CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/

by mcantelon • 16 years ago

94 41 16 years ago

theregister.co.uk

krschultz2• 16 years ago

You really can't tell a lot from this article. It all comes down to what this piece of software does. A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.

They definitely aren't modifying the guidance system on the weapon - those weapons are not built by the CIA. It sounds like this piece of software helps them correlate coordinates for targeting from one computer system to another. That may be bad, it may not.

(Also, in my experience the vetting of designs is pretty rigorous, but I work on the mechanical side and our customer is DOD not CIA so your results may vary.)

pavel_lishin• 16 years ago

> A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.

Someone on reddit pointed out that even if it does, it doesn't matter. If the kill radius is 20 yards, and the bugs mean that it has an error of up to 5 yards... that's not really significant.

edit: Unless, of course, you happen to be bombing something next to an elementary school, a mosque, or a hospital.

templaedhel2• 16 years ago

I would argue that any time accuracy (or any feature) is expected, then a lack of said feature does matter. You never know when someone somewhere could be relying on the fact that they can get within 5 yards.

rhtml2• 16 years ago

This article is missing some key facts.

Netezza appliance has nothing to do with controlling drones. The tenuous link in the article is established by a failure to understand the intel use of the word targeting (gathering info on a target), as opposed to the aiming a missile military sense. Why would a drone use a data warehouse plugin to control anything operational? It wouldn't. Could a coordinate come out of the system- sure, but just a coordinate that someone else put in there.

Netezza sued IISi in 2009 for failing to deliver the port of their software. It looks like they didn't seem to get much traction with that, made some surprisingly clumsy document releases, showing where they laid down some stupid spy BS to try and push IISi to deliver or give up, or at least hand over the code so the customer could get it working. http://www.thestreet.com/print/story/10810646.html

Now, we're at the third stage, where the countersuit is claiming reverse engineering (considering that Netezza probably wrote the specs, hard to prove) and Netezza is getting bought by IBM, perhaps to get their legal team aimed at the issue...meanwhile, it gives everyone a good excuse to talk about drones.

rdtsc4• 16 years ago

> "They want to kill people with my software that doesn't work"

Let's see, we assassinate people without any trial, in a country we are not even at war with, and the obvious problem is that the software is a little buggy.

What is "buggy" here is the whole assassination system. When Bush wanted to dispatch special ops around the world to assassinate "terrorists", everyone was up and arms about it, When Obama does the same thing using drones, nobody seems to care, and the problem is a couple of bugs in the software.

patio11• 16 years ago

There was a great piece whose identifying information I'm blanking on that explained how we stumbled into drone warfare. Basically, we tried doing snatch & grabs with commando teams for a while, and that kept generating one negative externality we weren't willing to tolerate. Illegal acts? No. Media pressure? No. Collateral damage? No. Diplomatic reprecussions? No. Prisoners.

Prisoners are a real handful. What are our options? Let them go? Well, no gain there. Put a bullet in the back of their head? Americans won't go for it. Try them in a civilian court? You get to expose sources & methods, they might walk anyhow (evidence tends to be testimony of equally unsavory characters plus something classified to the nth degree and not worth burning on Mook #473), and the successful outcome is they go plot their next terrorist act from a federal penitentiary. Try them in military court? All the fun of a civilian court, and the New York Times editorial board will make it sound like you took the bullet option anyhow.

You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

Interesting anecdote: up until WWII or so, American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on the battlefield. There was a brief trial followed by an execution.

Over time, the whole trial and such got to be counter-productive for the military, all that publicity and such. Warfare became much more a PR game. So commanders started emphasizing killing over capturing.

This trend has nothing to do with the war on terror. Eisenhower back in WWII sent out memos to his commanders saying he didn't want to see a lot of snipers being captured. The implications were pretty clear. Drone warfare is just the continuation of this larger trend.

rdtsc4• 16 years ago

> You know what has never once happened as a result of a Predator drone strike? A live prisoner in US custody.

That makes a lot of sense. It is the optimal way of disposing of people on hidden black lists.

The other upside for them -- Americans don't put their lives in danger, unless we consider driving to Langley in DC traffic every day as "danger". So they never have to deal with that PR aspect of the operation.

dschobel2• 16 years ago

This whole conversation is way off-topic but the operations happen with the partnership of the Pakistani government (so the bit about "...in a country we're not at war with" is irrelevant) against military targets who are not fighting under any nation's flag.

The days of two armies lining up at opposite ends of a battle-field are gone.

rdtsc4• 16 years ago

> This whole conversation is way off-topic.

I think not when software is used to kill people. I refuse to sanitize and rationalize that fact away and happily discuss UAV realtime software development patterns.

mmaro2• 16 years ago

It's important to remember that neither Bush nor Obama are king of the U.S. government. Our newspapers, universities, and civil servants turned on Bush because of his entry to Iraq, acting out of step with the rest of the government (which includes a lot more than people think). Anything they said to reduce Bush's power was fair game. You, like me, probably fell for it. People in the government generally don't have a problem with the government's power and actions. They did pull off a great trick though, assigning everything bad to Bush for six years.

rdtsc4• 16 years ago

> It's important to remember that neither Bush nor Obama are king of the U.S. government.

That is true. I was just using the names as shorthand for the governments they run.

> You, like me, probably fell for it.

Unfortunately that is true. Since then I started to pay more attention to how propaganda works in US.

> They did pull off a great trick though, assigning everything bad to Bush for six years.

Yes that was brilliant of them. It looks like it worked rather well.

c00ki3s2• 16 years ago

Could you elaborate on this? Normally I don't care about politics, but this does sound interesting.

gaius3• 16 years ago

Let's not forget that Clinton's favourite tactic was a cruise missile too. Remember Sudan?

onefortwo• 16 years ago

This is the problem with success, it has many different meanings and some of then are evil. When using technology to kill people it should be carefully studied what is the meaning of success.

templaedhel2• 16 years ago

The CIA does not seem to be having very good press karma with their drones, if I recall there was a few issues with data stream encryption, and software that allowed hostiles to intercept and view UAV downlinks in the battle field. Perhaps its just tempting to write a story about such a high profile target, but it seems partly like some corner cutting is going on on the CIA's end.

wheaties• 16 years ago

I love government contracting. First we pick a schedule, then we pick a technology, then we decide who gets the contract and who will supervise the execution of said contract. The best part? When something gets delivered, no matter how sad a state of affairs it is code-wise, no matter how difficult or expensive it will be to bring up to any sensible standards of maintainability, they won't pay for it. No, they'll only pay for a new feature.

This is why government contracting is fun. You never know when a story like this is going to come out and if you're going to be involved with it.

torrentabuse• 16 years ago

I don't really care if it's illegal. But inaccurate? That's not good.

dekz• 16 years ago

Let me get this straight, the drone is inaccurate by the worst case 13m. So the drone itself is off by at most 13m, while being 26,000ft in the air. This hardly seems like a major issue to me, according to wikipedia the Predator drone is equipped with hellfire munition, which have their own laser guided trajectory. Depending on the type the hellfire munition has approximately 8000ft range, so something tells me the drone itself doesn't guide the hellfire to the ground.

But 13m? I'm no munitions/combat expert, but I assume 13m discrepancy, even if it does apply to the hellfire itself, won't make much of a difference. Something is going to get blown up anyway, even if it is off by 13meters the target will essentially no longer be there.

known• 16 years ago

That's the main problem with American foreign policy. Win-Lose proposition is not scalable in globalized internet world.

CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones'

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