CIA Drones May Have Used Illegal, Inaccurate Code 279
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."
Why is the CIA attacking anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
The CIA is involved in the collection and analysis of foreign data.
Building an attack drone is, let's say, missing the mark.
Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of all the hardware that is controlled by software, I would have thought drone software would be the most scrutinized. Unbelievable. Even more reason why we should not arm robots (even remote human operated ones) with weapons such as Hellfire missiles.
Re: Confounded (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not *that* big of a deal. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless you're in the house 13 meters down the street from the real target :)
I think they buried the lead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
to direct secret assassination drones in central Asia.
The CIA has the authority to direct secret assassination drones? Inside of Pakistan and possibly other countries?
Did we learn NOTHING from the Bay of Pigs, Nicaragua, the equipping of the Mujaheddin with weapons, etc... ? The CIA should not be fighting wars. We're supposed to be the city upon the hill. We shouldn't be fighting our wars in secrecy.
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:5, Insightful)
To quote many prominent Republicans, "9-11 changed everything."
To be fair, it did. It gave cover for authoritarian assholes to do whatever they wanted to do. Fighting wars in secrecy is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to the large gulag, comrade.
IP theft by drone overlords! (Score:5, Insightful)
Military drones, armed and dangerous, operating software resulting from IP theft?
Heh... I'd love to see the Business Software Alliance go after these guys... :-)
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude. That's been common knowledge for years.
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Equipping the Muj with weapons was worth it, even counting the blowback (which was more consequence of ABANDONING A-stan than equipping the Muj).
Lest we forget, the Cold War was a VASTLY more important and larger struggle than the current police actions. A few thousand or few tens of thousands dead in late consequence of that existential conflict is a trifle. We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if there is any real problem.
And before anyone gets all bent hear me out and I mean from a tactical point of view.
Does it matter if the the drone ends up 13 meters away from a check point?
When using a Hellfire the operator will manually point the camera/laser at the target and fire the missile.
It really doesn't matter because there is a man in the using a laser designator.
If the Drone is dropping JDams then there may be a problem.
I believe there are two modes. One where the drone/pane uses it's video/laser systerm to pick the target.
This is the most accurate because it is a differential system. The plane tells the bomb to hit the target x meters away in y direction from where the GPS says we are now.
The other mode is a blind drop where the JDam goes to a preset area.
So no Hellfire missiles will work just fine. JDAMS may be an issue but I are they using them in the pre-programmed mode much? I can not see a good reason why when using a drone.
Oh and as to not arming robots? Too late really. We have been doing it for ever 100 years now.
The Torpedo is a Robot. The first ones where really steampunk killing robots. Suicidal ones to be sure but still robots.
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A few thousand or few tens of thousands dead in late consequence of that existential conflict is a trifle. We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays.
What do you mean we kemosabe?
Wouldn't it be nice if the people who felt it was acceptable to kill a few thousand people for their political goals were included in the total?
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
If my understanding is correct, this software was used to determine the locations of people making phone calls. So if it's off by 13 meters, the operator may chose the wrong target. The missile being laser guided doesn't help you if you're laser guiding it to the wrong place.
Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone who works in/for the U.S. military industrial complex should quit if they have any shred of morality in their being. It's way beyond defense.
Re:ROFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Until later, when it became clear it was very badly designed software.
Let me see if I have this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
1) US creates military drones used in Pakistan.
2) Drones are controlled using software.
3) Software company that writes drone software is bought by IBM.
4) Software can now, potentially, be outsourced to IBM development personnel in um, Pakistan.
Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?
Re:13 meters? (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, 13 meters is nothing. Civilians have been watching too many movies to think war is fought on that scale.
13 meters is a hell of a lot if there's a hospital or school ten meters from the target. This isn't warfare, it's assassinations. A 13 m discrepancy when you're trying to assassinate someone is pretty damn unacceptable.
Also, the system was used to locate targets. So it might say the target is in one hut, when in fact, they are in a hut 13 meters away. The drone's pilot would then designate the wrong hut with the laser. The system is for target selection, not missile or drone guidance.
