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CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code

Posted by Soulskill on from the fighting-terror-with-ctrl-c-and-ctrl-v dept.

skids writes "Coders hate having to rush code out the door before it's ready. They also hate it when the customer starts making unreasonable demands. What they hate even more is when the customer reverse engineers the product and starts selling their own inferior product. But what really ticks them off is when that buggy, knockoff product might be used by targeting systems in military unmanned drone attacks, and the bugs introduce location errors of up to 13 meters. That's what purportedly happened to software developer IISi, based on an ongoing boardroom/courtroom drama that will leave any hard-pressed coder appreciating just how much worse his job could get. The saddest part? The CIA assumed the bug was a feature. The tinfoil-hat-inducing part? The alleged perpetrators just got bought by IBM."

3 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. 13 meters? by gandhi_2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    so what?

    hellfires are laser guided, not GPS. a predator reporting its position as being 13 meters wrong is basically nothing....and a non-issue with regards to missile targeting.

    if the predator was dropping JDAMS, i could see the issue. but even then, 13 meters is well within the CPE allowed for the JDAM.

    --
    THL phish sticks
  2. Re:Let me see if I have this straight by gestalt_n_pepper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sadly, I can top that story. I used to work for a government contractor that took blueprints and had them redrawn in AutoCAD in St. Petersburg, Russia.

    Our main client was Los Alamos National Labs. We sent them the blueprints for almost every building there.

    --
    Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
  3. Re:In Soviet America, Zeroes Divide You! by gknoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But for that guy at the very end, it's still a human decision that can be overridden by natural desires to protect human life. He can make up something about the target being obscured. He can stop it if he really thinks it's not achieving an objective. He knows intuitively that he will pay a high price for taking this life, because he has to take that memory home with him.

    I read an interesting article in a mainstream magazine about Air Force drone pilots. Basically, they sit in Nevada and control drones in Afghanistan. I was expecting to read about how jaded and eager they were to press buttons at the drop of the hat, but what I found was the opposite.

    The drones are capable of staying in the air for days at a time, monitoring a target (person). They have cameras running, and multiple shifts of human crews watching the video feeds and analyzing what's going on. In the process, they are able to ascertain with frightening accuracy that yes, this particular man is a terrorist: Here's the video feed of him buying some weapons, and here's the part X hours later where we just watched him create a roadside IED. Being able to keep someone under direct video surveillance (including thermal, if I recall correctly, so being indoors didn't help a lot) meant that for at least some targets, they were very sure that that person was a bad guy.

    We have people halfway around the globe pushing buttons to kill people about whom we have reams of (video) evidence showing hostile behavior. I think that's better informed killing than having combat teams need to go in and do the same killing on foot, with potentially faulty intelligence, and without (at times) being able to mount multi-day uninterrupted surveillance.