Life in the kill box: 'Eye in the Sky' targets the ethics of drone strikes - CNET

Hood, who won an Oscar for his 2005 film "Tsotsi," came to "Eye in the Sky" after directing "Ender's Game." Although that future-set sci-fi adventure might look different from the taut contemporary drama of "Eye in the Sky," they're thematically similar. Both films deal with technology in warfare and the morality of using that tech, as well as the effect upon the people using it.

Hood was drawn to "Eye in the Sky" by Guy Hibbert's screenplay, which he described as a "page-tuer." Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren lead the cast as British top brass coordinating a drone mission in the sky over Nairobi, Kenya. Events play out in near real time, pinging around the world from operations rooms in Britain to a drone base in Nevada to a govement minister's laptop in Singapore. The buck is passed along the "kill chain" of decision-makers as the clock ticks down on a simple yet impossible moral dilemma: Should we kill a child to stop a terrorist?

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The film's setting illustrates that real-life drones are deployed not just on conventional battlefields, but in countries such as Yemen and Somalia where the US and UK are not officially at war. A whole new set of issues arise when intelligence bodies such as the CIA use military weapons to target individuals outside of war zones. "Where is the battlefield?" asked Hood. "Does a battlefield exist as what they call a kill box?"

A conventional battlefield is a place where clearly defined military units go at each other, but a "kill box" can be any designated space, simply because of the presence of a target.

In other words, you don't kill the people who are on the battlefield, you bring the battlefield to the person you want to kill.

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"Should the battlefield attach to [a suspected terrorist] wherever he goes?" asked Hood. "If he goes to London, can we use Hellfire missiles in London?"

When govements launch strikes against civilian areas, it becomes that much more important to have solid, trustworthy intelligence. But even a drone's high-resolution images of an area or an individual can't provide absolute certainty.

"There are many who argue drones are more accurate because we have a camera looking down," said Hood. "The military might argue we have total situation awareness. We don't. We have improved situational awareness, but we still need intelligence." Hood pointed out that more than once, drone strikes have killed women and children gathered for a wedding. "We are seeing some of the picture, but we are still not seeing all of the picture."

To fill in that perspective, the film shows the characters also using tiny microdrones disguised as a bird or an insect to fly right into the terrorist's house. These tiny drones may seem like science fiction, but they're based on real devices like the Hummingbird and Black Hoet drones.

The film dramatizes the moment that a drone pilot (played by "Breaking Bad" star Aaron Paul) calls for clarification of the potential damage from a strike, something Hood said is based in reality. "They have to know they're not committing a war crime," he explained. Despite being thousands of miles removed from the death and devastation, Hood said, drone controllers are "under more stress than fighter pilots because they're expected to stay and record images of the destruction."

Hood noted that the military avoids the word "drone" in favor of "remotely piloted aircraft." "In their mind, there's still a human being involved," he said, referring to the pilots with their hands on the joystick. "But which human being? What kind of person is behind the trigger? Is that person stable?"

Hood described the ethical issues surrounding drone use as standing at a "strange intersection of warfare and policing."

It could get stranger still if we move to fully autonomous weapons, dropping the human operator from the equation. Hood tied that still hypothetical scenario to the very real and current controversy over police shootings, wondering if drones could take on the work of policing as well as fighting wars. "In the world of robotic policing there are those who argue robots with high level of artificial intelligence can be programmed to police a crowd with less chance of an emotional response... Maybe a robot is less volatile."

If a robot is less likely than a human to panic or to bring its own prejudices to bear, it still operates on instructions given by humans. What should those instructions be? Should a drone fire on an individual or crowd if property is damaged? Or only if human life is under threat? Hood relates this to dilemmas posed by autonomous vehicles. As self-driving cars hit our roads, ethical posers like the trolley problem -- which asks how you would choose between potential victims of a runaway trolley -- become very real conces.

As seen in the film, drones offer such a range and destructive force that even when the people behind it feel justified, the use of the weapon could be counterproductive. "The real goal from the Weste point of view," Hood said, "is to reduce the amount of extremist ideological activity of whatever kind in the world. With any weapon, we have to ask not how great is this weapon, but to what extent does this weapon reduce or aggravate extremism?"