the NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.
"I've got nothing to hide..."
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that its operations kill terrorists with the utmost precision.
Note that "accuracy" and "precision" aren't the same thing. A sharp knife is precise, but if you slice in the wrong place, it's not being used accurately. Noting that the language here isn't a quote but a description from Scahill and Greenwald.
- "The [SHENANIGANS] operation – previously undisclosed – utilizes a pod on aircraft that vacuums up massive amounts of data from any wireless routers, computers, smart phones or other electronic devices that are within range."
- "The operator describes how, from almost four miles in the air, he searched for communications devices"
- "VICTORYDANCE, he adds, “mapped the Wi-Fi fingerprint of nearly every major town in Yemen.”
This is something we didn't even know is possible: drones are cataloguing the MAC addresses, BSSIDs, ESSIDs (unique identifiers for things like your iPhone and the wireless adapter on your PC, laptop, or tablet) of people's personal electronics, at the scale of cities, from so high up in the air you can't even see the drone, and they're creating "fingerprints" from it. That means what devices "belong" in what city.
They don't suspect these people of any wrongdoing or criminal activity - how could they? They're monitoring entire cities. This is exactly what Snowden warned us about: the untargeted mass surveillance of entire populations.
The next time you hear about domestic drones for police and "homeland security," remember this article.
Sorry, we did know that was possible. It's well reported and obviously possible. Search even for amateur cantenna ranges and you'll see how far you can easily pull an SSID from (hint: many kilometres).
If the above was news to you, then get more worried: Google catalogues SSIDs versus GPS from hundreds of millions (billions?) of client android devices. Even ones that aren't logged in. This is why geolocation is fast with android devices. Unsure, but it's quite likely that Apple does the same.
>>"The NSA geolocation system used by JSOC is known by the code name GILGAMESH. Under the program, a specially constructed device is attached to the drone. As the drone circles, the device locates the SIM card or handset that the military believes is used by the target."
>>"The agency also equips drones and other aircraft with devices known as “virtual base-tower transceivers” – creating, in effect, a fake cell phone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge."
This is unsettling! I always suspected this technology was used by law enforcement but equipping killer robots for live missile guidance?!?!?
We're going to enter into an interesting new phase of spying and counter-spying efforts if drones-as-faux-cell-towers are widely available.
"Citizens of [major urban area]. Do not use your cell phone, rogue foreign agents are spying on us with a drone cell tower. Please wait until further notice - the bogey will be shot down shortly."
Or perhaps more likely:
"All employees are advised to use landlines and encrypted channels for the foreseeable future instead of mobile devices, we have reports of drone cell towers for industrial espionage."
I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. There's been enough Orwellian nightmares come to fruition lately to make these projections seem sane.
I'm pretty sure you could find a VoIP-backhaul femtocell light enough to mount on a drone with enough battery to power it right now. They are used to provide cell service aboard ships.
The logical next step: finally we'll get practical, usable EMP guns. After all, it won't be murder to knock down a spy drone, and in many situations the drone operator won't even complain since their activity may have been of questionable legality in the first place.
>According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies.
Well, it's not like they believe their targets are human, anyway. Their lives are worth nothing to those analysts, innocent or not.
One interesting part was, that in some of the minds of the subjects ("teachers"), the "learner" could not do or say anything to "convince the teacher to stop". This is almost direct quote from a woman which was a hospital sister in real life. So she wasn't evil; she just was conditioned to not consider "learner" as a human being (or his opinion).
I don't know anything about how they target their victim, but I am assuming the have very little time between seeing the victim and deciding to execute him/her/them. So I suspect an algorithm makes the call.
None of it is "seconds", it's all minutes or higher, and there is almost certainly at least a Colonel (20+ years experience), or a General, making the call. Every shoot probably goes through >20 people -- legal, various types of targeting, and technical/tactical "can the shot be made at all". The whole process is designed around getting approval for things like this rapidly. UAVs have many-hour loiter times, vs. combat aircraft which are usually minutes on station (due to fuel, since they're often based far away from the combat).
You can legitimately criticize a lot about the program, but it's not understaffed. At some level the military likes to retain "person in the loop" on things where automation is technically more appropriate, as it's a way to train people for other roles later -- i.e. pilots who eventually become USAF top brass.
My problem is with the over-use of drones in operations where we'd otherwise not get involved (Yemen, etc.). Drones themselves probably centralize decision making with more senior people, and the cost of not taking a shot is just having to wait for the next one, so unless it's a shot in support of a unit already on the ground, theoretically drones will make the military more restrained in the shots it takes. If there are friendly forces on the ground nearby, you end up with things like the "Reuters Journalist/Collateral Murder" situation -- a lower level of evidence to support a military decision than you'd ideally have.
Most everything you wrote makes intuitive sense, even for myself, with no military experience--which is why it is so hard for me to believe that many of the other comments in this thread are being made earnestly.
Perhaps there is some philosophy at work that is just foreign to me?
Even the basis of this article strains credulity--the authors editorialize that any reliance on signals intel is bad. Assuming that drones are a useful military tool, wouldn't we want maximum information to improve targeting, leading to reductions in collateral damage?
