Comment by godelski
16 hours ago
> More succinctly: who decides what is legal here?
Why are people concentrating on legality? Look at the language
| The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols.
It's not just "legal". Their usage just needs to be consistent with one of
- legal
- operational requirements
- "well-established safety and oversight protocols"
Operational requirements might just be a free pass to do whatever they want. The well established protocols seems like a distraction from the second condition.
> who decides what is [consistent with operational requirements] here?
The Secretary of Defense. The same person who has directed people to do extrajudicial killings. Killings that would be war crimes even if those people were enemy combatants.
There's also subtle language elsewhere. Notice the word "domestic" shows up between "mass" and "surveillance"? We already have another agency that's exploited that one...
As an english speaker (not a lawyer) I'd have read the "and" in "applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols" to mean that all three were required.
Why do you read that to mean just one is required?
The first comma is ambiguous when reading it very precisely without prejudice.
It is a list of 4 items. This should not have been written like this to stand up nicely in courts and gives way to interpretation now.
(I'm not a lawyer, but) I don't see the ambiguity. It's a normal grammatical sentence if parsed this way:
The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with
- applicable law
- operational requirements
- and well established safety and oversight protocols.
Whereas if I try to parse it as a list of 4 items, it's not grammatical:
The Department of War may use the AI System
- for all lawful purposes
- consistent with applicable law
- operational requirements
- and well-established safety and oversight protocols.
This is the correct reading.
No, the usage has to be consistent with all three according to this provision.