Rise of the Drones – UAVs After 9/11

[Ed Jewett]

Deus Ex Machina

"Ye Know Not the Hour Nor the Day"

[Peter Lemkin]

CIA used pirated, inaccurate software to target drone attacks: lawsuit

By Daniel Tencer
Friday, September 24, 2010

They want to kill people with my software that doesn't work,' software exec tells court

The CIA used illegally pirated software to direct Predator drone attacks, despite apparently knowing the software was inaccurate, according to documents in an intellectual property lawsuit.

The lawsuit, working its way through a Massachusetts court, alleges that the CIA purchased a pirated and inaccurate version of a location analysis program, which may have incorrectly located targets by as much as 42 feet.

The allegation raises fresh questions about the CIA's execution of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are believed to have killed hundreds of civilians in the past four years.

And if the court decides to grant an injunction against users of the software, it could potentially halt the CIA's drone attacks, at least temporarily, as the agency works to find a replacement.

Massachusetts-based Intelligent Integration Systems Inc., or IISI, has asked a judge to stop clients of IT firm Netezza from using software IISI says is pirated, reports The Register.

According to IISI, Netezza reverse-engineered a location analysis program called Geospatial and installed it on its own hardware, which it then sold to the CIA. Netezza had contracted IISI to build the software, but decided to create its own unauthorized version after the project suffered delays, the lawsuit alleges.

The CIA accepted the pirated software despite reportedly knowing it "produced locations inaccurate by up to 13 metres (42.6 feet)," reports The Register.

In a sworn deposition, IISI chief technical officer Richard Zimmerman said a Netezza executive pressured him to deliver the product before it was ready and told him it was their "patriotic duty" to build location software for CIA-operated drones.

Another Netezza executive reportedly asserted that the CIA would accept flawed software. "My reaction was one of stun, amazement that they want to kill people with my software that doesn't work," Zimmerman said.

According to court documents, Netezza delivered its reverse-engineered software to the CIA in 2009.

"The potential for a software malfunction to cause serious havoc with an unmanned aerial vehicle, such as a Predator Drone, is no longer a matter of pure theory," writes Bill Conroy at NarcoNews. "Last month a Navy drone entered the airspace of the nation's Capitol after being out of control for a half hour due to what the Navy called a software issue.'

"If the CIA is using flawed software re-engineered by Netezza to target predator drones in Afghanistan,' as IISI's pleadings in the lawsuit assert, then it is likely only a matter of time before innocent lives are compromised due to a software issue.' In that sense, IISI's motion for a preliminary junction, if successful, could be seen as a lifesaver," Conroy argues.

Last year, the New American Foundation estimated that Predator drones killed 750 to 1,000 people in Pakistan between 2006 and 2009. About one third an estimated 320 people were believed to be civilians.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZALEZ: Thirty-one of 38 accused activists were found guilty on Thursday for their role in a protest against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The activists were arrested on Earth Day, April 22nd, at the New York Air National Guard base at Hancock Field. The defendants trespassed onto the base to protest the MQ-9 Reaper drones, which the 174th Fighter Wing of the Guard has remotely flown over Afghanistan from Syracuse since late 2009. The protesters draped themselves in white cloths splattered with blood-red pigment and then staged a die-in at the main entrance to the base. They said their act of nonviolent civil disobedience aimed to visualize the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drones operated by personnel sitting in front of computers thousands of miles away. The group calls themselves the Hancock 38 Drone Resisters. Following the guilty verdict, four of the activists were sentenced to 15-day terms in prison, while a number of others were given fines and community service.

Among the protesters' supporters has been former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Early in November, speaking to the judge presiding over this non-jury trial, Ramsey Clark testified for over four hours, telling the court the drones violate international law.

To discuss the case, Ramsey Clark is here with us in our New York studio. We're also joined on the phone from Syracuse by Harry Murray, one of the Hancock 38 and a co-defendant in the trial. He is a professor of sociology and anthropology at Nazareth College, where he also serves as a director of the peace and justice major.

I welcome you both to Democracy Now! I'd like to start with Harry. Your reaction to the verdict?

HARRY MURRAY: Well, we were disappointed in the verdict, not exactly surprised, because Judge Gideon, more than most judges I've experienced, took time to listen to and grapple with our arguments about the larger issues, particularly international law, but also we got into some wonderful discussions about the nature of civil disobedience, the evils of the drones, and even the nature of law and his responsibility as a judge.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now

HARRY MURRAY: I think

JUAN GONZALEZ: Go ahead.

HARRY MURRAY: For many of us, the most disturbing thing was sort of the uneven nature of the sentences, because we had a feeling that we all did the same thing, and the way that some folks got singled out for moremore harsh punishment was unsettling.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, this was an unprecedented trial for such a small community in upstate New York. Could you talk a little bit about the scene? What does this courtroom normally deal with, what kind of cases? And how did the judge react to so much attention and so many huge issues being raised in his courtroom?

