Greenwalds and drones

In an old, whitewashed motel, where folklore has it studio executives once brought their secretaries for "lunch," Robert Greenwald, a mercurial man trailed by insults and death threats, leads a small band of filmmakers dedicated to unnerving political and corporate powers with righteous anger and quick-cut editing.

Greenwald embodies the populism of George Bailey and the sly delight of a spy handed a secret dossier. His Brave New Films has skewered Wal-Mart, Fox News (Bill O'Reilly despises him) and the conservative politics of billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Greenwald's narratives have criticized the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and his latest documentary condemns the Obama administration's drone program for killing civilians in Pakistan and other countries in a misguided strategy to combat terror.

Much of the American public is unaware of what's going on, "and sadly there's a bipartisan national security state dedicated to making sure we don't find out," said Greenwald. "If you're losing your house or you don't have a job or you're trying to get your kid through school, the global challenges are generally the ones you don't feel equipped to take on.... That's one of the pleasures and joys of this work, to get up every day and work on telling these stories."

Brave New Films is a muckraking voice in a digital age of nano-second consumption. The company produces videos and graphics, time-releasing them on the Internet while also stitching them into full-length documentaries. This guerrilla style is aimed at creating buzz in progressive circles that at times ripples into the mainstream. The trick, said Greenwald, is staying ahead of the political curve to influence national discourse over anxieties as varied as healthcare,Wall Street and prisons for profit.

"Greenwald's a major advocacy figure on the left," said Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University's School of Communication. "Brave New Films is not pretending to be nuanced, and it's not pretending to make great art … Greenwald's intent is to engage people to take some kind of action. He's relentlessly experimental."

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.

According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, 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.

The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

His account is bolstered by top-secret NSA documents previously provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is also supported by a former drone sensor operator with the U.S. Air Force, Brandon Bryant, who has become an outspoken critic of the lethal operations in which he was directly involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.

While it’s not news that the NSA provides the CIA and JSOC with electronic surveillance information based off of cell phone metadata for use in drone strike targeting, the Intercept’s story provides us with important new details about what kinds of technologies the spies are using to collect and process this intelligence. The report also shows that, contrary to public officials’ promises, the drone program uses unreliable targeting information, largely derived from algorithmic analysis of large data pools. Contrary to some critics, that information is more useful to Americans than it is to the people the US government calls our enemies, and falls squarely within the public interest.

The backlash against the report began not long after it was published. John Schindler, a professor at the US Naval War College and frequent Greenwald critic, alleges that the revelations published by First Look will “help” The Terrorists.

And how / RT @PrivateSnuffy: Right off the bat, First Look is helping Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, LeT, AFPAK Talibans etc. improve their OPSEC.

— John Schindler (@20committee) February 10, 2014

But as Special Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions and legal scholar Sarah Knuckey pointed out on Twitter this morning, it isn’t news to people in Pakistan that the US government tracks their cell phones, and uses information beaming from them as the basis for conducting drone strikes.

@csoghoian Tracking via sim has been widely known in FATA for years - civilians there often speak of it.

— Sarah Knuckey (@SarahKnuckey) February 10, 2014

Even apart from Knuckey’s uncontroversial assessment, all the information you need to know that Schindler’s claim is without merit is contained in the Scahill/Greenwald piece itself. Their story describes various anti-surveillance strategies and tactics long employed by fighters seeking to evade the US’ omnipotent eyes in the sky. Some of these tactics include changing SIM cards or using multiple phones.

The targets of US drone operations know well that JSOC and the CIA use their cell phones to target them, and long before The Intercept published today’s story, they were making operational adjustments accordingly. Exactly what kinds of technologies the spies use to track their cell phones doesn’t matter at a practical level to the fighters trying to evade US surveillance. Simply knowing their cell phones are tracked and used in targeting is sufficient, and they knew this before First Look Media was a twinkle in Pierre Omidyar’s eye. But this information is extremely important for US citizens to understand.

As we’ve long known, military surveillance technologies almost always migrate back to the domestic space, where they are eagerly applied by law enforcement agencies in the disastrous, decades-long war on drugs, as well as operations against non-violent dissidents. It's likely that the technologies used to wage the drone war overseas are already in use here at home.

Under GILGAMESH, it appears as if the three letter agencies are using IMSI catchers—devices already marketed to and deployed by domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States. These devices trick cell phones into thinking they are cell phone towers, thereby identifying phones within range and even intercepting their data.

We already know that DHS’ Customs, Border Protection agency (CBP) uses Predator drones equipped with similar cell phone sniffing technology. The FBI has been much more secretive about its use of drones, but we can safely assume the Bureau uses these tools above US airspace, in both drones and its substantial fleet of surveillance planes. The US military also flies drones above US airspace. Presumably the technology Scahill and Greenwald describe is already in relatively widespread use among federal agencies in the United States. It’s only a matter of time before police departments start using them, too, if they don't already. The same is true with respect to technologies like those used in the SHENANIGANS program, which sucks up Wi-Fi metadata, likely enabling the NSA to track IP addresses to physical locations.