6 ms·

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

94 points by mcantelon 16y ago

krschultz 16y 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 16y 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.
  - templaedhel 16y 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.
    - JabavuAdams 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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.
- rhtml 16y 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 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.
rdtsc 16y 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.
- pierre_M 16y ago
  The linguistics of the term "assassination" here is interesting. In the old days, we'd just bomb whatever place we thought the bad guys were hiding, and anti-war types complained about the civilian casualties. So we got better and better at avoiding civilian casualties, and now we can pick off the specific targets we know we want. But then anti-war types call it "assassination" and it actually winds up sounding even worse. Of course when we do actually capture them instead of killing them, anti-war types will complain about the prisons we hold them in. Put 'em in a military prison and it's inhumane, put 'em in a civilian prison and that's inhumane too. As soon as we get around to trying them, they'll mount a legal challenge that the terms of the trial are unlawful, causing the trial to be abandoned while we think up a new legal framework under which to try them... and then they'll complain we're holding them for so long without a trial. What I'm trying to say is that instead of complaining about the targeted killing of specific bad guys in foreign countries that we're not at war with, perhaps you should be grateful that we're not declaring war on the country just so we can bomb the crap out of it.
- patio11 16y 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.
templaedhel 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
I don't really care if it's illegal. But inaccurate? That's not good.
dekz 16y 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 16y ago
That's the main problem with American foreign policy. Win-Lose proposition is not scalable in globalized internet world.

94 points by mcantelon 16y 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 16y 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.
- templaedhel 16y 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.
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
rhtml 16y 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 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.

rdtsc 16y 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.

pierre_M 16y ago
The linguistics of the term "assassination" here is interesting. In the old days, we'd just bomb whatever place we thought the bad guys were hiding, and anti-war types complained about the civilian casualties. So we got better and better at avoiding civilian casualties, and now we can pick off the specific targets we know we want. But then anti-war types call it "assassination" and it actually winds up sounding even worse. Of course when we do actually capture them instead of killing them, anti-war types will complain about the prisons we hold them in. Put 'em in a military prison and it's inhumane, put 'em in a civilian prison and that's inhumane too. As soon as we get around to trying them, they'll mount a legal challenge that the terms of the trial are unlawful, causing the trial to be abandoned while we think up a new legal framework under which to try them... and then they'll complain we're holding them for so long without a trial. What I'm trying to say is that instead of complaining about the targeted killing of specific bad guys in foreign countries that we're not at war with, perhaps you should be grateful that we're not declaring war on the country just so we can bomb the crap out of it.
patio11 16y 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.

templaedhel 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago

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

dekz 16y 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 16y ago

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