HARRY MURRAY: Well, DeWitt Town Court isyou know, is a small town courtit wasn't the city court in Syracuseused to dealing with much more traffic violations, shoplifting at the local mall, those kind of crimes. And the judges, the two judges, are both part-time judges, so it's an evening court. Judge Gideon, I think, was ratherwas enthusiastic, and I think he found the case interesting and challenging legally, morally and intellectually, in a lot of ways. And so, I think he entered into the discussion of the larger issues more than most judges, you know, that I've experienced. I remember one judge from years ago who told me, "You raised a lot of interesting issues. I'm not going to discuss any of them. Guilty." Whereas Judge Gideon really entered into the discussion. And even Mr. McRoberts, the prosecutor, for a while towards the end of the trial, started entering into the discussion of the larger issues involved, which I found extremely rare for a prosecutor.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I'd like to bring in Ramsey Clark into the conversation. Your decision to go up there to testify in this case, and how the judge reacted? You spent four hours on the stand?

RAMSEY CLARK: Well, the decision to go up was easy. I've represented the Berrigans, who were the source of this. They came, by the way, from Syracuse many years ago. I started representing them in 1970 in cases against Trident nuclear submarines and any other military evil that the country has known. So, this was a fertile place for such a trial. And actually, Jerry Berrigan, one of the brothers, was one of the defendants, 91 years old. He was out there. But he was not physically strong enough to endure the trial, and the judge dismissed him, one of the fair acts that happened in the court.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Gideon's willingness to have this whole discussion of international law violations that you were raising admitted into the courtroom?

RAMSEY CLARK: I think the court's going to have to hear them. This is the second court, by the way. The first one was out in Las Vegas, where there's a U.S. military air base that is guiding drones, as well. And that judge had great difficulty, and when he finally convicted, he dismissed the charges, essentially, by sentencing with time served, which was nothing. This judge felt some need to impose sanctions to the maximum of his authority on five of the defendants: 15 days in jail. Surprising.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yet, at the same time, he said, when he rendered the decision, that he'd spent many a sleepless night before making his final verdict. And he also said that, quote, "Many issues were raised (during the trial) that were not heretofore contemplated by this court on a personal level, and for which this court personally acknowledges a new and different understanding, making the decision...that much more difficult." He seemed to say that he believed that the protesters had been able to make their point, but that at the same time that, for participating in civil disobedience, there is a penalty that he felt that they had to pay.

RAMSEY CLARK: Well, he may have done that, but he came down rather harshly, it seemed to me. The judge in Las Vegas imposed no sanctions on any of 40-odd defendants. They are some of the same defendants. But they were exercising fundamental human rights in the interest of preservation of society, freedom of speech, and the right to petition your government, right to peacefully assemble. I mean, how is it that at Zuccotti Park we tolerate an enormous interference with traffic in the area for months and months without arrests, and here at a base that's killing people halfway around the worldassassination, really, and extremely dangerous in terms of provocation of a whole people.

During the trial, the day after I testified, in fact, the New York Times had an editorial about a guy who was working on peace in Islamabad. He had met with a family the day before. And the nextnot the day beforethey had left to go back up to the frontier territories. An 11-year-old boy was killed in a car driving back home. And we had 20-plus troops, soldiers, of an ally, more or less, Pakistan, killed by our drones. Incredible. I mean, they're assassination and murder weapons, and they create more fear and anger, because they come out of the blue. You don't feel safe anyplace. You're not safe anyplace. They'll chase you down anyplace. And it's a weapon that ought to be prohibited. It's a criminal weapon. And

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yet President Obama just said yesterday that he will not apologize for the attack. And the issue of these drones and thewhat is happening around the rest of the world, as they see the willingness of the United States to basically go into any country it feels necessary to do so with these drone attacks?

RAMSEY CLARK: Yeah, we totally disregard the sovereign territory of a big country, Pakistan, a major country, and basically say we'll kill anybody there we decide to, without consultation, so watch your step. It's a weapon of extreme provocation and extreme danger, extreme inaccuracy. Its ability to address a single individual is nonexistent. It kills whoever happens to be around, and it also kills sometimes when there's no one around except a bunch of people in a meeting, because you've got the wrong target.

