Drones Carrying Explosives
We’ve now had an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt by explosive-laden drones.
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We’ve now had an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt by explosive-laden drones.
One follow-on to the story of Crypto AG being owned by the CIA: this interview with a Washington Post reporter. The whole thing is worth reading or listening to, but I was struck by these two quotes at the end:
…in South America, for instance, many of the governments that were using Crypto machines were engaged in assassination campaigns. Thousands of people were being disappeared, killed. And I mean, they’re using Crypto machines, which suggests that the United States intelligence had a lot of insight into what was happening. And it’s hard to look back at that history now and see a lot of evidence of the United States going to any real effort to stop it or at least or even expose it.
[…]
To me, the history of the Crypto operation helps to explain how U.S. spy agencies became accustomed to, if not addicted to, global surveillance. This program went on for more than 50 years, monitoring the communications of more than 100 countries. I mean, the United States came to expect that kind of penetration, that kind of global surveillance capability. And as Crypto became less able to deliver it, the United States turned to other ways to replace that. And the Snowden documents tell us a lot about how they did that.
This teapot has two chambers. Liquid is released from one or the other depending on whether an air hole is covered. I want one.
In this long article on the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri in Beirut, there’s a detailed section on what the investigators were able to learn from the cell phone metadata:
At Eid’s request, a judge ordered Lebanon’s two cellphone companies, Alfa and MTC Touch, to produce records of calls and text messages in Lebanon in the four months before the bombing. Eid then studied the records in secret for months. He focused on the phone records of Hariri and his entourage, looking at whom they called, where they went, whom they met and when. He also followed where Adass, the supposed suicide bomber, spent time before he disappeared. He looked at all the calls that took place along the route taken by Hariri’s entourage on the day of the assassination. Always he looked for cause and effect. How did one call lead to the next? “He was brilliant, just brilliant,” the senior U.N. investigator told me. “He himself, on his own, developed a simple but amazingly efficient program to set about mining this massive bank of data.”
The simple algorithm quickly revealed a peculiar pattern. In October 2004, just after Hariri resigned, a certain cluster of cellphones began following him and his now-reduced motorcade wherever they went. These phones stayed close day and night, until the day of the bombing - when nearly all 63 phones in the group immediately went dark and never worked again.
[…]
The investigators now turned their full attention to the cellphone records. Building on Eid’s work, they determined that the assassins worked in groups, each with a leader and each adhering to specific procedures. Everyone in the group called the leader, and he called everyone in the group, but the lower-level operatives never called one another.
The investigators gave each group a color. The green group consisted of 18 Alfa phones, purchased with fake identification from two shops in South Beirut in July and August 2004. The purpose of the fake IDs was not to defraud Alfa out of payment; every month from September 2004 to May 2005, someone went to an Alfa office and paid all 18 bills in cash, without leaving any clue to his identity. The total phone bill for the green network, including activation fees, was $7,375 —a prodigious amount, considering that 15 of the green group’s 18 phones went almost entirely unused.
The first spike in call activity occurred in September 2004, immediately after Hariri announced his resignation. The investigators contend that the green group was at the center of the conspiracy. The phone number 3140023 belonged to the top leader, and the numbers 3159300 and 3150071 belonged to his two deputies. (He called them and they called him, but with those phones, they never called each other.) The two deputies carried phones belonging to other groups, through which they passed on instructions to the other participants in the operation. When a member of one group would call a group leader, the group leader would often follow up by switching to a green phone and calling the supreme leader, who was nearly always in South Beirut, where Hezbollah keeps its headquarters.
On Oct. 20, 2004, the day Hariri left office and his security detail was significantly reduced, the blue group went into operation. It originally worked according to the same rules as the green group, but its active membership increased from three phones to 15, with seven connected to Alfa and eight to MTC Touch. All of the blue phones were prepaid. Some were acquired as early as 2003 and had seen little or no use. The people who bought them also gave false identification, and again money seemed to be in plentiful supply. The minutes that expired each month went largely unused, but the phones were loaded again and again. When the blue group went dark, the phones still had unused minutes worth $4,287.
The prosecutors say the blue group followed Hariri’s movements. On the morning of Oct. 20, its members were already deployed around Quraitem Palace. At 10:30 a.m., Hariri set out toward Parliament and then to the presidential palace, where Lahoud was waiting to receive his resignation. The cell towers picked up the blue group’s members moving with him and calling their chief. From then on, the blue phones trailed Hariri nearly everywhere— to Parliament, to meetings with political leaders, to long lunches at the Saint-Georges Yacht Club & Marina. When Hariri was at his home, so were they. When he flew abroad, they moved with him to the airport and then stopped operating until he returned, when they would pick up the trail again.
