
CIA used 'illegal, inaccurate code to target kill drones' - mcantelon
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/
======
rdtsc
> "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
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
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.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_American commanders had little problem dealing with enemy noncombatants on
the battlefield._

Did you mean combatants? Typically noncombatants would refer to medical
personnel, chaplains, etc. It'd be interesting to know if people like this
were routinely tried and executed.

~~~
gaius
No, a chaplain in a military uniform is a combatant as far as the Geneva
Convention is concerned, and must be treated as a POW.

The term more recently used was "unlawful combatant".

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_Though the Geneva Conventions do not state whether chaplains may bear arms,
they specify (Protocol I, 8 June 1977, Art 43.2) that chaplains are
noncombatants. In recent years both the UK and US have required chaplains, but
not medical personnel, to be unarmed. Other nations, notably Norway, Denmark
and Sweden, make it an issue of individual conscience. Captured chaplains are
not considered Prisoners of War (Third Convention, 12 August 1949, Chapter IV
Art 33) and must be returned to their home nation unless retained to minister
to prisoners of war._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain#Military>

~~~
gaius
I stand corrected :-)

But the point still stands - a chaplain in uniform on the battlefield wouldn't
be tried and executed at a drumhead.

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krschultz
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
> 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.

~~~
templaedhel
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.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Look up "circular error probable" (CEP). When they say "accurate to x meters",
they might well mean that 50% of munitions land in an x meter circle --- the
other 50%? anywhere (maybe gaussian distro). So all this talk of x meter
accuracy is quite misleading.

~~~
yummyfajitas
That may be true, but (assuming a normal distribution [1]) that would also
imply that 99% of shots land within 2.6x meters (assuming I didn't mess up my
arithmetic).

Whoever is doing the aiming gets a big red circle that encloses the margin of
error. If you are off by 5 meters, that big red circle is in the wrong place.
The pilot expects a 1% chance of error, in reality it might be 4% (i.e., 4x as
many screwups).

[1] Of course it isn't a normal distribution, but this only changes the
programming details.

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wheaties
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.

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dekz
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.

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templaedhel
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.

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

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