But the decision to murder or to assassinate anybody, anyplace, to send one of these things out, is itself a crime. You can'tyou can't do that. It's not war. It's not a war zone. It's not soldiers. You're killing families, and you're increasing hatred, a danger for our society. International law, I believe, does prohibit the use of drones. It has to be respected, because others will have drones. What kind of world will we live in then, when peopleit's like flying kites. They love to fly kites in Afghanistan. It's like flying kites. Everyone has drones, and no one's safe. You kill at will wherever you want to on earth.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Harry, Harry Murray, I'd like to ask you about the decision to do this protest, the impact on the peace movement in the upstate New York area as a result of the arrests and the highly publicized trial, but first, your decision to get involved and the selection of this particular base for the protest?

HARRY MURRAY: Sure. Well, my decision to get involved comes out of a decades-long involvement with the Catholic Worker Movement and the teachings of Dorothy Day on nonviolence, and really out of decades of working with homeless veterans since the 1970s, seeing the results of sending young people off to war and just so many of them unable to ever adjust to normal society again, which I guess is something that many people would say, "Well, that should make you support drones, because drones save the lives of American troops, and they can kill remotely." But I think that drones really increase the risks of war, because drones make attacking people in other countries, extrajudicial killings, as Ramsey says, cheap and easy. It makes it very easy for the president to make a decision to just try to take out someone in, you know, almost any country in the world. And the number of countries in which we've been using drones has been expanding. And as Micah Zenko points out in his book Between Threats and War, what that does is really kind of increase the risk of the number of incidents that could possibly start a more major war. And so, you know, it's putting everyone at more risk.

We chose this actionactually, for the last few years, there has been a really wonderful collaboration of peace communities in upstate New Yorkin Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Ithaca, Albanyand having a drone control center established at Hancock Air Base has really brought the war home to central New York in a way that hadn't been true since the Seneca Army Depot closed down a couple decades ago. Having people who are actually killing human beings in Afghanistan working right in Syracuse really makes Syracuse and upstate New York a war zone, because, according to international law experts or the law of war experts, the drone pilots sitting at Hancock are legitimate war targets. They are combatants. And therefore, according to the law of war, they are legitimate targets, at least as long as they are in uniform, even if they're off base, which really brings the war home. Syracuse becomes a war zone. And, you know, this killing is being done not only with our tax dollars, but it's being done by our neighbors as they are living here. And so, there waswe felt a great need to come together from across upstate New York to try to raise our opposition to this drone center.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Ramsey Clark, this whole issue of these wars continuing, and because there are so few Americans that are directly related to or involved with someone who is fighting in the war, that there seems to be far less consciousness or far less consistency in the antiwar movement in the United States certainly than there was during the Vietnam War period. Your sense of how the wars have drifted from the national consciousness vis-à-vis all of, obviously, the economic problems in the country?

RAMSEY CLARK: Well, the draft made an enormous difference, because that touched home. And World War II, we fought with soldiers that were drafted overwhelmingly. Vietnam, by that time there was high discrimination. You know, black kids didn't get college deferments, and they were taken in a much higher degree. That's the reason that the Berrigan brothers, when they raided draft boards, would go into areas where poor kids', Chicanos' and African Americans' draft records were and destroyed those records. So, the college kids were deferred, kids from the suburbs. That's takenso we've got an all-volunteer army, if you want to call it "volunteer."

It's awe've got a high number of non-citizens in it. We offer citizenship, high number of Latinos, some in violation of treaties. Latin American countries didn't want their sons to serve in the U.S. military, because they've been invaded by the U.S. military too many times. They didn't want to see them on their streets pointing guns at them, their own kids. And yet, we've had enormous numbers in Iraq, sometimes ten, fifteen, twenty thousand, out of a much smaller army than we had, say, in World War II or even in Korea or Vietnam, that were aliens promised citizenship sometimes, promised other benefits, and paid better than they could be paid otherwise in work they could find. So we're recruiting non-Americans, to some degree. And an all-professional army is not the ideal for a democracy. You wantif you have to have an army, you want it to be represented by your people, who believe in your country and stand up for your country, not by hired guns.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And thisthe way that the Obama administration has sought to portray itself as an administration that is seeking to end these wars but is dragging out the removal of troops over so many years, in effect maintaining the war while saying that it is seeking to end it.

RAMSEY CLARK: Well, not only sustaining it overit should never have been begun in the first place, but sustaining it over an absurd length of time, just trying to cling on there in the hope that something will happen, the other side will collapse, but also expanding it. I mean, we'veif you look at what's happened, there's Iraq, and then there's Libya, there's Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria under the gun, heavy guns, terrible geopolitical pressure on them, and Iran waiting in the list. And here we are speeding toward Myanmar now, because we see it as a new border, new border state, between China and the U.S. and one to be fought over and exploited hopefully. And it would be right on the soft underbelly of China, It has a common border with former India. So you've got war continually expanding, war in the Philippines and elsewhereand nearly always against Muslims, which is something to worry about. We keep expanding the war against Muslim states, and we're losing any hope for reconciliation with a billion-and-a-half people if we don't change our policy.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Ramsey Clark, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson. Harry Murray is one of the Hancock 38 and a co-defendant in the trial that was just concluded in upstate New York. He's a professor of sociology and anthropology at Nazareth College, where he also serves as a director of the peace and justice studies major.

