Dec. 12, 2014 4:51pm
Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins wanted to prove that drones can be used to crack Wi-Fi passwords, listen in on cellphone calls and read text messages. So with a garage, several off-the-shelf electronics and $6,000, the longtime friends and Air Force companions did just that.
They built a drone and installed multiple antennas on it, then gave it a go.
“We passed telephone calls, hacked into networks, cracked the encryption on Wi-Fi access points — all of that sort of evilness is possible,” Tassey told WUSA-TV.
Taking care not to break any laws, they tested it out in an empty area where they could only “spy” on themselves.
The small, bright yellow flying machine has a 50-mile range but requires an actual human to either take off or land. Once in the air, though, the drone sends a signal to wireless phones just like a cellphone tower would.
Here’s a look at how it works:
Image source: WUSA-TV
And now that Tassey and Perkins have proven that drones can be even more useful – or harmful – than some first thought, their concoction has landed in the nation’s capital.
But it’s not where you might suspect.
The drone was put on display at Washington’s International Spy Museum for all to have a look.
Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins’ cyberattack drone on display at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (Image source: WUSA-TV)
An Orange Pixel
flickers on the horizon, sandwiched between the inky azure of the
mid-Pacific and the robin’s-egg pale of the Hawaiian sky. Richard
Jenkins is the first to see it—a sailing robot, which has been blowing
our way for a month. We’re in a small motorboat 7 miles out at sea, just
north of Oahu’s windward shore. Dylan Owens gets the next good glimpse.
“I see the wing,” he exclaims, “and the tail!”
Jenkins and Owens are the engineering duo behind Saildrone, which in
the words of their website is “a wind-powered autonomous surface
vehicle.” On October 1, the 19-foot craft was set loose in the San
Francisco Bay with a simple command lodged in its electronic brain: Sail
to Hawaii. For 2,248 nautical miles the boat did the rest. The path it
chose happens to be identical to that of the annual Pacific Cup sailing
race, and the fastest anyone has traversed this course is just over five
days. The single-handed-sailing record is eight and a half days. As
Jenkins and Owens look on, Saildrone is about to complete what might be
called the first no-handed ocean sail: San Francisco to Hawaii in 34
days. It’s not quick, but then again there is no one aboard to complain.
The journey has included a storm with gale-force winds followed by
two weeks of doldrums. During the tempest, Saildrone was reporting
speeds of up to 16 miles per hour and angles as extreme as 75 degrees,
meaning it was heeled over and surfing down the backside of breaking
waves—waves with enough power to snap it in two had they caught the boat
in the wrong position. The doldrums were equally worrisome: With no one
aboard to scrub the bottom, algae, seaweed, and barnacles might have
overtaken Saildrone, transforming it into just another piece of flotsam.
As the vessel sails into sight, I see that it’s a streamliner—a
narrow hull stabilized by two outriggers, one on each side. Its “sail”
is a sail in name only; in reality it’s a 20-foot-high, solid
carbon-fiber wing. Extending from the back of this wing, halfway up the
mast, is a tail—just like an airplane’s. (“That’s a little trick that I
stole from the Wright brothers,” Jenkins says.) Above the waterline the
boat is painted safety orange and emblazoned with the words OCEAN
RESEARCH IN PROGRESS in all caps. The hull is black with bottom paint,
and near the bow is the name in a fancy serif: Honey Badger.
The Honey Badger is more than a sailboat and more than a
robot, although it’s both of those things. The Pacific crossing is
really a test of a new type of sail that automatically keeps itself
pointed into the wind, like a weather vane. Adjusting a little tab on
the back of the tail—a task handled by the Honey Badger’s
autopilot—is enough to maintain the correct course and to angle the wing
so it creates forward thrust. There’s no need to employ ropes, winches,
or even sailors. The mechanism is so simple it might really be best
regarded as a plug-and-play power source. Like a windmill, it converts a
ubiquitous natural resource into usable energy.
The biggest impact might be to industry. They need to know what is happening in the invisible reaches of the world’s oceans.
Metadata Alone Doesn’t Insure We’re Targeting Bad Guys
In Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s new report
based on interviews with drone targeting program whistleblowers as well
as Edward Snowden, they point out that targets for drone strikes are
picked almost entirely using “metadata” … and that human intelligence
isn’t used to confirm that actual bad guys are being targeted.
We reached out to a former top NSA official to get his take on this
story: Bill Binney, the 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a
“legend” within the agency, the senior technical director within the
agency who managed thousands of NSA employees, and has been interviewed
by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others.
Washington’s Blog asked Binney:
Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill have a new article on drone targeting abroad.
In it, they argue that Sigint [signals intelligence] can be
unreliable in targeting drone strikes, without Humint [human
intelligence] to corroborate.
Do you have any opinion on this?
Binney responded:
The problem I have with drone strikes using metadata only is that they are not making sure of their targets this way.
You need to have content not just metadata to know that it is your
target. Humint could point you to a bad guy; but, even then, you still need to have content to insure that is the same guy using the phone or originating the e-mail. This is why I call the strikes by metadata alone a “undisciplinedslaughter.”
