i'd just be interested in how you see our data world and you know, you just talk about 23 and me. but what about twitter, facebook, google, other major social media platforms? well, i share your concern and i think it's very astute that you pointed out. and when i try to share my concerns about all the social media companies, from instagram, let alone tick tock, which has again, staff and founders from the chinese people's liberation army that help file tick tock and bite dance. so it's all out there, but a lot of people say, well, who cares? the facebook has my data and who cares if facebook has over a 1000000000 people on their platform, they're just a company. what do i care? but what people don't realize is that as soon as one organization collects it, other organizations will get it. they will get it because they pay for it. right? law enforcement in the united states. ready for one certainly can buy streams of
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social media data that can be shared with the government. there are governments that hack that data and we've seen dozens and dozens examples of that. and then again, we have it and players either organized criminals or espionage actors from foreign nations that are placed within these organizations and the challenges as i'm sure you know, and you know, the economists is writing about this 20 years ago. data is the new oil. so the more and more data we produce, the more and more data that you have degree into your well, the greater your military prowess, your intelligence prowess, and of course, your economic problems. so who owns this data and what is done with it should definitely be up to subject to debate. i will stay that certain governments do a much better job of protecting this data than others. i'm thinking specifically of the european union as a number of general regulations on data privacy and the like as do many other nations, most other countries, with the exception of the united states, have
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a national data commissioner that looks after these things. so you're absolutely right to look at it and i'll just be a bit future oriented out there and say as much data as we have collected. now, it is miniscule in terms of what we will be collecting, going forward with things like the internet of things. and the metal verse that facebook is now very much getting involved. and in fact, when it comes to the growth of the internet and the collection and processing of data manually, but mostly through machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are. but in the 1st seconds of the 1st minute of the 1st hours of the internet revolution, and frankly, none of us knows what's going to come next. so it is both a very exciting possible time to be alive in. but it is also quite concerning as well. so my question to you is, is there any way to control these technologies that can be used both for good and
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for beauty, but can come back and get us. what in your experiences ever worked in controlling some of the worst dimensions of advancing technology? in terms of drones, i absolutely share your concern. you know what, what does a drone? well, a drone is just a computer, right? it's a computer that can fly, swim, crawl, or walk, and if you've gone online and watch some of the youtube videos by boston dynamics, it is mind blowing from some of the capabilities of modern robots, both for good and for. the challenge is, is that the price of these drones has dropped tremendously. one of the very 1st on man drones was the global, produced by the united states. that about a cost of $3000000000.00. now you can walk into a tesco or a costco or a wal mart and buy a drone for
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a $100.00. so these are widespread and anything the amount of growth in flying robots is going to increase exponentially. so i fear, and i mentioned previously, you know, right now people who grew up in this error and before had been able to look up into the sky and the stars and planets and the light. but the same way we have light pollution on the earth. we're going to have drone pollution in the sky. there will be drones delivering packages. there will be drones transporting people. there will be drone taxis. and of course, because they're flying robots which are flying computers. they too are hackable and we know very little about the supply chain of the drones that are out there except for this. the overwhelming majority of them are produced in china. and to answer your question about what we can do to control these. well, we saw that 1st hand because the ukrainians were using chinese made d, g. i drones and others to great effect in terms of uncovering and routing out
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russian soldiers that had legally invaded ukraine. d. j. i found out about that because the russians complained to that, and then d, g, i restricted a whole bunch of navigational features on the crania and d, g i, jones or d, j, i drones from china that we're flying and ukraine. so here the ukrainians thought they had this great tool, but because the who manufacturer and the supply chain, of course there were backdoors and them that the chinese could exploit to down those drones as well. so it's quite a complicated question mark. we started to show by saying, this isn't science fiction. this is all real. but 10 years ago when you wrote your piece, a lot of people thought it was science fiction. and now what you wrote and thought about us become real. as we look forward to the future of war, are we going to have soldiers? are we going to pilots, or is it going to be lethal autonomous weapon systems that we see deployed? that today looks to us like science fiction? absolutely. that is the future of warfare. in most countries around the world,
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drone and robotic warfare is not fully autonomous. meaning that there is always a human being in what's called the kill chain. it's not a very nice sounding term, but it's accurate. so before a drone will take somebody out or shoot them or drop a bomb on them. for example, under the u. s. military code, there's always a human being that will interact in that. but there's no reason that has to be the case. and in countries, for example, like north korea, they operate fully autonomous drug robot robots. the north koreans operate fully autonomous robots in the dmc. and if a movement is detected, the guns can just shoot automatically based on nothing more than the computer algorithm. and the challenge with that is if i want to be more safe and more secure and more humane and ensure that my drones don't blow up anybody accidentally
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or injured the public unnecessarily and cause a humanitarian disaster, i will use the human in the loop. but if my human and the loop drone is going up against the fully automated drone, that can react much more quickly than any human being can. then i will lose all of my drones and i will be outgunned in warfare. so i think unfortunately that the future of warfare is very autonomous. the challenge that we face with technology due to moore's law is, is that it proceeds at an exponential rate. it's constantly going up, up, up, up, doubling, doubling, doubling. so that's what the technology does. but all of our systems of society are not exponential. they are in fact linear, completely fan flat. so they're all the systems are linear and completely flat. so if you think about business, government, public policy, law, or ethics, they are struggling mightily to keep up what is technologically possible. and part
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of the problem is we don't have very many technologically savvy members of congress in the us. the most common profession is that of lawyer, and we have a lot of senators and their 60 seventy's and eighty's. so we're gonna have to change all of that. well, i don't want to, but we're going to have to leave it there. i could talk to you for hours on these issues and look forward to that and future show smart goodman security adviser and former futurist and residence at the f b i. and now chair of policy lawn ethics at singularity university. really appreciate you scaring the heck out of us today. thanks so much for joining us. mark. thank you, steve. so what's the bottom line? the president of microsoft, brad smith wrote an interesting book, title, tools, and weapons. in this book, he worries out loud that the technology designed to help society's improve to increase productivity and achieve new height. can also be used to harm us. facial recognition software can make life a lot easier, but can also be used to spy on and essentially trap citizens. he and others point
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that how china attracted enforces social controls on his population, online and offline. well, what can stop this, this dopey and future? of course, science will keep pushing us forward and improving our health in our lives, in every way imaginable. but the intersection of science and security is producing some very scary things. the only partial solution i can think of is exposing this, exposing the problems, talking about them until we all work together and establish guardrail to prevent tact from hurting you and hurting me. and that's the bottom line. ah
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ah ah. safe, then he'd been humming. then he international anti corruption excellence award boat . now for your hero blue. i'm sammy's a dan in del, how with the look at those headlines now. ukraine's president says investigate is

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