US Bombs ISIS Command Center After Terrorist Posts Selfie Online

HughPickens.com writes: Brian Everstine writes at Air Force Times that U.S. intelligence officers were able to locate and bomb an Islamic State command center based on a photo and comments in social media. "The [airmen are] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command," said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command. "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.' So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAMS take that entire building out. Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours."

Carlisle was careful to not go into great detail about the how the information was gathered and what additional effort went into targeting those bombs. It's easy to imagine that in addition to the information gleaned from the initial post that the Air Force used satellite and drone reconnaissance data. It's also possible that U.S. intelligence could have actively engaged with the original poster in order to draw out information. Attackers and researchers have shown time and time again that simply asking a target for information—either by posing as a trusted individual or using carefully created phishing attacks—works even better than fancy information-stealing digital attacks.

Comments

Secret, covert spy knowledge

[watermark]

Geotags

Re:Secret, covert spy knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

There's almost no chance this was from EXIF data unless the social media site in question was something like Wikimedia Commons where you can get the original image.

Every social media platform I've bothered checking reencodes images you've uploaded to fit into a predefined set of sizes. I've only bothered checking the EXIF data from images posted to Facebook and Twitter, but both sites actively strip out EXIF metadata. Or, I suspect, more accurately they don't bother copying it over when reencoding. (And why bother? It can only make the file larger and they're going for small. Who cares if the lens and exposure information gets stripped?)

So I doubt this was from geotags, unless the photo was uploaded some place that lets you get the original file.

Re:So, anyone else see a problem here?

[Firethorn]

Yes. Deployed service people today are cautioned against taking pictures, especially with cell phones, for this reason.

If you really want to, they recommend running it through public affairs(the professional photographer people) to make sure that information that can precisely locate the photo is removed.

Re:geo-taging

[Firethorn]

so airforce is gonna walk inside school/building or use non-existent iraq forces in areas..

???

No, they look at satellite imagery, known maps of the area, run a drone by the place before deciding that hellfires are a touch small for this target, let's get some JDAMs in here, etc...

Re: Good.

[Type44Q]

I agree completely; there's no way they should've revealed their intel collection methods... so perhaps we should be willing to consider the possibilty that social media wasn't even *remotely* how they they identified their target?

Re:america!

[Whiteox]

caught up in tribal conflicts that have been going on for a couple of millennia; long before Islam

Almost. The current war are by 2 factions of muslims battling with each other right now. It is not solely for wealth but more for spiritual right of one faction over another*. Fortunately for the West, these internal battles has been going on for about 1400 years. So those tribal conflicts you speak of were settled long before Islam. That is Persia vs the rest of the world, later, Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire) vs barbarian hordes etc.
Iran is old Persia that followed the teachings of Zoaroster, the Zoarostrian church was driven out by the muslims. The people of Iran are not arabic but Indian in origin. They are however muslim presently and are relatively stable. Turkey is muslim, but they have a secular government by choice and is stable. Saudi Arabia is run by a monarchy and is stable.
So the reason for why ISIS is going on about a Caliphate across geopolitical boundaries is for religion. They want to change the borders. That's why it's a mess. USA coalition tends to deal with political nations and not sweeping across border movements. ISIS's goal is unlikely as pretty much everyone is moving to secular forms of government. When it's all over, they will have 2 choices. Turn into a North Korea or elect ministers to deal with the rest of the world.

* Roman Catholic vs Lutheran for example.

"Honor Violence"/"Honor Killings"

[tlambert]

One refers to a people, the other refers to a place. Immigrants to the West from the middle east don't kill each other very often based on their ancestor's tribal conflicts.

The original posting in this thread was rather badly put, but some interesting ideas have come up in the context of replies in the aftermath of that posting.

"Honor Violence"/"Honor Killings": thousands of women and young girls in the U.S. each year.

The immigrants tend to bring their culture with them, and since we've gone from the "melting pot" mentality to the "multicultural" mentality, with its enclaves, things have only gotten worse over recent years:

http://www.theahafoundation.or...

But, you know, feel free to believe it's an effect of radicalizing radiation that comes from a particular region, and that once people are removed from the region, it magically stops.