But also, cell phones can be lent to others and multiple people can use the same computer etc.
A U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator
unmanned aerial vehicle assigned to the California Air National Guard's
163rd Reconnaissance Wing flies near the Southern California Logistics
Airport in Victorville, California in this January 7, 2012 USAF handout
photo obtained by Reuters February 6, 2013. REUTERS/U.S. Air Force/Tech.
Sgt. Effrain Lopez
WASHINGTON (AP) — An American citizen who is a member of
al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S.
officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to
kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new
stricter targeting policy issued last year.
The CIA drones watching him cannot strike because
he's a U.S. citizen and the Justice Department must build a case against
him, a task it hasn't completed.
Four
U.S. officials said the American suspected terrorist is in a country
that refuses U.S. military action on its soil and that has proved unable
to go after him. And President Barack Obama's new policy says American
suspected terrorists overseas can only be killed by the military, not
the CIA, creating a policy conundrum for the White House.
Two of
the officials described the man as an al-Qaida facilitator who has been
directly responsible for deadly attacks against U.S. citizens overseas
and who continues to plan attacks against them that would use improvised
explosive devices.
But one U.S. official said the Defense
Department was divided over whether the man is dangerous enough to merit
the potential domestic fallout of killing an American without charging
him with a crime or trying him, and the potential international fallout
of such an operation in a country that has been resistant to U.S.
action.
Another of the U.S. officials said the Pentagon did ultimately decide to recommend lethal action.
The
officials said the suspected terrorist is well-guarded and in a fairly
remote location, so any unilateral attempt by U.S. troops to capture him
would be risky and even more politically explosive than a U.S. missile
strike.
Under new guidelines Obama addressed in a speech last year
to calm anger overseas at the extent of the U.S. drone campaign, lethal
force must only be used "to prevent or stop attacks against U.S.
persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible and no other
reasonable alternatives exist to address the threat effectively." The
target must also pose "a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons" —
the legal definition of catching someone in the act of plotting a lethal
attack.
The Associated Press has agreed to the government's
request to withhold the name of the country where the suspected
terrorist is believed to be because officials said publishing it could
interrupt ongoing counterterror operations.
The officials spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the
classified drone targeting program publicly.
House
Intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., complained last
week that a number of terrorist suspects were all but out of reach under
the administration's new rules that limit drone strikes based on the
target's nationality or location. Two of the U.S. officials said the
Justice Department review of the American suspected terrorist started
last fall.
The senior administration official confirmed that the
Justice Department was working to build a case for the president to
review and decide the man's fate. The official said, however, the legal
procedure being followed is the same as when the U.S. killed militant
cleric and former Virginia resident Anwar al-Awlaki by drone in Yemen in
2011, long before the new targeted killing policy took effect.
The
official said the president could make an exception to his policy and
authorize the CIA to strike on a onetime basis or authorize the Pentagon
to act despite the possible objections of the country in question.
The Justice Department, the Pentagon and the CIA declined to comment.
If
the target is an American citizen, the Justice Department is required
to show that killing the person through military action is "legal and
constitutional"— in this case, that the Pentagon can take action against
the American, as the administration has ruled him an enemy combatant
under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a resolution Congress
passed a week after the 9/11 attacks to target al-Qaida.
Mary
Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at the University of
Notre Dame, said there is a school of thought that the Obama
administration's drone policy is "lawless."
"Why should the
Justice Department issue the execution warrant for anyone abroad? The
fact that they give extra scrutiny only because he's an American
exacerbates this negative impression," O'Connell said.
U.S. drones
have killed four Americans since 2009, including al-Awlaki, who the
administration said was actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens.
Attorney
General Eric Holder said the three other Americans were killed by
drones, but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed
in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son,
Abdulrahman, a native of Denver who was killed in Yemen two weeks later;
and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
The
case has galvanized congressional opponents of Obama's plan to transfer
drones from the CIA to the Defense Department. Before the plan was
announced, either CIA or Pentagon drones could go after terrorist
targets, even if they were U.S. citizens. The CIA could also fly drones
in areas where host countries might object. But by law, the Pentagon can
only strike in war zones, in countries that agree to U.S.
counterterrorism action or in lawless areas like parts of Somalia where
that government's security forces cannot reach. Even then only
al-Qaida-linked suspects can be targeted.
"It
is very clear that there have been missed opportunities that I believe
increase the risk of the lives of our soldiers and for disrupting
operations underway," Rogers said last week.
U.S.
officials said both Senate and House appropriators have blocked funding
to transfer the CIA's stealth RQ-170 drone fleet to the Pentagon. Some
lawmakers want the White House to come up with a fix for targeting
suspects in areas where the Pentagon is banned from operating — either
by leaving some part of the CIA operation running or by granting the
Pentagon authority to strike covertly despite the location — meaning
they could legally deny the operation.
Lawmakers
like Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein,
D-Calif., have also objected to the shift to the Pentagon, arguing that
the CIA has more experience flying drones.