Eventually, the yellow group was added….
There’s a lot more. It’s section 6 of the article.
See also this example.
I haven’t seen much press mention about the leaked CIA documents that have appeared on WikiLeaks this month.
There are three:
These documents are more general than what we’ve seen from Snowden, but—assuming they’re real—these are still national-security leaks. You’d think there would be more news about this, and more reaction from the US government.
This seems like a bad vulnerability:
Researchers have demonstrated a vulnerability in the computer systems used to control facilities at federal prisons that could allow an outsider to remotely take them over, doing everything from opening and overloading cell door mechanisms to shutting down internal communications systems.
[…]
The researchers began their work after Strauchs was called in by a warden to investigate an incident in which all the cell doors on one prison’s death row spontaneously opened. While the computers that are used for the system control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that control prison doors and other systems in theory should not be connected to the Internet, the researchers found that there was an Internet connection associated with every prison system they surveyed. In some cases, prison staff used the same computers to browse the Internet; in others, the companies that had installed the software had put connections in place to do remote maintenance on the systems.
The weirdest part of the article was this last paragraph.
“You could open every cell door, and the system would be telling the control room they are all closed,” Strauchs, a former CIA operations officer, told the Times. He said that he thought the greatest threat was that the system would be used to create the conditions needed for the assassination of a target prisoner.
I guess that’s a threat. But the greatest threat?
EDITED TO ADD (11/14): The original paper.
That’s what the U.S. destroyed after a malfunction in Pakistan during the bin Laden assassination. (For helicopters, “stealth” is less concerned with radar signatures and more concerned with acoustical quiet.)
There was some talk about Pakistan sending it to China, but they’re returning it to the U.S. I presume that the Chinese got everything they needed quickly.
“ReallyVirtual” tweeted the bin Laden assassination without realizing it.
The former CIA general counsel, John A. Rizzo, talks about his agency’s assassination program, which has increased dramatically under the Obama administration:
The hub of activity for the targeted killings is the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, where lawyers—there are roughly 10 of them, says Rizzo—write a cable asserting that an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued, often running up to five pages. Michael Scheuer, who used to be in charge of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, describes “a dossier,” or a “two-page document,” along with “an appendix with supporting information, if anybody wanted to read all of it.” The dossier, he says, “would go to the lawyers, and they would decide. They were very picky.” Sometimes, Scheuer says, the hurdles may have been too high. “Very often this caused a missed opportunity. The whole idea that people got shot because someone has a hunchI only wish that was true. If it were, there would be a lot more bad guys dead.”
Sometimes, as Rizzo recalls, the evidence against an individual would be thin, and high-level lawyers would tell their subordinates, “You guys did not make a case.” “Sometimes the justification would be that the person was thought to be at a meeting,” Rizzo explains. “It was too squishy.” The memo would get kicked back downstairs.
The cables that were “ready for prime time,” as Rizzo puts it, concluded with the following words: “Therefore we request approval for targeting for lethal operation.” There was a space provided for the signature of the general counsel, along with the word “concurred.” Rizzo says he saw about one cable each month, and at any given time there were roughly 30 individuals who were targeted. Many of them ended up dead, but not all: “No. 1 and No. 2 on the hit parade are still out there,” Rizzo says, referring to “you-know-who and [Ayman al-] Zawahiri,” a top Qaeda leader.
And the ACLU Deputy Legal Director on the interview:
What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA’s acting general counsel—the agency’s chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program’s mere existence.
Rizzo’s disclosure was long overdue—the American public surely has a right to know that the assassination of terrorism suspects is now official government policy and reflects an opportunistic approach to allegedly sensitive information that has become the norm for senior government officials. Routinely, officials insist to courts that the nation’s security will be compromised if certain facts are revealed but then supply those same facts to trusted reporters.
This would make a great movie:
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., renewed his call for the installation of an impenetrable, see-through security shield around the viewing gallery overlooking the House floor. Burton points out that, while guns and some bombs would be picked up by metal detectors, a saboteur could get into the Capitol concealing plastic explosives.
The House floor, he pointed out, is the only room where all three branches of government gather to hear the president speak, as President Obama will do when he delivers his State of the Union address on Jan. 25.
Burton introduced the legislation in the past, but it’s gone nowhere. He’s hoping the tragic events of Saturday could help it win more serious consideration by the Republican leadership.
“I think the risk is there,” Burton told The Washington Examiner. “The threat is more now than it has ever been.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.