CIA’S Successful Drone Campaign Nearing Its End?

Oct 17, 2010 by James

Nearly everyday you hear about another unmanned drone deploying its missiles into Pakistan and killing either innocents or insurgents but that could be coming to an end. It seems the government, more specifically the CIA, were so excited to kill insurgents remotely that they were never approved to use some technology that is in the current unmanned ariel vehicles (UAV) and more importantly it wasn’t ready to be used. A soon to be decided lawsuit could bring counter terror operations worldwide to their knees.

On December 7, 2010, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle is expected to issue a decision on a complicated contract and intellectual property-related lawsuit that could ground the CIA’s Predator drones. The CIA is being sued by Intelligent Integration Systems(IISi), which is a small Boston based technology company, that alleges the CIA is using a hack of their software. IISi is seeking an injunction to prevent the CIA from utilizing drones with IISi’s geospacial toolkit and Extended SQL toolkit. IISi says that their technology was pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the “government client” seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.

The result of the CIA using an incomplete “hack” of IISi’s programs means that some of the drones could be missing their targets by as much as 40 feet, and 40 feet off target means civilian deaths. The CIA was more worried about having armed drones in the air rather than accuracy or collateral damage. The company that gave the CIA the unfinished software, Netezza, along with IISi knew that their Geospacial kit contained “far from production ready code” according to emails obtained by FastCompany.

Further documents obtained by FastCompany showed that the drone software was severely flawed and was certainly not ready for use in combat but Netezza decided to reverse engineer the software and sell it to the CIA claiming that it worked just fine. During a court deposition one IISi executive summed it up as “my reaction was one of stun, amazement that they (CIA) want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work.”

IISi released the following statement: “the Superior Court has already ruled that Netezza’s termination of IISi was wrongful and that Netezza breached the contract. Further, the Court approved a stipulation under which Netezza may not disclose to IBM any copies (including any portion thereof) of the IISi Geospatial and Extended SQL Toolkit products. We believe that Netezza’s denial that it used our software is false and that it is directly contradicted by Netezza’s own internal emails to CEO Jim Baum, which show clearly that Netezza “hacked” our software and delivered that hacked and defective version to the government.”

It would be interesting if the court did ground the CIA’s drones but the possibility of that ever happening is non-existent. This is a time where counterterrorism operations trump the Constitution and walking into court and saying “it’s a national security matter” trumps even a Supreme Court ruling. Even if the Judge ordered all of the drones grounded until the infringing software was removed the CIA would likely continue to fly the drones and ignore the order because well they’re the CIA. I would hope that the CIA wouldn’t use software that would potentially put a missile 40 feet off target ever but certainly now that it is able to be publicly scrutinized but do they really care?