[Ed Jewett]

Wednesday, 21 December 2011

The Future of Drone Warfare

Over half of Air Force UPT (undergraduate pilot training) grads are now assigned to pilot drones rather than a real aircraft.* The big question is why are drone pilots, guys that fly robots remotely from a computer terminal, going to a very expensive year of pilot training? I can understand why the Air Force has chosen to send drone jockeys to pilot training:

• A shift to piloting drones rather than real aircraft is an assault on organizational culture of the Air Force. In the Air Force, pilots do the fighting and as a result take most of the leadership positions.
  
• A transition to robotics upends that arrangement, and is why the USAF has strenuously resisted taking control of the drone mission until recently.
  
• In this light, sending these drone jockeys to a very expensive year of UPT is an attempt to ease the cultural transition.
  

However, culture aside, is it the best training?

Drone Pilots Today

I suspect it isn't. Here's why. The assumption that combat with drones is going to be the same as combat without them is flawed. It's going to be VERY different. So far, it's hard to see that. Most engagements today involve:

• a drone flying leisurely over a village in Pakistan controlled by a pilot at a terminal in Las Vegas/Nellis,
  
• waiting for five or more armed men to assemble in a single house (which is a terrorist "signature" that green lights authorization to eliminate the threat), and
  
• then pushing a button and holding a cursor over the house until it disappears.
  

That's not going to last long.

Drone Combat

How does the addition of drones change the nature of combat/conflict? Why? The tech is moving too fast. Here are some of the characteristics we'll see in the near future:

• Swarms. The cost and size of drones will shrink. Nearly everyone will have access to drone tech (autopilots already cost less than $30). Further, the software to enable drones to employ swarm behavior will improve. So, don't think in terms of a single drone. Think in terms of a single person controlling hundreds and thousands.
  
• Intelligence. Drones will be smarter than they are today. The average commercial chip passed the level of insect intelligence a little less than a decade ago (which "magically" resulted in an explosion of drone/bot tech). Chips will cross rat intelligence in 2018 or so. Think in terms of each drone being smart enough to follow tactical instructions.
  
• Dynamism. The combination of massive swarms with individual elements being highly intelligent puts combat on an entirely new level. It requires a warrior that can provide tactical guidance and situational awareness in real time at a level that is beyond current training paradigms.
  

Training Drone Bonjwas

Based on the above requirements, the best training for drones (in the air and on land) isn't real world training, it's tactical games (not first person shooters). Think in terms of the classic military scifi book, "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. Of the games currently on the market, the best example of the type of expertise required is Blizzard's StarCraft, a scifi tactical management game that has amazing multiplayer tactical balance/dynamism. The game is extremely popular worldwide, but in South Korea, it has reached cult status. The best players, called Bonjwas, are treated like rock stars, and for good reason:

• Training of hand/eye/mind. Speeds of up to 400 keyboard mouse (macro/micro) tactical commands per minute have been attained. Think about that for a second. That's nearly 7 commands a second.
  
• Fight multi-player combat simulations for 10-12 hours a day. They live the game for a decade and then burn out. Mind vs. mind competition continously.
  
• To become a bonjwa, you have to defeat millions of opponents to reach the tournament rank, and then dominate the tournament rank for many years. The ranking system/ladder that farms new talent is global (Korea, China, SEA, North America, and Europe), huge (millions of players), and continuous (24x7x365).
  

Currently, the best Starcraft bonjwa in the world is Flash. Here's his ELO rating.
Nearly all of the above would likely apply to cyber warfare too.

Posted by John Robb on Wednesday, 21 December 2011 at 09:26 AM | Permalink

[Ed Jewett]

"Nearly all of the above would likely apply to cyber warfare too."

A comment in the above link:

"... The world may be saved by Coca-Cola. You see, Coca-Cola absolutely destroys circuit boards. It eats the legs right off of chips. It was utterly lethal to electronics and this was back in the through-hole, 1/4-watt resistor days. It's got to be 2^2 or 4X, as lethal now. ..."

[Ed Jewett]

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America's Drone Wars in Africa: A Constellation of Secret Airstrips and Drone Bases


by Michel Chossudovsky

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[TD="colspan: 2, align: left"]Global Research, December 22, 2011
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"For the second time in two weeks, American authorities lost contact with a drone aircraft, this time resulting in a fiery crash in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. ... "
In 2009, The Pentagon established an agreement with the Seychelles government to establish a drone base within proximity of the country's civilian airport. The base is operated by the US Air Force.

