Tuesday morning, a consortium of human rights organizations launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a joint project to enact an international treaty banning the use of “fully autonomous robots” — machines that kill without direct human oversight — in combat. The launch highlights a net of thorny ethical and legal issues surrounding the use of these weapons, ones that have yet to be fully resolved by the US government or international community.

The campaign to ban robot soldiers began in response to rapid advancements in military robotics in roughly the past decade and a half, developments that most famously produced the armed Predator and Reaper drones in common use by U.S. armed personnel today. In 2009, several concerned researchers founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), the first NGO dedicated to pushing an international treaty that (among other things) would ban autonomous weapons. Debate over the topic heated up in late 2012, when Human Rights Watch released much-debated report arguing that autonomous weapons were in-principle inconsistent with international humanitarian law.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots joins ICRAC and HRW with 20 other like-minded organizations, including Amnesty International and Code Pink, in a renewed effort to codify a ban on autonomous weapons. There is no currently existing fully autonomous weapons platform and the U.S. Department of Defense, which supervises what is by far the most robotically advanced military in the world, has a self-imposed moratorium on deploying weapons capable of autonomously using lethal force. However, the Campaign’s member groups are worried that technological advancement will make the deployment of such weapons inevitable without a treaty ban:

Over the past decade, the expanded use of unmanned armed vehicles or drones has dramatically changed warfare, bringing new humanitarian and legal challenges. Now rapid advances in technology are permitting the United States and other nations with high-tech militaries, including China, Israel, Russia, and the United Kingdom, to move toward systems that would give full combat autonomy to machines…”We cannot afford to sleepwalk into an acceptance of these weapons. New military technologies tend to be put in action before the wider society can assess the implications, but public debate on such a change to warfare is crucial,” said Thomas Nash, Director of Article 36. “A pre-emptive ban on lethal autonomous robots is both necessary and achievable, but only if action is taken now.”

These efforts are obviously in their infancy, and militaries have some pretty obvious reasons to want autonomous weapons, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see a treaty banning robot soldiers anytime soon. Moreover, it’s not even clear if it’d be a good thing: lawyers and ethicists are sharply divided as to whether autonomous weapons would be illegal, unimportant, or potentially even an improvement over human soldiers.

Critics of autonomous weapons argue that they’re incapable of complying with critical provisions in international humanitarian law aimed at protecting civilians. That Human Rights Watch report concludes that no algorithm or artificial intelligence could sufficiently distinguish, for example, between civilians and insurgents in an Afghanistan-style counterinsurgency, meaning that no army employing autonomous weapons could satisfy the legal principle of “distinction” (that all armies must, over the course of fighting, identify civilian populations and military targets and treat the two differently). Critics also believe that autonomous weapons would have difficulty making the kinds of contextual moral judgments necessary to comply with the principle of proportionality, the idea that any unintentional cost to civilian life must be proportionate to the military benefits, or “military necessity,” the legal principle requiring armies to hold off on attacks (even on military targets) that aren’t necessary for winning.

Opponents of a treaty ban, by contrast, argue that such criticisms are missing the point. All weapons, they hold, can be used illegally — obviously, armies using machetes alone can violate the principles of distinction, proportionality, or military necessity. Indeed, they might be more likely to: while humans are driven to massacre by anger or sadism, a properly programmed robot will never lash out (Ronald Arkin at the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on just this sort of programming). It’s much smarter, they argue, to attempt to identify the specific circumstances under which autonomous weapons could be used lawfully or unlawfully rather than tilt after the windmill of an international treaty.

While some of these quandaries depend on technical assessments — How well can we program robots? How good are their sensors? — others are more conceptual. One such challenge comes from Monash University Professor Robert Sparrow, who argues that robots create problems of moral responsibility for atrocities that are in principle impossible to resolve. Sparrow argues that, the more autonomous a combat machine is, the less predictable its behavior in combat zones becomes, and hence the less fair it is to hold either its programmer or commanding officer responsible for any atrocities it commits. But if it’s wrong to hold anyone responsible for atrocities, then the entire system of international law and the morality of war — which depends on being able to hold particular individuals responsible for war crimes — falls apart.

Others, like Jeffrey S. Thurnher and Michael Schmitt, counter that it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a robot could commit a war crime without the person who ordered it into combat knowing that atrocity was a possible outcome of their order, suggesting that a person could always be responsible for the machine’s actions.

