'Widowmaker' Is the Five Eyes Spy Collective's Most Tasteless Codename

The stash of secret documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden has been a treasure trove of classified codenames from the spy agencies of the Five Eyes, the allied intelligence collective that includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Some are simply bizarre, such as "Squeaky Dolphin," "Dreamy Smurf" and "Egotistical Giraffe," some are more disquieting, such as "Boundless Informant," "Skynet," or "Turmoil."

But the most tasteless and creepiest of them all might be "Widowmaker," the codename for a team of spies from the NSA, the British GCHQ, and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which was briefly mentioned in a Guardian article on Wednesday.

The "Widowmaker" team's job was to "discover communications intelligence gaps in support of the global war on terror," the Guardian explained.

Although the story doesn't delve too much into details, and the original Snowden documents referred to in the story were not released, what that means is that the "Widowmaker" team helped track and geo-locate alleged terrorists. The information provided by the "Widowmaker" team was then used to bomb and kill those targets—hence its disturbing and perhaps tasteless name.

"Widowmaker" was part of a surveillance program in support of a drone strike in Yemen codenamed "Overhead," according to the Guardian, which shared the source documents with The New York Times. (Curiously, the Times' article based on the documents doesn't mention "Overhead" or "Widowmaker.")

The Snowden documents confirmed once again that data collected from cellphones or computers, the so-called "signals intelligence" or "SIGINT," is a key element of the US drone war.

Spies' fundamental role in locating and killing alleged terrorists—and many innocent people too—was first revealed by The Intercept last year. This was later confirmed by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, who said that "we kill people based on metadata."

That metadata, however, isn't always as accurate as spies wish it was. A certain cell phone, for example, may be used by more than one person, making it hard to determine who the drone should target and try to kill. At times, the target might really be the suspected terrorist that American and British spies identified; at times, it might just be an innocent bystander who find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, which perhaps makes the choice of the codeword "widowmaker" a little unfortunate.