I think people are much better at evaluating whether the totality of a situation is good/bad, vs. why specifically that situation is bad.
There's no question much of the US response to 9/11 has been bad -- internationally (wars...) and domestically (perpetual state of war, civil liberties losses, etc.).
Articulating which changes, particularly technological, are good and bad individually is a lot harder. And it seems to be harder for people the closer they are to the situation emotionally.
The US military is nothing short of absolutely amazing. I just wish we lived in a world that didn't use it in such insidious ways.
Politicians have made a habit of abstracting themselves from the reality of the military and at the same time exploiting every angle of it for political gain.
But the sheer complexity and capability of the US military is dumbfounding.
Right now I get texts and voice mail from people attempting to contact the former owner of the SIM Identity I have..it happens any time you buy a prepaid phone..sometimes you get a previously owned SIM id..
Guess where this most active as far as buying a prepaid phone?
Developing countries such as Africa and Middle East..
This is a very highly political volatile situation waiting to blow up in a Presidents face.
> This is a very highly political volatile situation waiting to blow up in a Presidents face.
You have to look at this in the overall picture of military size and spending though as well. Since WWII, with a few blips, the size of our armed forces (in the US) has been slowly decreasing, while military spending has been increasing at a relatively steady rate (outside of actual war-time expenses) regardless of who is in office.
But the spending isn't equal. It is going up in critical areas, including tactical aircraft at an exponential rate. At current projections unless something changes, in 2054, the entire defence budget will be enough to buy one tactical aircraft. Norman Augustine pointed that out in the mid-1980's, but we are still on track.
So here's what I see, and it is genuinely scary:
I see a shrinking US military armed with ever more-effective force-multiplying weapons (but insufficient people) trying very hard to maintain control over key strategic areas they see in the world, while the weapons are getting stronger and the human side is getting weaker. There is no way this will continue for very long. It will stir up more and more justified resentment in the world which will face a country less and less prepared to deal with it.
All of this is a proxy for having real strength in arms.
Or maybe there will be a world war to reset the cycle, kill off tons of uppity civilians and let those that can reap astounding profits and lock down more control over the experience of the civilization we have...
Do you really think, after our experience in Iraq, that we could win a world war? Our armed forces have been moving slowly away from a world-war type force since WWII. Fighting a world war requires having lots and lots of boots on the ground and vast quantities of manpower. A few robots can't match that.
War is never about winning anything. It is about profiteering off death and destruction and paying sacrificial homage to the god of chaos to whom all politicians worship.
But if you look at it that way, our military-industrial complex has become so efficient at waging war as a means to profiteering, that all we need are very tiny wars we can continue to wage forever. In fact this is what is happening.
But this continues to bolster my point, which is that our military is less and less prepared to fight a major war. The scary thing is that if a major conflict comes, we are totally unprepared and that's not fixable without rethinking the basics of military equipment and such.
Of course this is possible to turn around. The Byzantines managed to do so by cutting military spending during a series of wars they were losing. I think we need to follow their lead but that has tremendous implications on issues like gun control.
Some unnamed source says that targets aren't double checked and that maybe innocents that have been lent a phone have been killed. This article is extremely light for such length.
I think the point of the article was how they are doing the data collecting and making the decisions (for which they provided statements from a named source as well as the leaked documents).
The thought that targeting a 'cell phone/sim', as opposed to the actual person, could cause unexpected deaths seemed to be more of a 'logical next step' rather than a substantiated claim (although it has been shown elsewhere that unexpected deaths are happening with some frequency due to drone strikes/targeting).
> that unexpected deaths are happening with some frequency due to drone strikes/targeting
No doubt. The behaviour is extremely troubling, and the "collateral damage" should be considered war crimes IMO.
I'm doubting the authenticity of the source and that geolocation alone is being used for targeting, without any secondary confirmation. I find that very difficult to take at face value, although in our current climate I wonder why I should.
Jacob Appelbaum has been saying this for a while already. They use NSA's data to do "signature strikes", i.e. strikes where they may assassinate someone only based on the "harmless metadata" they have on him. Talked to someone who may have talked to someone else from a "terrorist organization"? Well, you may now be on a drone target list.
This is going to get exponentially worse as they move to automated drone assassinations, where they just create an "algorithm" that's supposed to decide who is going to die next.
This is going to be their next logical conclusion, and to them it's "inevitable". Of course, it will be done in secret, too, probably for years before there are even leaks about it. Going by how "accurate" their algorithms are for determining who's American and who's not (there has to be only a 51 percent chance, which is almost like flipping a coin on whether someone is American or not), I imagine this algorithm on who to kill will be pretty loose, too. Better safe and kill more innocent people, than sorry and not kill the right target, is what they will choose for that algorithm.
You could say the rules for killing are already very loose right now, but the killing itself is done manually, and they are somewhat restricted to how many people they can hire for this. Once it's automated, expect the assassinations to rise by an order of magnitude, because it will just be "so easy", and also sending a drone should become much cheaper in 10 years.