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
And while yes, being 13 meters away from a hellfire hit is still going to turn your brain to mush, a blase attitude towards the need to be as accurate and efficient as possible in target selection is what leads to blue on blue and death of civies. Once you start accepting 13 meter inaccuracies as "good enough" you're on a slippery slope. You want to be as accurate as your weapon system allows you to be, and you always want to strive to improve upon it.
Re:Let me see if I have this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when I was a lowly QA tester for a company that took DARPA contracts involving things specific to North Korea, it never ceased to amaze me that the entire programmer staff were H1B's from China, who just happens to be North Korea's main ally, who were hired solely for their utter cheapness.
This is why I just can't take tin-foil hat people seriously.
Illegal Software (Score:3, Insightful)
The CIA? This is a bunch who allegedly run clandestine torture camps. Use illegal software - oh no, they'd never do that...
Re:Lest we forget (Score:5, Insightful)
The greatest American general? Would that be Patton? Or Lee? Or the only man ever to get higher marks at West Point than Lee, Douglas MacArthur? Pershing was no slouch either. Eisenhower had actually been subordinate to both Pershing and MacArthur earlier in his career, and only a lucky break getting assigned to the General Staff in D.C. that allowed him some paper-pusher promotions got him to the head of the queue. He barely even had any combat experience.
The war in Germany was limited because the Americans and British, while not pro-Nazi (except the people where were), weren't really anti-German. There are too many Germans in the US and Britain for that to happen, and the current set of British Royals are German. My grandfather on my mother's side fought in Europe during WWII, but before he shipped out they trained him for bayonet on dolls with Japanese features.
The American people at that time probably would have accepted extremely high losses fighting the Japanese and wouldn't take anything less than unconditional surrender. If they hadn't given up after the two nukes, no one here would probably ever have heard the phrase "made in Japan."
But what the OP was referring two was more along the lines of the fact that between the US, UK and Canada, we suffered over 10,000 casualties, with well over 2000 of those being actual battlefield deaths, just on D-DAY. Just D-DAY, not even the whole Normandy campaign. We have had a bit of 4,000 dead in all 7 years of the Iraq war, while we lost over 418,000 in WWII, or about 0.32% of our population at the start of the war.
I'm not trying to diminish the feeling of loss I'm sure the families of the 4,000+ US soldiers who have died in Iraq must feel. However, the fact that in 7 years we've lost about twice the number of soldiers we lost trying to get ashore in France on 6 June, 1944, speaks volumes about what "limited" war might actually be.
tl;dr you're wrong.
In Soviet America, Zeroes Divide You! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and as to not arming robots? Too late really. We have been doing it for ever 100 years now.
The Torpedo is a Robot. The first ones where really steampunk killing robots. Suicidal ones to be sure but still robots.
This is not the root issue of using a robot. The root issue is that technologically advanced societies have been pushing the button from further and further away. The further away they are, the less incentive they have to make sure that their target is valid.
First, you've got hand to hand combat. You're not going to engage unless you absolutely have to, and can deal with listening to someone gurgle and plead while they bleed out. Then you can move on to ranged weapons. In the early days, you had to get pretty close to hit someone with a musket, but you still at least had to watch people die. Then we got cannon. Rifles. Machine guns. Artillery. Airplanes. Satellite guided bombs. With each advance in military technology, you are taking less risk to your own life when you take the lives of others. That's why there are 6,000 dead "coalition" troops and several hundred thousand dead Afghans and Iraqis. It's not a war, it's a shooting gallery with political implications. If it were a war, like it was with the Japanese and the Nazis, there would be a front somewhere. The chances of Iraqis or Afghans crossing continents and oceans are not virtually zero, they are exactly zero.
Now we're at the point where some militaries have the majority of their apparatus safely tucked away in a megabase or in the air or even back in their home country. Ninety nine percent of the military are good guys who sign up thinking they will be fighting for their country. For the military to work, when the guy with the most penises on their shoulder says "Kill" the command must be passed down until a trigger is pulled somewhere. 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.
When the top brass are over your shoulder, you'd better click the button and blow up the house.
And soon the top brass won't even need to issue a command. They will order the command, and the quasi-sentient robots (not some half assed definition that fits your argument) will kill, and the grunts will simply arrive to ID the body parts.