These issues have yet to be resolved as a matter of law, philosophy, or even robotics. Yet one thing is clear: the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots won’t end the end of debate about the use of robots in war. If anything, it’ll escalate it.

Two top Bush-era officials have joined forces to pen an article falsely warning citizens of the strict gun laws the Obama administration will put into place via ceding to the authority of the United Nations.

John Yoo and John Bolton — the former Justice Department official responsible for the “Bush torture memos” and the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. respectively — took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Monday sounding the alarm against the sneaky way the Obama administration will come for Americans’ guns: the United Nations. In particular, the recently passed Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is, according to Yoo and Bolton, the vehicle that the White House means to use to go around Congress and the Constitution itself to violate citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

Yoo and Bolton see in the text of the ATT — drafted to regulate the $70 billion arms trade and keep tanks and fighter jets out of the hands of frequent human rights violators — a clear and easy way for the Obama administration to get everything the authors believe to be the end goals of the gun violence debate in the U.S. without the approval of the American people:

But the new treaty also demands domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” The treaty’s Article 5 requires nations to “establish and maintain a national control system,” including a “national control list.” Article 10 requires signatories “to regulate brokering” of conventional arms. The treaty offers no guarantee for individual rights, but instead only declares it is “mindful” of the “legitimate trade and lawful ownership” of arms for”recreational, cultural, historical, and sporting activities.” Not a word about the right to possess guns for a broader individual right of self-defense.

Gun-control advocates will use these provisions to argue that the U.S. must enact measures such as a national gun registry, licenses for guns and ammunition sales, universal background checks, and even a ban of certain weapons. The treaty thus provides the Obama administration with an end-run around Congress to reach these gun-control holy grails.

Their article syncs with other conservatives dire warnings of a new “national gun registry,” despite precisely zero proposals from Democrats to enact one. The portion of the treaty Yoo and Bolton cite does not include specifics on what a “national control list” looks like, and refers to the export of arms and their components. This in turn does not imply the type of Federal individual ownership list Republicans fear and Vice President Joe Biden has made clear isn’t soon coming.
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A new report out on Thursday shows just how much the Syrian government has come to utilize air strikes as part of its ongoing struggle against rebels, unable to discriminate between fighters and civilians.

In the newly released report, Human Rights Watch chronicles the increasing use of air strikes in the ongoing conflict in Syria, representing a shift from the early days of fighting. Since the beginning of the conflict, an estimated 70,000 Syrians have died, mostly at the hands of government security forces.

Among the targets that the Assad regime is said in the report to have focused on include those with no military value, but instead represent areas where civilians would meet in large numbers. This includes eight documented air strikes on four bakeries throughout Syria, all while people waited in bread lines away from active fighting between the government and rebel fighters. In once instance, a government helicopter circled a bakery near Aleppo, before dropping two bombs in the immediate vicinity, killing at least twenty-three civilians and injuring another thirty.

Another issue at play is technological inferiority in the skies, compared to, for example, the accuracy that U.S. air power displays. The Syrian Air Force’s lack of precision also plays a role in increased civilian casualties:

Four Syrian Air Force officers who defected told Human Rights Watch that the Syrian Air Force does not have the technology to identify and target specific military objectives in urban areas. They believed their commanders nonetheless ordered air strikes in cities and towns, in part to instill fear in the civilian population in opposition strongholds, and also to deprive the opposition of its support.

Civilian casualties are always possible, even when using the most sophisticated technology, as NATO uses in Afghanistan. As Human Rights Watch points out, however, the intentional targeting of civilians by the Syrian government (PBS’s Frontline has recently documented on such case) violates international law. “In village after village, we found a civilian population terrified by their country’s own air force,” said Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch emergencies researcher who visited the sites and interviewed many of the victims and witnesses. “These illegal air strikes killed and injured many civilians and sowed a path of destruction, fear, and displacement.”

Human Rights Watch’s report comes out as the United States continues to grapple with what role it should play in ending the strife in Syria. So far, the Obama administration has spent $385 million on humanitarian aid for Syrian civilians alone, and recently reportedly agreed to provide greater amounts of non-lethal assistance to Syria’s rebels. Calls for the United States to provide weapons to the certain parts of the Syrian opposition or establish a No-Fly Zone in Syria have increased in volume in recent weeks, even as one rebel groups’ ties to Al Qaeda have increased.

A rebel group in Syria denied on Wednesday that it was officially merging with the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda, instead pledging allegiance to core Al Qaeda, raising questions of just what this means for counterterrorism efforts in the region and U.S. support for the ongoing struggle against the Syrian government.