Drone assassination defenders have been saying "but would it be any different if they just sent some guy with an F-16 in there to attack the target?". Well, even if such an attack wouldn't be anymore precise and it would still kill a lot of innocent people in that strike, the difference between killing people like that and killing them with automated drones or even manual ones, is about as big as spying on highly expensive targets, and doing "mass collections on everyone". It becomes so easy and so cheap technologically, that their rules for doing that action become radically more loose.
Just as for spying, they will do it simply because they can. Instead of attacking Osama's #2 with an air strike, they will be attacking a lot more people who are just very remotely associated with an organization, and in many of these cases, the decision to kill will be done by loose understanding of what is a target from the NSA mass spying (whether it's the understanding of the people deciding the drone targets now, or the algorithm for the automated drones in the future).
Recommended watching: Daniel Suarez on automated killer robots:
War will always lead to the death and injury of people who do not fit within the political motivation of the action. By removing the passion of soldiers we see how bad a lot of the data is. The data was always bad, but that was overshadowed by the suffering caused by actual malevolence. If a war is justifiable for humanitarian reasons the risk to civilians is probably worth it. Soldiers have lots of unintended consequences to civilian populations which drones effectively remove; this could be a good thing. Of course people said similar things about area bombing in WWII so I wouldn't bet on it.
Was it really an accident, when Google also mapped radio networks and captured data. While they were collecting street view information. Or if it was done on purpose.
I'm personally torn. It's asymmetric warfare. They didn't care about the thousands of innocents in the towers. If we let the Taliban regroup, another 9/11 is probable and the next strike (imo) will be at least a dirty bomb and possibly nuclear so I don't think we can afford to fight cleanly. You can be righteous as you want but if Manhattan gets nuked, the economic cost to the US is incalculable.
"In bin Laden's November 2002 "Letter to America",[3][4] he explicitly stated that al-Qaeda's motives for their attacks include: Western support for attacking Muslims in Somalia, supporting Russian atrocities against Muslims in Chechnya, supporting the Indian oppression against Muslims in Kashmir, the Jewish aggression against Muslims in Lebanon, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia,[4][5][6] U.S. support of Israel,[7][8] and sanctions against Iraq.[9]"
To me, the current series events looks like this:
- U.S. Assisted or condoned a bunch of violence against muslims (including civilians)
- A group of radical muslim terrorists decided to retaliate with violence against U.S. civilians
- U.S. retaliates with a full scale invasion of the countries most likely inhabited by terrorists and proceeds to kill civilians through incompetence or lack of care
- U.S., unwilling to declare war against countries that aren't overtly hostile, proceeds to repeat killing of terrorists and civilians through incompetence or lack of care
I hate to say this because I by no means condone civilian deaths but the U.S. has been the one escalating this war and a dirty bomb or somesuch seems like a balanced (although by no means just) response to the actions of the U.S..
Just compare the numbers:
- American civilians killed by terrorists: 2977 [1]
- Middle eastern civilians killed during the Iraq invasion alone: 120,976 – 134,149 [2]
That's 40 middle eastern civilians killed for every American.
I think the longer this war continues, the more enemy combatants you're going to find and the more desperate and bitter they'll become. How many of these terrorists do you think are fighting against the U.S. out of insanity or blind religious fervour? I think the majority of them will have been created after seeing their families, friends and countrymen killed by western forces in their homelands and by continuing such strikes, you're only creating more of them.
I can't see any clean way out of this other than pulling out completely and trying to make amends for the atrocities the U.S. government has committed.
Now you're encouraging the U.S. to kill more of these people on the grounds that they might retaliate for the people you've already killed. Doesn't this seem wrong to you? The more people you kill, the more people are going to fight you.
Just think, pretend America was peaceful and didn't have a trillion dollar military. One day a few stupid Americans go and kill ~12000 Chinese civilians. China responds by launching a full scale invasion of the United States and kills over 480000 civilians, including a number of your friends and family at first you fear them. Over the years they start to get less discriminate because previously rational people have decided to take up arms against the aggressors. More and more of the people you know are dying around you because they were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe you're in a small town and half the people you know are killed by an indiscriminate robotic strike from above. Wouldn't even you be eventually pushed over the edge and want to start fighting back?
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say but it seems to me the problem with this was is that the U.S. is _creating_ the terrorists they're there to fight.
You're assuming innocent people like myself actually have a say in US foreign policy, so I guess middle eastern people should kill me? I hate US foreign policy, example 1, Cuban embargo, how's that working out? Or invade Iraq when we need forces in Afghanistan, so instead of 1 effective war, let's fight 2 ineffective wars. Guess what? I always vote against the sitting congress and I haven't voted for a sitting president. I have as much say an Iraqi. So yeah, kill me and see what it does.
Interesting how so many people now know so many things about the most secret organization in the world. There must be a lot of money in writing stories about it.
"I've got nothing to hide..."
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that its operations kill terrorists with the utmost precision.
Note that "accuracy" and "precision" aren't the same thing. A sharp knife is precise, but if you slice in the wrong place, it's not being used accurately. Noting that the language here isn't a quote but a description from Scahill and Greenwald.