Drone Strikes Based on MetadataA preview:
"The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes –
an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people."
...
"One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.
Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers.
'They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,
' the former drone operator says.
'That’s how they confuse us.
'"As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike.
"...
"The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that its operations kill terrorists with the utmost precision.
In his speech at the National Defense University last May, President Obama declared that
'before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.
' He added that,
'by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.
'But the increased reliance on phone tracking and other fallible surveillance tactics suggests that the opposite is true." Really interesting stuff here (large article), I just saw a report about this today on
Democracy Now! Mr. Greenwald pointed out that
"they aren't targeting the (suspected) terrorists, they are targeting wherever their cell phone is ... these strikes are based on suspicion of a future crime, not yet committed
".
Mr. Scahill pointed out that when innocent people are killed, that undermines our security.
There was a 16 year old American Citizen killed by drone strike over in Yemen, though that's possibly unrelated.
(not afforded a trial by jury).
New website By Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/