The Seychelles islands with a population of 85,000 inhabitants are strategically located in the Indian Ocean. They are close to the U.S. combined Navy and Air Force base in Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago, from which major military operations are conducted. Diego Garcia is also a major center of the military intelligence establishment.

The Seychelles are also directly opposite Somalia and its capital Mogadishu. See Map. below.



According to the Washington Post, the US Air Force operates only "a handful" of MQ-9 Reapers out of its base in the Seychelles. Bear in mind that these are very sophisticated UAV. Officially they are said to be involved in the survellance and prevention of acts of piracy off the East African coastline. In actual fact, they are involved in surveillance activities in support of US military and intelligence operations in East Africa.

More specifically, the UAVs are involved in military surveillance in Somalia, where the US is engaged in "a war of stealth", which is rapidly developing into a theater war following the influx and deployment of allied Kenyan troops.

Reports confirm that "the base in the Seychelles is part of a constellation of drone bases that the U.S. government has expanded in the region" [officially] to monitor or attack al-Qaeda affiliates," namely as part of a counter-terrorism mandate, "to make the world safer for Africans."

In recent years, the US Air Force in liaison with the CIA, has established drone bases in Ethiopia and Djibouti. These initaitives are ccordinated with Africa Command (AFRICOM):

"The Air Force has been secretly flying armed Reaper drones on counterterrorism missions from a remote civilian airport in southern Ethi*o*pia as part of a rapidly expanding U.S.-led proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, U.S. military officials said.
The Air Force has invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, Ethi*o*pia, where it has built a small annex to house a fleet of drones that can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs. The Reapers began flying missions earlier this year over neighboring Somalia, where the United States and its allies in the region have been targeting al-Shabab, a militant Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda.
....As a result, the United States has relied on lethal drone attacks, a burgeoning CIA presence in Mogadishu and small-scale missions carried out by U.S. Special Forces. In addition, the United States has increased its funding for and training of African peacekeeping forces in Somalia that fight al-Shabab.
The Washington Post reported last month that the Obama administration is building a constellation of secret drone bases in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including one site in Ethi*o*pia. The location of the Ethio*pian base and the fact that it became operational this year, however, have not been previously disclosed. Some bases in the region also have been used to carry out operations against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.
The Air Force confirmed Thursday that drone operations are underway at the Arba Minch airport. Master Sgt. James Fisher, a spokesman for the 17th Air Force, which oversees operations in Africa, said that an unspecified number of Air Force personnel *are working at the Ethio*pian airfield "to provide operation and technical support for our security assistance programs."
The Arba Minch airport expansion is still in progress but the Air Force deployed the Reapers there earlier this year, Fisher said. He said the drone flights "will continue as long as the government of Ethi*o*pia welcomes our cooperation on these varied security programs."
Last month, the Ethio*pian Foreign Ministry denied the presence of U.S. drones in the country. On Thursday, a spokesman for the Ethio*pian embassy in Washington repeated that assertion.
"That's the government's position," said Tesfaye Yilma, the head of public diplomacy for the embassy. "We don't entertain foreign military bases in Ethi*o*pia."
But U.S. military personnel and contractors have become increasingly visible in recent months in Arba Minch, a city of about 70,000 people in southern Ethi*o*pia. Arba Minch means "40 springs" in Amharic, the national language.
Travelers who have passed through the Arba Minch airport on the occasional civilian flights that land there said the U.S. military has erected a small compound on the tarmac, next to the terminal.
The compound is about half an acre in size and is surrounded by high fences, security screens and lights on extended poles. The U.S. military personnel and contractors eat at a cafe in the passenger terminal, where they are served American-style food, according to travelers who have been there.
Arba Minch is located about 300 miles south of Addis Ababa and about 600 miles west of the Somali border. Standard models of the Reaper have a range of about 1,150 miles, according to the Air Force.
The MQ-9 Reaper, known as a "hunter killer," is manufactured by General Atomics and is an advanced version of the Predator, the most common armed drone in the Air Force's fleet.
Ethi*o*pia is a longtime U.S. ally in the fight against al-Shabab, the militant group that has fomented instability in war-torn Somalia and launched attacks in Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere in the region.
The Ethio*pian military invaded Somalia in 2006 in an attempt to wipe out a related Islamist movement that was taking over the country, but withdrew three years later after it was unable to contain an insurgency.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nati...print.html

According to a report cited by the Washington Post, the CIA is also "building a secret airstrip somewhere in the Arabian subcontinent in order to carry out drone missions against al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. officials say the group, based in Yemen, is al-Qaida's most active branch, and is responsible for several attempted attacks on U.S. targets....The US military is also believed to have used the unmanned drone aircraft to carry out missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya."

