“For many of these cases, they’re often individuals who are young, increasingly young, often have some history of mental problems,” Karen Greenberg of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School told Al Jazeera. “The real issue is, what about the real terrorists?”

These robots are our golems — utterly unpredictable, entirely unaccountable, alarmingly enabling. The horizon of war reeks of their casualties, with every blue face, every lank arm, the output of an arbitrary machine.

This form of control is indifferent to whether or not I “believe” in it. I can’t choose to opt out or face it down with a vigilant skepticism. I can decide to resist—I can toss my smartphone in a lead bag and refuse all social media—but these decisions won’t affect the social infrastructure I am embedded in.

Every time it kills civilians, we add to guilt, like a bank account. And as time passes, guilt decays and reduces in value (especially if the robot kills bad guys). Now here's the governor bit: whenever guilt is above a value -- say, 100 -- then the robot formulaically becomes less willing to shoot.

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

“We don’t give them a manual, we don’t send them home for three weeks to study,” says James Blake, head of the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. “We just put them in the environment, put the device on them, and exercise.” “We get kids who come in with unrealistic views of the Army because of Call of Duty,” Hill says, referring to Activision Blizzard’s popular video game franchise. “You’re not going to come in here and run around like you’re in a one-man war.”

In a move echoing the apocolyptic situation played out in the Terminator series of films, the US government is handing over control of its nuclear stockpile to computers. In the Terminator films the US government develops a computer system called Skynet which is designed to have command over all computerised military hardware and systems, including America's entire nuclear weapons arsenal.

Sarkozy-Terminator ira-t-il frapper à la porte de l'UMP pour demander la tête, non de Sarah Connor, mais, au hasard, de François Fillon?

At a secret black site in the years after the end of WWII, CIA and US intelligence operatives tested LSD and other interrogation techniques on captured Soviet spies—all with the help of former Nazi doctors. An excerpt from Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, published this week.

As some had been branded war criminals at Nuremberg, the U.S. military whitewashed the backgrounds of many scientists in an attempt to justify hiring them.