> Since June 2013, article after article about the NSA has been illustrated with a single image supplied by the agency, a photograph of its Fort Meade headquarters that appears to date from the 1970s.
> The photographs below – which are being published for the first time – show three of the largest agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. The scale of their operations was hidden from the public until August 2013, when their classified budget requests were revealed in documents provided by Snowden. Three months later, I rented a helicopter and shot nighttime images of the NSA’s headquarters. I did the same with the NRO, which designs, builds and operates America’s spy satellites, and with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which maps and analyzes imagery, connecting geographic information to other surveillance data. The Central Intelligence Agency – the largest member of the intelligence community – denied repeated requests for permission to take aerial photos of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
> My intention is to expand the visual vocabulary we use to “see” the U.S. intelligence community.
Does anyone know how they are being funded? It is all well and good claiming they want more journalistic integrity than their old haunts, but I would like a word or two on how they can maintain impartiality and feed their families.
They haven't really talked about funding publicly, but we do know that Pierre Omidyar is involved (there've been stories about him funding them before [1], and on the about page of this site he is listed as "Publisher" for First Look Media [2]).
His net worth is huge ($8.5b as of September 2013, according to Forbes [3]), so he can give them plenty of initial funding, and he's brought in Michael Rosen as CRO, who was previously head of online and mobile sales for AT&T Adworks [4], so advertising seems a very likely answer to the question of how they will make money in the future.
OT, but it's interesting to note that two of the most promising new media startups - Re/Code and The Intercept seem to have very similar design/branding vocabulary. Both use nearly the same shade of red along with black and white as their primary colours.
Everybody's (rightfully) complaining about mass surveillance and what do apparently all web devs do (the people who actually understand tech and know what all this means)? They include endless scripts and background requests (which of course track everybody) to CDNs and whatnot in every single website, instead of simply hosting their stuff themselves and using http://piwik.org/ to get their user stats.
Someone on HN recently commented about how they'd use customer details (people buying games) and check them out on Facebook. I suggested it was a bit creepy. Other people were surprised I thought it was creepy and thought it was normal behaviour.
I would link but search is unusably broken on mobile.
This is a beautifully designed site. I'm happy that it works as well as it does on my phone. I'm very glad to see more of the minimal design elements like qz and less of the constant scrolling ... I mean 'continuous' scrolling.
Also, I'm glad this content has arrived...
(edit: not so impressed by the desktop version of the site, but I guess I can make it beautiful by resizing my browser)
If you're turned off by the length of the article, read it. It's worth it. This post --itself pretty damn long-- is basically pulling out the most appalling pieces regarding Greenwald's JSOC source and the source's statements regarding the drone program.
Also, make sure you don't say No Such Agency or type their acronym. Wouldn't want the article to get censored and fall off the front page. Moving on...
>According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the [No Such Agency], the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
What could possibly go wrong? What might the enemy do upon figuring this out? Well, it's clear that our own operatives understood the problem:
>One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the [No Such Agency]’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.
So... why are we still doing it? Is there a way that this might become at least a bit more reliable?
>What’s more, he adds, the [No Such Agency] often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a SIM card, rather than the actual content of the calls. Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata.
You've got to be shitting me. The source continues later in the article:
>The former JSOC drone operator estimates that the overwhelming majority of high-value target operations he worked on in Afghanistan relied on signals intelligence, known as SIGINT, based on the [No Such Agency]’s phone-tracking technology.
>“Everything they turned into a kinetic strike or a night raid was almost 90 percent that,” he says. “You could tell, because you’d go back to the mission reports and it will say ‘this mission was triggered by SIGINT,’ which means it was triggered by a geolocation cell.”
And the source does at least concede that the [No Such Agency] builds a matrix of characteristics to try and pin down a target:
>In fact, as the former JSOC drone operator recounts, tracking people by metadata and then killing them by SIM card is inherently flawed. The [No Such Agency] “will develop a pattern,” he says, “where they understand that this is what this person’s voice sounds like, this is who his friends are, this is who his commander is, this is who his subordinates are. And they put them into a matrix. But it’s not always correct. There’s a lot of human error in that.”
I'm sure this is what the president meant by "near-certainty" of a target's validity:
>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.”
The highest standard we can set:
>As of May 2013, according to the former drone operator, President Obama had cleared 16 people in Yemen and five in Somalia for targeting in strikes. Before a strike is green-lit, he says, there must be at least two sources of intelligence. The problem is that both of those sources often involve [No Such Agency]-supplied data, rather than human intelligence (HUMINT).