___
Follow Kimberly Dozier on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kimberlydozier
___
Online:
Policy and procedures for the use of force in counterterrorism operations outside the U.S.: http://1.usa.gov/1dy7de4
Michael Boyle, who was on Obama’s counter-terrorism advisory group in the run-up to the 2008 election, writes in a study for the Chatham House journal International Affairs that Obama abandoned his pledge to restore respect for the rule of law following the Bush administration.
Obama “has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor [maybe worse]
… while President Bush issued a call to arms to defend ‘civilisation’
against the threat of terrorism, President Obama has waged his war on
terror in the shadows, using drone strikes, special operations and
sophisticated surveillance to fight a brutal covert war against al-Qaida
and other Islamist networks,” Boyle writes.
The study concludes that the Obama administration has been
“successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by
counting all military-age males
they kill as combatants. Civilian casualties are likely to be far
higher than so far acknowledged, Boyle said, and government claims to
the contrary are ”based on a highly selective and partial reading of the
evidence.”
“The result of the ‘guilt by association’ approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which the US selects targets for drone strikes,” the study says.
“The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that
kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where
they occur. No one really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in
these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.” Stanley McChrystal, the former military general that Obama fired after he made disparaging remarks about the President to a reporter, is also speaking out against the drone war now.
“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world,” McChrystal said in an interview. “The
resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes…is much greater
than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral
level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
McChrystal added that drones exacerbate a “perception of American arrogance.”
The retired general has a history of bluntness in this respect. McChrystal has also explained matter-of-factly to the New York Times how the
US military “have shot an amazing number of people [in Afghanistan],
but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.” He also, rather adroitly, explained the logic of what he called “insurgent math.” That is, “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.”
Boyle says there is an urgent need for greater transparency because
most Americans remained “unaware of the scale of the drone programme…and
the destruction it has caused in their name”.
He added that drones are having “adverse strategic effects” by causing hatred among the local populations where US bombs fall
and also by ”encouraging a new arms race that will empower current and
future rivals and lay the foundations for an international system that
is increasingly violent.”
A report by researchers at the Stanford and NYU schools of law found in September that the drone program is “terrorizing” the people of Pakistan and that it is having “counterproductive” effects.
The US drone war in Pakistan not only kills and injures civilians, the report finds, but it traumatizes the population
and has led people to keep their children home from school and to avoid
any large grouping of people, however innocent. It also says the drone
war has helped recruitment efforts of extremist groups like al-Qaeda.
Very rarely does our government ask us what to have a war on. The proposal for missile strikes into Syria was a rare occasion when public pressure and other factors compelled Congress to demand a say. Public pressure then compelled Congress to say No.
But daily drone buzzings over various nations aren't occasions for public debate. We aren't being asked about another decade in Afghanistan or cooking up a future war on Iran. And our current president and his predecessor combined have wiped out eight wedding parties (six in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and one in Yemen earlier this month) without our having ever been asked about any of them.
What if we were?
There are various ways a debate over whether to launch a war could go. In a highly-informed debate, we might investigate whether a war would violate the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U.N. Charter, and the U.S. Constitution. We might ask how many adults, children, and infants would likely be killed, injured, and traumatized, how many refugees created, what sort of environmental damage, what economic cost, what erosion of our civil liberties, what heightened secrecy in government, what increase in violence throughout our culture and the country attacked, what likely blowback for decades to come, and what obvious alternatives are available to violence. But, of course, if we asked all that, then we’d never have any wars.
In a more plausible scenario, we might expect a debate to squeeze its way onto our televisions that would ask questions like: How many U.S. troops will die? How much will it cost? Why are we on the same side as al Qaeda this time? How will it end once begun? How does bombing more people express our support for suffering people? Or, depending on the circumstances, maybe even this: Haven’t we been arming that dictator for decades — why the urgency to overthrow him now?
But how would a debate over whether to send hellfire missiles screaming into a wedding party look? What if such a debate were to develop in our news media this Christmas season?
In areas of frequent drone strikes, people are often afraid to get together in large numbers. In Yemen, parents resort to home schooling for fear of letting their children out of the house. Few and far between are the events deemed important enough to risk violating that rule. One such event is a wedding.
How much, we might hear our pundits ask, could be saved by killing 15 people at a wedding as opposed to killing them each separately? (If the missiles alone cost $1 million each, the answer is well over $14 million.) What element of surprise might be gained in obliterating people whose minds are distracted by love and friendship and an important right of passage? What fear and respect might be placed into the minds of the survivors? Let’s say one of the wedding couple survives and the other doesn’t; which one would it be most desirable to let live? Does it matter what kind of dress the bride is wearing? Should fashion consultants be brought in by the Pentagon, or should morning talk shows contribute that analysis as part of their patriotic duty? Should the missiles hit just as little kids bearing flowers enter the scene?
The debate may sound absurd, but its creation would actually be a significant step toward sound government. We ought to vote on or be represented by officials who vote on important decisions for us. We ought to be informed, engaged, and consulted. Therefore, a debate before the next wedding strike is a perfectly reasonable proposal — unless of course we’re going to unilaterally stop blowing up weddings. Far be it from me to suggest anything that rash.