The drones are allegedly used for "humanitarian purposes" as well as part of the "Global War on Terrorism", "to go after" Al Qaeda affiliated paramilitary. Ironically, the evidence amply confirms that in Libya, Syria and Somalia, these Al Qaeda groups are supported covertly by Western intelligence. In Libya and Syria Al Qaeda constitutes "NATO's foot soldiers" supported directly by the Atlantic Alliance.

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[Peter Lemkin]

]Drones: A deeply unsettling future
The rapid expansion of a drone arms race has emerged both domestically and abroad, leaving everyone vulnerable.

Trevor Timm Last Modified: 07 Dec 2011 11:54

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San Francisco, California - On Sunday, Iran claimed to have taken down a US drone in Iranian airspace - not by shooting it out the sky, but with its cyber warfare team.

Reports confirm that the US believes Iran is now in possession of "one of the more sensitive surveillance platforms in the CIA's fleet", but deny Iran's involvement. Of course, Iran's claim of overtaking the drone with its cyber warfare team should be tempered with a serious dose of scepticism, as cyber security experts say the facts may not add up. But this is just the latest story in a series of incidents that raises worrying questions about security problems caused by drones. And given the coming proliferation of drone technology both domestically and abroad, this should be a concern to citizens all over the world.
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Two years ago the Wall Street Journal reported Iran-funded militants in Iraq were able to hack into drones' live-video feeds with "$26 off-the-shelf software". In another unnerving incident, Wired reported in October that a fleet of the Air Force's drones was infected with a computer virus that captured all of drones' key strokes. Technicians continually deleted the virus to no avail. How did the drones get infected? The military is "not quite sure". Worse, the Air Force's cyber security team didn't even know about the virus until they read about it in Wired.
Wired reported in a separate story that an upcoming Congressional report will detail how hackers broke into the US satellite system. With one satellite, hackers "achieved all steps required to command" it, "but never actually exercised control".
Last summer, a drone caused a scene in the nation's capital, when, as New York Times wrote, "fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington's restricted airspace". A similar incident took place in Afghanistan where military planes had to shoot down a "runaway drone" when pilots lost control.
The US, of course, leads the world in drone use for both surveillance and combat missions. Attacks are carried out in Pakistan every four days on average. Many times, the US isn't even sure exactly who they are killing. Despite the fact that the location of vast majority of drone bases are classified, journalist Nick Turse pieced together a startling picture of the massive US fleet. He determined that the US has at least 60 drone bases operated by either the US military or the CIA around the world, and "most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous - until now".
But drone use is not just relegated to US military. Drone manufacturers already command a $94bn market, according to some estimates, and the drone arms race is in full swing. As the Washington Post reported, the constant buzz of drones and threats of attack now dominates the lives of civilians in Gaza. And Turkey plans to have Predator drones in operation by June 2012.
Meanwhile, Chinese contractors unveiled 25 types of unmanned aircraft last year. In all, at least 50 countries now have some sort of unmanned aerial vehicles, and the New York Times reports that "the number is rising every month". That number also includes Iran, which is seeking to upgrade its fleet. Even the Libyan rebels had their own surveillance drone - provided to them by Canadian defence contractors - before they were in full control of their own country.
The technology itself is also developing at an alarmingly rapid pace. The New York Times reports that researchers in the US are working on "shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects", along with oversized drones that can capture video of an entire city. There are birdlike drones, underwater drones, drones within drones, facial recognition drones, and perhaps most terrifying, completely autonomous drones - currently being tested in Georgia - which will require no human control at all.
As Micah Zenko, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me last month, "It's a very impressive and responsive tool that should be used sparingly. Even if we're responsible now, we might not be forever."
But in the US, drones will become yet another way authorities can compromise the privacy of ordinary citizens, as the FAA plans to propose new rules for their domestic flight. As Newsweekreported, police forces and border patrols in the US are buying the technology from defence contractors, and one has already been spotted flying over Houston. Police departments are already using GPS and cell phone tracking without warrants, this will another powerful surveillance weapon in their arsenal. As privacy advocates warn, "drones can easily be equipped with facial recognition cameras, infrared cameras, or open Wi-Fi sniffers". And while these drones will be used for many surveillance purposes (a scary thought in and of itself), contractors admit they are equipped to carry weapons, such as Tasers.
Whether they are being used for surveillance or all-out combat, drones will soon pose serious risks for all of the world's citizens. They can offer governments, police departments, or private citizens unprecedented capabilities for spying, and given their security vulnerabilities, the potential consequences could be endless.
Trevor Timm is an activist and blogger at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He specialises in free speech issues and government transparency.

[Peter Lemkin]

Robot wars What is the role of drones and robots in wars and how will they shape the future of the US military?

