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Curtailing NSA surveillance undermines drone strikes
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NSA---Generic Curtailing NSA surveillance undermines drone strikesTomlinson 13 [Simon Tomlinson- reporter for the dailymail and cites leaked documents from the NSA, Oct 2013, “US drone killed Bin Laden chief after CIA intercepted his wife's email that revealed his whereabouts,” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2464192/CIA-drone-strikes-rely-heavily-NSAs-data-mining-program.html, mm] The National Security Agency has been extensively involved in the U.S. government's targeted killing program, collaborating closely with the CIA in the use of drone strikes against terrorists abroad, leaked documents have revealed. In one instance, an email sent by the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate contained clues as to her husband's whereabouts and led to a CIA drone strike that killed him in Pakistan in October 2012, the Post reported in its online edition Wednesday night. While citing documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden - the American is hiding out in Russia after being granted asylum there - the Post reported that it was withholding many details about the drone-strike missions at the request of U.S. intelligence officials. They cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security for their request, the paper reported. The documents make clear that the CIA-operated drone campaign relies heavily on the NSA's ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the newspaper said. The NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency's vast resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets, the Post reported. The documents provided by Snowden don't explain how the bin Laden associate's email was obtained or whether it was obtained through the controversial NSA programs recently made public, including its metadata collection of numbers dialed by nearly every person in the United States. Instead, the Post said its review of the documents indicates that the agency depends heavily on highly targeted network penetrations to gather information that wouldn't otherwise be trapped in surveillance nets that the NSA has set at key Internet gateways. The U.S. has never publicly acknowledged killing bin Laden associate Hassan Ghul, according to the Post. The Al Qaeda operative had been captured in 2004 and helped expose bin Laden's courier network, a key development in the effort to locate bin Laden. Ghul then spent two years in a secret CIA prison and returned to Al Qaeda after the U.S. sent him to his native Pakistan in 2006. U.S. forces killed bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout in 2011. That same year, the Treasury Department named Ghul a target of U.S. counter-terrorism sanctions after he had helped al-Qaeda re-establish logistics networks, enabling Al Qaeda to move people and money in and out of the country. The Post said an NSA document described Ghul as Al Qaeda chief of military operations and detailed a broad surveillance effort to find him. Obtained during a months-long effort to find Ghul, the email from his wife erased doubts U.S. forces had found him, the Post said. NSA data plays a major role in the WOT- curtailment hurts WOTGander 14 [Kashmira Gander- Reporter for the independent and cites Glenn Greenwald, Feb 2014, “NSA 'drone strikes based on mobile phone data',” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/nsa-drone-strikes-based-on-mobile-phone-data-9119735.html, mm] The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses electronic surveillance rather than human intelligence in lethal drone strikes, it has been reported. The new publication headed by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the news of US government surveillance in The Guardian, claims the revelations were made by a former US drone operator. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operator, who also allegedly worked for the NSA, told The Intercept that the NSA uses data and mobile-phone tracking technology to confirm the locations of targets. The JSOC is responsible with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in countries including Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. He also told the publication that tactics used by the NSA include “geolocating” a suspected terrorist via the SIM card in their phone. This information is then passed on to the CIA or US military as a basis for strikes and night raids. NSA Documents leaked by whisteblower Edward Snowden also support the reports, as well as claims by another former US Air Force drone sensor operator and anti-lethal operation spokesperson, Brandon Bryant, the publication claims. The Obama administration maintains that its operations only target terrorists. In a speech 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.” However, the former drone operator claims that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the electronic surveillance, he told reporters at The Intercept. He added that the tactic had also been used to kill terrorists and people using explosives against US forces in Afghanistan. The former drone operator said strikes are sometimes targeted at locations, despite forces not being certain that the individual in possession of a SIM card is in fact the correct person. Suspected terrorists are increasingly aware of the tactic, he said, and avoid detection by having up to 16 different SIM cards linked to their identity at a time. In other cases, family members and friends, including children, borrow mobile devices and are mistakenly targeted. Senior Taliban leaders thwart the system by mixing SIM cards in bags at meetings to confuse the NSA. The NSA also often directs drone attacks according to the activity of a SIM card rather than call content, which he said amounts to deaths being based on unreliable metadata. He called the practice “very shady”. “They might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities,” he warned. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism also estimates that at least 273 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia have been killed by unmanned aerial assaults under the Obama administration. The NSA declined to respond The Intercept. Decreasing NSA capabilities undermines drone strikes Richter, 14 Greg Richter, Freelance writer for Newsmax.com and The Clyde Fitch Report, “Latest Snowden Revelations: NSA Surveillance Key to Targeted Killings,” Newsmax, 2/9/14, http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/greenwald-snowden-nsa-targeted/2014/02/09/id/551768/ // IS "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," the article states. Without the crucial geolocation data, the article suggests it would be nearly impossible to target suspected terrorists, since the human intelligence is apparently often not that reliable. But in terms of definitively proving the targets are in fact terrorists, the abstract location data is even less reliable. "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 article continues. JSOC would be helpless "without the NSA conducting mass surveillance on an industrial level,” the story states, quoting a former Air Force drone operator named Brandon Bryant. “That is what creates those baseball cards you hear about,” featuring potential targets for drone strikes or raids.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, graduate of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism Lorenzo is also a Law graduate at University of Barcelona. “Report: NSA Snooping Plays Key Role in Drone Strikes Against Terrorists,” 10/17/13, http://mashable.com/2013/10/17/nsas-internet-surveillance-used-in-drone-strikes-program/ // IS The CIA has a secret ally in its controversial drone strikes program that kills suspect terrorists around the world: the National Security Agency. New documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA's Internet surveillance and hacking capabilities in fact play a crucial role, as reported by The Washington Post. The NSA contributes to efforts to hunt down terrorists with a wide variety of cyber-espionage tools. Sometimes, they intercept Internet traffic and emails; other times, its elite hackers team — the Tailored Access Operations division — hacks into a target's computer to intercept files, chat logs and even record keystrokes. The role of the intelligence agency in the drone program had not been previously reported, and the scoop reveals the existence of the "Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell," or CT MAC, the NSA's unit that focuses on collecting intelligence to aid the CIA's drone strikes. It's unclear, however, if the NSA's two most controversial programs revealed over the summer — Internet communications snooping program PRISM and the telephone metadata collection program — have played any role in the operations' support of drone strikes. In any case, the documents leaked by Snowden underline the effectiveness of the NSA's operations. Just one single operation may lead to a treasure trove of documents Just one single operation may lead to a treasure trove of documents. In one operation, the NSA obtained files that could be used to help the NSA map the movement of terrorists and aspiring extremists in Yemen, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Libya and Iran. Another single penetration yielded 90 encrypted al-Qaeda documents, 16 encryption keys, 30 unencrypted messages and "thousands" of chat logs, the Post reported, citing an inventory contained in a document leaked by Snowden. NSA is key to drone strikes- curtailment would trigger the linkMeyer 14 [David Meyer- senior writer for Gigaom, covering Europe and issues relating to privacy and security, Feb 2014, “Drone strikes increasingly rely on NSA surveillance data, report suggests,” https://gigaom.com/2014/02/10/drone-strikes-increasingly-rely-on-nsa-surveillance-data-report-suggests/, mm] The CIA and U.S. military are increasingly relying on surveillance information from the NSA to locate and attack drone targets, with innocent people being killed as a result, according to allegations made in a new publication, The Intercept. It was already known that the NSA is involved in U.S. drone activities, but Monday’s article uses Edward Snowden documents and a new source — a former drone operator — to allege that the increasingly exclusive use of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for drone strikes with no traditional human intelligence (HUMINT) operatives on the ground costs more innocent lives than might otherwise be the case.“The Intercept” is the first site to come out of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new First Look Media stable, and its editors are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – two of the key journalists associated with NSA leaker Snowden – and national security writer Jeremy Scahill. This first story from the site was written by Greenwald and Scahill. The main problem with relying on SIGINT so much appears to be that Taliban targets, for example, are wise to the NSA’s tactics, leading them to shuffle SIM cards around their groups and, by extension, their associates and families. With no HUMINT, the NSA’s cameras and fake cellular base stations attached to the drones then sometimes identify the wrong people for killing. These surveillance units attached to drones are, according to the story, part of an NSA program called Gilgamesh. Another operation called Shenanigans “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” and has apparently been used to map the “Wi-Fi fingerprint” of most major towns in Yemen. Meanwhile on Friday NBC also published a Snowden-derived story (again co-authored by Greenwald) that described the dirty tricks capabilities of GCHQ, the NSA’s British counterpart. According to the quoted documents, the agency has at least considered carrying out “false flag” cyber-attack operations on its own side in order to discredit adversaries using social media to spread disinformation. All this suggests GCHQ is becoming more active and aggressive than SIGINT organizations have traditionally been. And on Saturday the New York Times published claims, apparently emanating from the NSA, that Snowden had used web crawler software to collect all the information he took with him when he fled to Hong Kong. The piece suggested that the NSA systems didn’t pick up on this, perhaps because Snowden’s Hawaii facility had not yet received certain