In a confusing 24 hours, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) on Tuesday announced that their alliance with the rebel group known as Jabhat al-Nusrah was now official and public, seemingly ending any uncertainty about ties between the two. Calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIGS), the new group was to be devoted to imposing a harsh form of Islamic law and establishing a caliphate throughout the Middle East.

Rather than going along with AQI’s assertion, however, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, the head of Jabhat al-Nusrah, denied AQI’s claim. Instead, in a recording, al-Jawlani said the group “pledge[s] allegiance to Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri,” the head of Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan. The State Department originally named al-Nusra as a Foreign Terrorist Organization back in December 2012, even then referring to them as an alias of AQI. Al-Nusrah is at present reportedly the strongest group locking in combat with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Whether al-Nusrah has merged with AQI or pledged itself to Al Qaeda core, the question remains just what effect al-Nusrah’s shift towards publically supporting Al Qaeda will have on the ground, given the Obama administration’s clear antipathy towards the group already. Some have suggested that the newly strengthened ties in either case opens up the Syrian offshoot to military targeting under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), the Congressional approval for the Executive Branch to carry out strikes against terrorist groups responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

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The Central Intelligence Agency may be out of the armed drones business soon, according to a report out Wednesday morning, possibly granting more visibility to the Obama administration’s targeted killing program.

According to The Daily Beast, the White House is ready to approve a plan transferring authority to launch lethal missions in areas such as Pakistan from the CIA to the Department of Defense. Both DOD and the CIA currently have access to unmanned aerial vehicles, as drones are formally known, but use them in different ways for different purposes under different congressional authorities and different rules of transparency.

Should President Obama sign-off on the idea, the shift that would take place would not likely be immediately apparent to the public, but would go a long way to formalize the procedures in which drones are used. The process known as “institutionalization” has been in motion for over a year now, according to The Daily Beast, headed by newly-confirmed CIA Director John Brennan:

Brennan, who has presided over the administration’s drone program from almost day one of Obama’s presidency, has grown uncomfortable with the ad hoc and sometimes shifting rules that have governed it. Moreover, Brennan has publicly stated that he would like to see the CIA move away from the kinds of paramilitary operations it began after the September 11 attacks, and return to its more traditional role of gathering and analyzing intelligence.

Under the new structure, the CIA would still have a role in providing the intelligence necessary to identify targets, at least temporarily, but would no longer have operational control of lethal missions. That role in gathering intelligence means that the CIA’s use of unarmed drones for surveillance purposes is unlikely to be affected. While not a guarantee of greater transparency, placing the targeted killing program entirely under the Defense Department would mean that it would no longer be “covert” — or both secret and deniable by the government — but instead “clandestine” — meaning the administration would be unable to legally lie about operations.

The move mirrors an approach former Defense Department lawyer Jeh Johnson promoted in an appearance at Fordham University on Monday. Johnson is the latest in a long line of high-profile Democrats questioning the current structure of the targeted killing program and the secrecy surrounding it. In recent weeks, CAP Chair John Podesta, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) have all called for greater openness from the Obama administration about the way the program is carried out.

In a move that shocked many observers, a alleged international war-criminal walked into the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda and requested he be transferred to The Hague to answer for his alleged crimes.

Confusion swirled following Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo announcing via Twitter that Gen. Bosco Ntaganda had surrendered willingly to the United States. The International Criminal Court first indicted Ntaganda for recruiting children in 2003 as part of a rebellion against the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but he has until now avoided capture.

The U.S. Embassy in Kigali was unable to confirm or deny Mushikiwabo’s statements for the next two hours, before State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland affirmed during her daily press briefing that Ntaganda was inside the Embassy. Complicating matters, neither the United States nor Rwanda are members of the Court, thus are not obliged to hand Ntaganda over. Instead, the U.S. is currently working with other countries to facilitate Ntaganda’s transfer to The Hague.

In the time since charges were filed against Ntaganda, he was first integrated into the Congolese armed forces as part of a peace deal, before defecting to lead yet another rebellion against the Congolese government — the M23 movement. A United Nations Group of Experts claimed in a report that the Rwandan government has been controlling the M23 as a proxy against the Congo. The United States has, in turn, been accused of running defense for Rwanda, protecting it from potential international condemnation. Rwanda’s ties to Ntaganda, however, became tenuous over time, as factions emerged within the M23:

“I’m sure he was much more scared of us than the [US] embassy because he has caused some friction,” a senior Rwandan military official told the FT, adding that he believed Gen Ntaganda feared for his life. “The information we had consistently coming from his people was that he was heading deeper and deeper into the forest but that was a deception to our intelligence.”

