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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.
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.
Has anyone else considered the potential implications of "terrorist posts geostamped selfie, gets bombed"?
I predict we'll see "swatting" taken to a whole new level.
Fuck yeah, indeed.
We have allowed ourselves to be caught up in tribal conflicts that have been going on for a couple of millennia; long before Islam - and framed as a Muslim problem by our media and government.
What we in the West need to understand is that the Middle East is stuck in ancient tribal animosity. And we should back off. Sometimes, when school yard children insist on fighting, the only thing reasonable to do is let them fight it out.
But our leaders will not let that happen because it will disrupt a strategic resource that we all still need - hint: OIL.
Goddamn it.
a fun and cool thing to kill people in other countries. It's just something the U.S. gov does, and in the midst of getting used to this, the innocent people who are also getting killed by U.S. guns and bombs are conveniently forgotten, and no-one is ever held accountable.
If this was exif tags from the selfie, then that would be data, not metadata.
It may have been exif, but I have seen academic research that used "big data" in the form of satellite images to identify both the location and orientation of photos containing landscape. I would be astonished if the military didn't have this capability, especially since, as I recall, they were funding the research.
The truth is that the terrorists are recruiting online, so the military wanted to stop that. Also, they paid off someone's mistress for this, but didn't want to break her cover, so they made up a story about social media, giving a cover to the mistress and killing two birds with one stone.
Nobody has denied that is the case, so I can only assume it's true.
Learn to love Alaska
I was under the impression we had huge problems getting humint because of the way their organizational structure and vetting goes.
That was Al Qaeda, which was small and tight. ISIS is big, and loose. This makes them much stronger, and able to hold and defend territory, but it also makes them easier to penetrate.