A high standard indeed. But don't worry! The [No Such Agency] insists that HUMINT is involved. After the fact:
>Hayden felt free, however, to note the role that human intelligence plays after a deadly strike occurs. “After any use of targeted lethal force, when there are indications that civilian deaths may have occurred, intelligence analysts draw on a large body of information – including human intelligence, signals intelligence, media reports, and surveillance footage – to help us make informed determinations about whether civilians were in fact killed or injured.”
==============================================
There's also some nice tidbits about the technical manner in which this is pulled off. The GILGAMESH program is described:
>As the former JSOC drone operator describes – and as classified documents obtained from Snowden confirm – the [No Such Agency] doesn’t just locate the cell phones of terror suspects by intercepting communications from cell phone towers and Internet service providers. The agency also equips drones and other aircraft with devices known as “virtual base-tower transceivers” – creating, in effect, a fake cell phone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the [No Such Agency]’s receiver without their knowledge.
As well as the SHENANIGANS program:
>In addition to the GILGAMESH system used by JSOC, the CIA uses a similar [No Such Agency] platform known as SHENANIGANS. The operation – previously undisclosed – utilizes a pod on aircraft that vacuums up massive amounts of data from any wireless routers, computers, smart phones or other electronic devices that are within range.
>VICTORYDANCE, he [different operator from an [No Such Agency] doc, not the JSOC source] adds, “mapped the Wi-Fi fingerprint of nearly every major town in Yemen.”
>VICTORYDANCE, he [different operator from an [No Such Agency] doc, not the JSOC source] adds, “mapped the Wi-Fi fingerprint of nearly every major town in Yemen.”
From 4 miles in the air (so high you can't see the drone), works while the drone is "circling" (so far more accurate due to transit and length of sniffing), is intentionally used for "fingerprinting" entire cities (who belongs here? what devices moved? where did they go?) without any suspicion of individual wrongdoing, and unlike google, IT DOESN'T JUST TARGET WAPs.
Think about it. They ingest every handset, every wifi device, every BSSID, ESSID, even MACs ARPing over the air. For entire cities.
Now think ten years ahead, when solar-powered persistent drones can stay up over a city 24/7, constantly circling, sniffing, and relaying the movements of UUIDs from place to place around the world. Drones fly just as well in US airspace as Yemeni airspace.
This is what Snowden warned us about. "Papers, please" is out of date: they're no longer asking.
Or stand near anyone conspiring to blow anything up, or buy a used phone from someone conspiring to blow anything up... did you even read the article? 283+ civilian casualties to date, with more collateral damage than any other form of interdiction we've tried so far.
You must have missed the 'fix' part of 'find, fix, & finish'. They have real-time video feeds of the targets right up until pushing the button (aka 'finishing').
And, yes, I say it is generally not a good idea not to associate with terrorists or go into a room with them and throw your SIM card into a pile to be mixed. And, if you suddenly find out that your phone number has changed for no explicable reason, it's probably best to ditch the SIM card and buy a new one.
You must have missed (or willfully ignore) the part where it says this mode of interdiction has more civilian casualties than any other we have tried. So just maybe it isn't the best way to deal with the threat at hand.
The particular story will undoubtedly get accusations of interfering with military operations and "making us less safe" or even "aiding terrorism", so it's a razor-sharp balance walk to decide to publish it.
It definitely seems sufficiently ineffective, evil and inhumane to warrant publishing in my opinion.
My guess - NYT and WP will not publish anything about the jsoc story.
Mmmh - reaches out to third party websites (unavoidibly with referers). And to one of the worst offenders of internet privacy. I think its a bit hypocritical to lament over state sponsored spying but they wish to spy on their users too.
When raising children I learned a valuable lesson: you don't educate by telling them. You educate by living up to what you tell them.
Don't get me wrong: I am exited as the next person about this experiment. I laud them for their effort. But I expected better.
> Since June 2013, article after article about the NSA has been illustrated with a single image supplied by the agency, a photograph of its Fort Meade headquarters that appears to date from the 1970s.
> The photographs below – which are being published for the first time – show three of the largest agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. The scale of their operations was hidden from the public until August 2013, when their classified budget requests were revealed in documents provided by Snowden. Three months later, I rented a helicopter and shot nighttime images of the NSA’s headquarters. I did the same with the NRO, which designs, builds and operates America’s spy satellites, and with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which maps and analyzes imagery, connecting geographic information to other surveillance data. The Central Intelligence Agency – the largest member of the intelligence community – denied repeated requests for permission to take aerial photos of its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
> My intention is to expand the visual vocabulary we use to “see” the U.S. intelligence community.