Ntaganda standing trial at the Hague is a much needed boost for the ten year-old ICC. Credibility is at a premium for the body, as its warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has been frequently undermined by African leaders, and its indictment of Kenya’s President-elect Uhuru Kenyatta failed to keep him from winning his country’s recent election.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) today said China and the Philippines should settle a dispute via a measure enshrined in the Law of the Sea treaty, a treaty that his Senate colleagues killed last year.

China has been engaged in territorial disputes with several of its neighbors — including Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam — over ownership of several small island chains and their potential natural resources for years now. The Obama administration has been seeking to broker a diplomatic solution to the conflict, urging negotiation through various forums.

Taking that advice to heart, the Philippines has filed an arbitration claim against China at International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, in an effort to gain a binding decision on the matter. Congressman Royce, currently traveling as part of a delegation to the Philippines, added his voice to the plea that China participate in the proceedings:

“It is best that China joins the process so that we can move forward under international law,” the California Republican told The Associated Press after meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and other diplomats in Manila.

“We want to calm the tensions,” Royce said. “We want this approached from the standpoint of diplomacy, and that is what we are conveying because in that way we don’t create crisis which roils the markets or creates uncertainty.”

Royce’s position is perfectly sensible and speaks to the importance of the role that arbitration plays in solving international disputes before they reach the point of violence. The United States, however, would be unable to avail itself of the Tribunal’s arbitration to get itself out of similar maritime quarrels. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which forms the authority of the Tribunal, has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, despite being signed in 1994.

UNCLOS came closer than it ever has to acheiving the two-thirds vote necessary to come into effect during the last Congress. Support for treaty poured in from almost all sides — including in testimony from representatives of big business such as the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, members of the military, and five former Republican Secretaries of States — urging ratification.

The treaty still died at the hands of Republicans in the Senate, who seemed to take the word of conspiracy theorists over American interests. It may eventually come that the U.S. will require aid similar to the Philippines in working with China, aid that UNCLOS won’t be able to provide.

Fox News has a new reason to attack the United Nations: the U.N., under the leadership of Russia, China, and Iran, is dangerously close to taking over control of the Internet, stifling free speech around the world. Fortunately for Internet users, this is not actually the case.

Fox’s Megyn Kelly interviewed The Lawfare Project’s director, Brooke Goldstein, on the grave threat that the United Nations poses to the freedom of the Internet:

KELLY: [Countries like China and Russia] already crack down, they censor the Internet already to some extent in their respective countries. So how much more control do they want?

GOLDSTEIN: Well, they want legitimacy and they want coordinated control. What this is going to result in, people are predicting at the very worst, is a fractured internet. It is an Internet that changes depending on whose borders you’re in. What it’s also going to result in are high-levels of taxes for internet providers. So U.S-based companies like Google or Yahoo who want to provide their services to Russia, to China, are more taxed. And that’s going to be an incentive not to provide it. It will also provide a highly coordinated censorship, something that we’ve seen before, and again it will be legitimized by the United Nations.

Watch the full interview here:

Fox is correct in noting that next month will be the start of the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, hosted by the International Telecommunications Union, the oldest part of the U.N. system. They are also correct that states such as Russia and India are in fact in favor of the United Nations having more direct control over the governance of the Internet. That’s about where the accuracy ends.

As Kelly reluctantly admit during the segment, the United States is opposed to this proposal. That didn’t stop her from managing to critique the Obama administration for not leading the opposition towards the measure.

Despite Fox’s fretting, the real purpose of the conference is far more mundane than they let on. According to the Better World Campaign, a part of the United Nations Foundation, the conference is based primarily around such technical issues as “fair mobile roaming charges; how to prevent taxation on mobile users from two different countries when receiving an international call; how to prevent spam; and basic cyber-security.” The majority of time and effort will go into updating the International Telecoms Regulations, a process that requires consensus.

The fact is that Russia and other states have been trying for a decade to move control of the Internet from non-profits to intergovernmental organizations where they would have more control; they have failed to do so each time. What’s more, the stance of these states runs against adopted U.N. policy, with the U.N. Human Rights Council having declared free and open internet access a human right earlier this year. In addition, preparatory documents that leaked back in June showed no sign of anything on the agenda that would indicate that a takeover was even close to being at hand.