Last Modified: 27 Dec 2011 14:31

PLEASE GO HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO ON THIS AT AL JAZEERA!!!

Over the past decade, the US military has shifted the way it fights its wars, deploying more unmanned systems in the battlefield than ever before.
Today there are more than 7,000 drones and 12,000 ground robots in use by all branches of the military.

These systems mean less American deaths and also less political risk for the US when it takes acts of lethal force often outside of official war zones.

But US lethal drone strikes in countries like Pakistan have brought up serious questions about the legal and political implications of using these systems.

[Ed Jewett]

Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones



DEC 30 2011, 9:49 AM ET [URL="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/unaccountable-killing-machines-the-true-cost-of-us-drones/250661/?google_editors_picks=true#disqus_thread"]73
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Officials often portray the global expansion of deadly drone strikes as an unequivocal success. But are we really accounting for all the consequences?

Reuters

A series of articles have been published recently about the extent and, in some cases, failures of the drone program so famously expanded under President Obama's watch. The first, a blockbuster article by theWashington Post's Greg Miller, brings to light some truly worrying aspects of a policy that seems to have taken on a life of its own (emphasis mine):

In Yemen, for instance, the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Commandpursue the same adversary with nearly identical aircraft. But they alternate taking the lead on strikes to exploit their separate authorities, and they maintain separate kill lists that overlap but don't match. CIA and military strikes this fall killed three U.S. citizens, two of whom were suspected al-Qaeda operatives...

Obama himself was "oddly passive in this world," the former official said, tending to defer on drone policy to senior aides whose instincts often dovetailed with the institutional agendas of the CIA and JSOC.

In other words, Jaffe is describing a system in which a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we're assured are bad and who are sometimes U.S. citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process.

The upside to this system of drones, administration officials insist, is that al Qaeda has been crippled, and that it has created an intense strain on the ability of terrorists to carry out plots. And this is undoubtedly true -- the drone war has achieved its immediate purpose of thwacking bad people. But do we really understand the true cost of this form of warfare?

It is practically impossible for anyone to exercise proper oversight over the program

In the countries where the drone system is most active -- Pakistan and Yemen -- relations with local governments and communities are awful, and perceptions of the United States could barely be any worse. There is agreement seemingly only on the need for long distance killing, and even then -- especially in Pakistan -- there is a great deal of contention.

In fact, one could argue that the severe degradation of relations with Pakistan, which are driven to a large degree by popular anger over drone strikes (as well as a parallel perception among some Pakistani elites that the U.S. disregards Pakistani sovereignty at will), is driving the current U.S. push to ship supplies and, eventually, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, through Uzbekistan. While overall it might seem like a good trade to policymakers, engaging with the regime in Tashkent in this way nevertheless carries substantial reputational and moral costs, to say nothing of long term consequences we cannot predict.

In Yemen, the insistence on drone strikes in the absence of any broader (and more intensive) political engagement with the opposition political movements has created the mass perception that the U.S. is intimately tied to the oppression of the Yemeni people -- a dangerous social meme that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula certainly tries to coopt for its own advancement. But focusing on AQAP like that opens the same trap that cripples U.S. policy in the country: the assumption that terrorism is the only consequence that matters. On a more practical level, the U.S. negligence of Yemeni politics in its pursuit of terrorists is making it more likely, not less, that the eventual Shah-like fall of President Saleh will result in a hostile or indifferent power in Sana'a -- the opposite of what the current CT policy there requires.

Beyond the political consequences, the drone program also imposes severe bureaucratic costs. Within the U.S. Intelligence Community, various lethal targeting programs are heavily classified, compartmented, and SAPed -- meaning, they are mostly closed off from each other. This is one reason why the CIA and JSOC maintain separate, non-overlapping kill lists in Yemen. It also means it is practically impossible for anyone, in any position including the top of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to exercise proper oversight over the program. In other words, we have created an unaccountable killing machine operating at an industrial scale, to borrow CNAS President John Nagl's phrasing.

This sloppiness with life and death decisions is a substantial moral failing, and should be a huge scandal for President Obama

Within the U.S. government bureaucracy this shift in priority has distorted staffing choices and led to a momentum that will be difficult to ever stop. When Itestified about Intelligence contracting before the U.S. Senate earlier this year, I noted the problems with how these programs get staffed: often without regard to specific skill sets, and usually under the assumption that more staff means better results. Both assumptions lead to muddled results. In some targeting programs, staffers have review quotas -- that is, they must review a certain number of possible targets per given length of time. Because they are contractors, their continued employment depends on their ability to satisfy the stated performance metrics. So they have a financial incentive to make life-or-death decisions about possible kill targets just to stay employed. This should be an intolerable situation, but because the system lacks transparency or outside review it is almost impossible to monitor or alter.