The real problem with this technology is that there is no pushback for human life. If a politician wants it, and he can find someone in the military who will perform it, you can bet your ass that millions of innocent people will die as a result. The more humans you remove from the end of the equation, the less humane the result will be.
Re:Wow. (Score:1, Insightful)
I started to refute what you wrote, line by line, as every single point you made is wrong. The assumptions you make aren't even valid (hint: asserts are for preventing programming errors, not checking code -- that's what a compiler and unit tests are for). I'm not going to write anything more, as if you are interested at all in programming, you will visit a real forum (like Stackoverflow) to reeducate yourself, where this topic has been covered a thousand times.
Re:Wow. (Score:1, Insightful)
So the whole concept of code contracts just go right over your head, don't they?
Re:13 meters? (Score:5, Insightful)
For assassinating houses, 13 meters will most likely still give the remote operator the same house.
In sparsely-built American suburbs, perhaps. Most places that's the house next door, or the car across the street or a couple of car lengths ahead or behind.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
asserts are for preventing programming errors
Correct. They are a development tool. There is no reason to have one remaining in embedded code that is declared to be releasable (and you're lazy if you do it in desktop code, too).
If you can grep "assert" in your code, you have work left to do.
How could they not know their job? (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire point of American warfare is to expend as much ammunition as possible so to stick the American public with the biggest bill possible. A 13 meter margin of error means you can justify using three guided missiles instead of one. How does a military contractor not see the benefit of that? How are they supposed to create business for you if you're tying them up in court!
These clowns can't possibly think they're actually looking for WMD's and Osama Bin Laden could they? They're looking for an intractable enemy to spend billions trying to irradicate, and they've found them in the Taliban, just like Isreal found the Palestinians. Spooky sneaky "bad guys" are literally booming business.
Re:13 meters? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Especially those of us standing near the people getting shot with missiles.
Re:Lest we forget (Score:3, Insightful)
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US (they had after all nearly been destroyed by Germany, a smaller country) and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union. That, and what that notorious left-winger Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex".
Eisenhower wasn't upset about having a strong, high technology military. He was concerned that crackpot projects were excessively milking the country for money and that military spending should be looked upon always with a certain amount of clear eyed judgement to prevent unwarranted waste.
Nuclear powered bombers? Remember that one? Safeguard? Heck, even now NMD is being built for pork purposes under the smokescreen of a fictional "rogue nation" threat.
Even the Sovs had their own version military industrial complex. They called it the "metal eaters alliance".
However, as I suspect that you're writing that from your parents' basement, I doubt that you actually know any history, or were even around for the Cold War."We are too easily impressed by small wars nowadays"- if you knew any history, you would know that the Western invasion of Germany was a limited war because high casualties would not be accepted by the American and British public. Read up on Eisenhower. You need to learn about the greatest American general.
I'd say it was pretty much total war. There was a certain amount of trust within the western allied governments that the generals would not be wasteful with soldiers lives and I think Eisenhower and his colleagues were cognisant of that.
Re:I think they buried the lead.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Wouldn't it be nice if the people who felt it was acceptable to kill a few thousand people for their political goals were included in the total?"
They frequently risk that, and fear doesn't stop those who think the game is worth the candle. Killing thousands of enemies has often been the price of progress.
Killing thousands of Brits, Tories and Hessians freed the US from England. Killing thousands of Confederates freed the slaves. Killing millions of Nazis and Italian Fascists saved Europe. Killing millions of Japanese rescued much of Asia from Imperial Japan. Killing millions of Commies and their proxies contained them to buy time for China and Russia to outgrow Communism.
Killing often works very,very well, and it works even if you don't like that it works. Sufficient force trumps everything else.
The real world is not written by Tom Clancy (Score:3, Insightful)
What the CIA do in the real world is not written by Tom Clancy, or it seems by anybody that has a clue what the organisation should be doing. Yet another example of Horse Judges out of their depth and unable to do anything useful even if they were given the best possible people to work for them.
Did we learn NOTHING.... (Score:1, Insightful)
To answer your question, the continuing lesson we've learned is that war channels national wealth to a relatively small coterie of companies and their owners/shareholders, etc. As long as there is money to be made by killing people, we will continue to ignore the larger lessons that might actually help us make a better world.