security upgrades at the time of the leak. Drone strikes are increasingly dependent on the NSA Meyer, 14 David Meyer, a senior writer for Gigaom, covering Europe and issues relating to privacy and security. He has been a technology journalist since 2006 and has written for publications such as the BBC, The Guardian and ZDNet, “Drone strikes increasingly rely on NSA surveillance data, report suggests,” Gigaom, 2/10/14, https://gigaom.com/2014/02/10/drone-strikes-increasingly-rely-on-nsa-surveillance-data-report-suggests/ // IS The CIA and U.S. military are increasingly relying on surveillance information from the NSA to locate and attack drone targets, with innocent people being killed as a result, according to allegations made in a new publication, The Intercept. It was already known that the NSA is involved in U.S. drone activities, but Monday’s article uses Edward Snowden documents and a new source — a former drone operator — to allege that the increasingly exclusive use of signals intelligence (SIGINT) for drone strikes with no traditional human intelligence (HUMINT) operatives on the ground costs more innocent lives than might otherwise be the case. “The Intercept” is the first site to come out of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new First Look Media stable, and its editors are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – two of the key journalists associated with NSA leaker Snowden – and national security writer Jeremy Scahill. This first story from the site was written by Greenwald and Scahill. The main problem with relying on SIGINT so much appears to be that Taliban targets, for example, are wise to the NSA’s tactics, leading them to shuffle SIM cards around their groups and, by extension, their associates and families. With no HUMINT, the NSA’s cameras and fake cellular base stations attached to the drones then sometimes identify the wrong people for killing. These surveillance units attached to drones are, according to the story, part of an NSA program called Gilgamesh. Another operation called Shenanigans “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” and has apparently been used to map the “Wi-Fi fingerprint” of most major towns in Yemen. NSA electronic surveillance k.t drone strikesFox news 14 [“US government reportedly ordering drone strikes based on cell phone location,” feb 2014, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/10/us-government-reportedly-ordering-drone-strikes-based-on-cell-phone-location/, mm] The U.S. government reportedly is ordering some drone strikes based on the location of terror suspects' cell phones -- without necessarily confirming the location of the suspects themselves -- raising concerns about missiles hitting unintended targets. The details were included in a report published Monday by journalist Glenn Greenwald's newest venture, The Intercept. Though it previously has been reported that National Security Agency data-tracking is used in locating and targeting terror suspects, the Intercept article raised new questions about the accuracy of that data. The report, citing an unnamed former drone operator and other sources, said the NSA uses a "complex analysis of electronic surveillance" to pinpoint drone strike targets. However, the report said, the CIA and U.S. military don't always confirm who the target is with informants on the ground. This raises the concern that the flagged phone could be in the hands of someone else -- a friend, a family member, someone who's holding the wrong phone at the wrong time -- when the missile is fired. "It's really like we're targeting a cell phone," the former drone operator was quoted as saying. "We're not going after people -- we're going after their phones." The Intercept report also detailed how some Taliban leaders have caught onto the NSA's methods, and have tried to evade tracking by purchasing multiple SIM cards and mixing them up. A spokeswoman with the National Security Council defended the administration's approach to these strikes, without going into fine detail. "For obvious reasons we can't discuss the specific sources and methods we use to establish near certainty, but our assessments are not based on a single piece of information," spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told Fox News. "We gather and scrutinize information from a variety of sources and methods before we draw conclusions." She said officials take "extraordinary care" to make sure counterterrorism actions are within the law and, "before we take any counterterrorism strike outside areas of active hostilities, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set." According to the Intercept article, the same spokeswoman declined to say on the record whether strikes are ordered without the use of human intelligence. The CIA and NSA declined to comment on the report. Greenwald was among the first journalists to report last year on NSA documents provided by leaker Edward Snowden. The latest report comes as the Obama administration claims to be tightening its standards for conducting drone strikes -- particularly when an American is the terror suspect. In one example of these apparent deliberations, the Associated Press reported that officials are wrestling with whether to approve a drone strike against an Al Qaeda-tied U.S. citizen. While the administration is not commenting publicly on the report, senior U.S. officials acknowledged that the individual is one of several Americans overseas whom the U.S. government is watching closely. They acknowledged that any targeted killing now requires "additional layers of review." One official described the individual in question as one of the "al-Awlaki's" of the world -- a reference to Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. In a speech last May at the National Defense University, President Obama outlined a more constricted drone policy overseas which, among other changes, made it more difficult to use drones to kill U.S. citizens overseas. Any such strike, like other drone attacks, would have to be approved by the president. Asked about the reports at Monday's daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on the specific case. But he said the administration has set a "high threshold" for taking lethal action against any