Furthermore, the Intelligence Community (IC) as a whole has been reoriented to support the killing machine. While that isn't of itself a bad thing, we should be asking very probing questions about whether it is necessary and if it is accomplishing the goals it should. The IC already struggles with making useful predictive analysis (i.e. understanding threats to the country and thinking of ways to respond to them). By focusing the IC so strongly on the identification of individuals to kill, the drones program is distorting the collection and analysis priorities of the IC, and in a very real way restricting the resources available to responding to larger economic, military, and nuclear threats. Bureaucracy becomes its own force after a while, and the possibility of ever reassigning these analysts and decision makers becomes less and less realistic the longer the program exists.

A final, important consequence of the dramatic expansion of the drone program is the continued degradation of the IC's Human Intelligence capabilities and the increasing reliance on liaising with "local partners." In both Pakistan and Yemen this has led to severe consequences both for our reputation and for our relations with each government. In Afghanistan, poor HUMINT tradecraft has led to a lot ofunnecessary deaths because we relied on sketchy local sources instead of doing the hard work to develop thorough human intelligence. The result, way too often, is firing blind based on "pattern of life" indicators without direct confirmation that the targets are, in fact, who we think they are -- killing innocent people in the process. In Pakistan, the drones program has become so contentious that it's inspired death squads that summarily execute people they suspect of participating in the targetting process. And in Yemen, we are nowslowly realizing that our "local partners" are really anything but, and we face the very uncomfortable possibility of being used as pawns to violently resolve conflicts that have nothing to do with us.

This sloppiness with life and death decisions is a substantial moral failing, and should be a huge scandal for President Obama. But, he has decided to both distance himself from it while also taking credit for its successes, even as it focuses on ever less important and marginal figures within the terrorist milieu.

The enormous expansion of drone operations has been a success in the narrowest sense of killing some bad guys. But it has come at an enormous cost: to our reputation, to our morals, to our relationship and status with countries we need to work with to contain and defuse terrorism, and in the lives of the many innocent people we've killed through either sloppiness or ignorance. Rather than asking the difficult questions of whether the success of the drone program has been worth it, though, President Obama has chosen instead to amplify its operations and thus claim victory in killing bad guys, even while he distances himself from the knowledge and personal responsibility for who these dead people are and what crimes they may have committed.

It is an absolute scandal. We owe ourselves better questions and more accountability of the drones we use to wantonly kill people around the planet.

[Ed Jewett]

US Civilians Are Now Helping Decide Who To Kill With Military Drones

Robert Johnson | Dec. 30, 2011, 8:02 PM | 11,134 | [/url][url=http://www.businessinsider.com/us-civilians-are-now-helping-decide-who-to-kill-with-military-drones-2011-12#comments]61

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Iran Declares It Is Ready To Expand Military Ties With Iraq

Iran Calls US Attempt To Blame It For 9/11 A 'Clumsy-Scenario'

The Good News About China's New Ballistic Missile Subs Is That They're Ridiculously Loud And Easy To Track

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President Obama's enormous expansion of the U.S. drone program may be pushing too fast for military staffing to keep up.David S. Cloud of The Los Angeles Times reports the military is now forced to rely on a string of civilian contractors placed at all levels along the "kill chain." These are the people who analyze incoming drone video and decide when to fire Hellfire missiles.
The practice is not new.
According to Cloud, an American civilian played a "central" role in the Predator attack that accidentally killed 15 Afghans in 2010, information that "surprised" the investigating Army officer.
Manning the drone fleet is a mounting issue in the Air Force.
It takes more staff to fly a drone than an F-15, and with more drones than ever in the air, non-government employees are increasingly employed to analyze video, and keep the UAVs in the air.
The Air Force says it takes 168 people to fly a Predator for 24 hours, and 300 people to keep a Global Hawk aloft for the same time.
The Air Force owns 230 Reapers, Predators, and Global Hawks flying 50 of them at any given time.
But it's the 730 more drones being added to the fleet over the next 10 years that may explain why military personnel are now being asked to fly four drones at once.
Announced last week and received with a wealth of concerns, the four drone per pilot program raises further concerns about an already legally muddled program.
Despite public resistance, legal questions, and additional pilot stress, military officials in the U.S. and Britain are already claiming to see "great promise" with the four drone program.
Unless the military drastically increases its recruiting efforts, with the defense cuts a huge improbability, there is likely to be an increasing number of civilians, working for profitable corporations, helping make decisions on when to fire U.S. weapons.
While the Air Force tries to maintain certain standards within its ranks, attempting to root out those with questionable legal backgrounds, and poor "moral standing," every corporation within the kill chain is guided by its own hiring practices.



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