Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press.
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.
The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the
technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks
of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S.
forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have
“absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on
the surveillance tactic.
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. According to the former
drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking
program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without
knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or
SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.
“Once the
bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he
says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of
course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious
and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very
shady.”
The former drone operator also says that he personally
participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was
known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.
“They
might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could have been family
members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities.”
What’s
more, he adds, the NSA 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.
“People
get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” he says. “It’s
really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people –
we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the
other end of that missile is the bad guy.”
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. The
Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which uses a conservative
methodology to track drone strikes,
estimates
that at least 273 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have been
killed by unmanned aerial assaults under the Obama administration. A
recent study conducted by a U.S. military adviser found that, during a
single year in Afghanistan – where the majority of drone strikes have
taken place – unmanned vehicles were 10 times more likely than
conventional aircraft to cause civilian casualties.
The NSA
declined to respond to questions for this article. Caitlin Hayden, a
spokesperson for the National Security Council, also refused to discuss
“the type of operational detail that, in our view, should not be
published.”
In describing the administration’s policy on targeted
killings, Hayden would not say whether strikes are ever ordered without
the use of human intelligence. She emphasized that “our assessments are
not based on a single piece of information. We gather and scrutinize
information from a variety of sources and methods before we draw
conclusions.”
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.”
The government
does not appear to apply the same standard of care in selecting whom to
target for assassination. 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 NSA’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.”
In July, the
Washington Post
relied exclusively on former senior U.S. intelligence officials and
anonymous sources to herald the NSA’s claims about its effectiveness at
geolocating terror suspects.
Within the NSA, the paper
reported, “A motto quickly caught on at Geo Cell: ‘We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em.’”
But the
Post
article included virtually no skepticism about the NSA’s claims, and no
discussion at all about how the unreliability of the agency’s targeting
methods results in the killing of innocents.
In fact, as the
former JSOC drone operator recounts, tracking people by metadata and
then killing them by SIM card is inherently flawed. The NSA “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.”
The JSOC operator’s account is supported by
another insider who was directly involved in the drone program. Brandon
Bryant spent six years as a “stick monkey” – a drone sensor operator who
controls the “eyes” of the U.S. military’s unmanned aerial vehicles. By
the time he left the Air Force in 2011, Bryant’s squadron, which
included a small crew of veteran drone operators, had been credited with
killing 1,626 “enemies” in action.
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