target. -----AQAP Curtailment undermines drone strikes on AQAP Greenwald and Scahill, 14 Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, *Snowden-exposé leaker, founder of the Intercept **investigative reporter, war correspondent and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. “THE NSA’S SECRET ROLE IN THE U.S. ASSASSINATION PROGRAM,” The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/ // IS The NSA has played an increasingly central role in drone killings over the past five years. In one top-secret NSA document from 2010, the head of the agency’s Strategic Planning and Policy Division of the Counterterrorism Mission Management Center recounts the history of the NSA’s involvement in Yemen. Shortly before President Obama took office, the document reveals, the agency began to “shift analytic resources to focus on Yemen.” In 2008, the NSA had only three analysts dedicated to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. By the fall of 2009, it had 45 analysts, and the agency was producing “high quality” signal intelligence for the CIA and JSOC. In December 2009, utilizing the NSA’s metadata collection programs, the Obama administration dramatically escalated U.S. drone and cruise missile strikes in Yemen. ---Metadata Decreasing meta data collection devastates drone strikes Greenwald and Scahill, 14 Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, *Snowden-exposé leaker, founder of the Intercept **investigative reporter, war correspondent and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. “THE NSA’S SECRET ROLE IN THE U.S. ASSASSINATION PROGRAM,” The Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/ // IS 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. NSA data key to drone strikes- plan triggers the link Macri, 14 Giuseppe Macri, Tech editor, “NSA surveillance data used for unconfirmed drone targeting,” 2/10/14, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/10/nsa-surveillance-data-used-for-unconfirmed-drone-targeting/ // IS National Security Agency spying programs are used for more than just passive surveillance according to one former drone operator, who says the data surveilled from targets is used in lethal U.S. drone strikes. The Intercept – a news startup from former Guardian journalist and NSA story breaker Glenn Greenwald – reports the CIA and U.S. military use the metadata and phone location tracking capabilities of the NSA to launch attacks against targets, forgoing any other means of identification and often incurring civilian casualties. According to the former operator out of Joint Special Operations Command, civilians have “absolutely” been the victims of drone strikes, which have otherwise been effective in neutralizing known terrorist targets in Afghanistan. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” the former drone operator said. “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.” Metadata key to drone strikes – target identification Russia Today, 14 Russia Today, “Use of NSA metadata to find drone targets kills civilians – Greenwald,” Russia Today, 2/10/14, http://rt.com/news/nsa-drones-civilian-casualties-383/ // IS The US is relying upon NSA metadata to identify targets for drone strikes, reports the Intercept. A former NSA operative said the tactic is flawed and the agency targets phones “in the hopes that the person on the other end of the missile is the bad guy.” Citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden and testimonies from former Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) members, Glen Greenwald and colleague Jeremy Scahill have revealed the extent which the US military is using NSA intel to establish targets for drone strikes in an article in the Intercept. The most common tactic employed by the NSA is known as ‘geolocation’, which entails locking on to the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist. A former drone sensor operator with the US Air Force, Brandon Bryant, told the Intercept that using the metadata led to inaccuracies that killed civilians. The NSA uses a program called Geo Cell to follow potential targets and often do not verify whether the carrier of the phone is the intended target of the strike. .“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,” Bryant told the Intercept – the nascent news site created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to “to hold the most powerful governmental and corporate factions accountable.” Over the past five years the NSA “has played an increasingly central role in drone killing,” but the growing reliance on metadata to find insurgents is also targeting civilians. The analysis of the electronic surveillance leaves a lot of room for error and can kill “the wrong people.” ---PRISM Curtailing PRISM decreases drones Bump 13 [Philip Bump- Reporter for Washington post and he cites experts, July 2013, “How the NSA Is Using Cell Phone Data to Drone Civilians (In Pakistan),” http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/07/how-nsa-using-cell-phone-data-drone-civilians-pakistan/67436/, mm] In late 2001, a National Security Agency analyst was asked to do something unusual. Instead of locating a target's cell phone to eavesdrop on his conversation, the analyst was asked for the phone's location in real-time. It was apparently the beginning of the NSA's role in the CIA's drone operations that, a new report compiled by Pakistan suggests, had killed nearly 200 civilians by 2009. The details of that first NSA-supported strike appear in a new story from The Washington Post. A Navy SEAL, standing in a trailer that was once home to the CIA's child care program, asked the analyst where the NSA's target was located. “We just want you to find the phone!” the SEAL urged. No one cared about the conversation it might be transmitting. … The NSA collector in Georgia took what was then considered a gigantic leap — from using the nation’s most sophisticated spy technology to record the words of presidents, kings and dictators to using it to kill a single man in a terrorist group. This, The Post suggests, spurred the NSA's rapid expansion in the last decade, building and expanding its facilities around the world. Meanwhile, the technology used by the agency to track targets also expanded. The Post: By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit. At the same time, the NSA developed a new computer linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway into which the military and intelligence officers could feed every bit of data or seized documents and get back a phone number or list of potential targets. It also allowed commanders to see, on a screen, every type of surveillance available in a given territory. This appears to be a different tool than Boundless Informant, the graphical interface of the NSA's PRISM data collection revealed in the leaks from Edward Snowden. But that 2004 innovation may explain Snowden's insistence that visitors stash their cell phones in his fridge when visiting. The side effects of the NSA-fueled drone strikes has been a point of dispute since the program began. The United States government has been vague about its estimates of civilian casualties from the strikes. During the president's first speech acknowledging the program, he stated that "it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in every war" — without putting a number on it. Documents released in April of this year included language from the CIA stating that civilian deaths were "exceedingly rare." A report just leaked from the Pakistani government is a bit more specific. Acquired by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, it offers that country's assessment of the civilian casualty risk. Drawn from field reports by local officials in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the document lists over 70 drone strikes between 2006 and late 2009, alongside a small number of other incidents such as alleged Nato attacks and strikes by unspecified forces. Of 746 people listed as killed in the drone strikes, at least 147 of the dead are clearly stated by the leaked report to be civilian victims. Some 94 of these are said to be children. That figure is slightly lower than the comprehensive data compiled by the New America Foundation, which puts the total for that time period in the range of 190 — with scores more listed as "unidentified." Last fall, Columbia University's Human Rights Institute tried to assess the accuracy of reports on civilian and militant casualties, finding that "estimates are incomplete and may significantly undercount the extent of reported civilian deaths." The number released by Pakistan, it's worth noting, also include fewer strikes than reported by the New America Foundation. Last week, representatives of the government's surveillance infrastructure testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Chris Inglis, deputy director of the NSA, was asked about a key concern of privacy advocates: if the agency's sweep of phone metadata included location data for those calls. (That data collection program was renewed on Friday.) Inglis' response: "We are not collecting that data under this program." For at least one other program, they are — as of late 2001. ---Wiretapping Wiretapping and audio files are key to drone strikes- aff hurts drones Miller et al 13 [Greg Miller- covers intelligence for the Washington post, Julia Tate- research correspondent for Washington post, Greg Gellman- reporter based in new York, “Documents reveal NSA’s extensive involvement in targeted killing program,” Oct 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/documents-reveal-nsas-extensive-involvement-in-targeted-killing-program/2013/10/16/29775278-3674-11e3-8a0e-4e2cf80831fc_story.html, mm] The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012 and reveal the agency’s extensive involvement in the targeted killing program that has served as a centerpiece of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy. The NSA is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets,” an NSA spokeswoman said in a statement provided to The Post on Wednesday, adding that the agency’s operations “protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” In the search for targets, the NSA has draped a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan. In Ghul’s case, the agency deployed an arsenal of cyber-espionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio files and other messages, and tracking radio transmissions to determine where Ghul might “bed down.” The file is part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA’s exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT. To handle the expanding workload, the NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency’s vast resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets. The unit spent a year tracking Ghul and his courier network, tunneling into an array of systems and devices, before he was killed. Without those penetrations, the document concluded, “this opportunity would not have been possible.” At a time when the NSA is facing intense criticism for gathering data on Americans, the drone files may bolster the agency’s case that its resources are focused on fighting terrorism and supporting U.S. operations overseas. Even so, former CIA officials said the files are an accurate reflection of the NSA’s contribution to finding targets in a campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people, including thousands of alleged militants and hundreds of civilians, in Pakistan, according to independent surveys. The officials said the agency has assigned senior analysts to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and deployed others to work alongside CIA counterparts at almost every major U.S. embassy or military base overseas. Wiretapping is essential to drone strikes- reverse causal Scahill and Greenwald 14 [Glenn- journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law, Jeremy Scahil- investigative reporter, war correspondent and author of the international bestselling books, “THE NSA’S SECRET ROLE IN THE U.S. ASSASSINATION PROGRAM,” https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/, Feb 2014, mm] 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. 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. 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.” 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. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.65 Mb. Share with your friends:
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