US Drones Target Terrorists Based on Their Cell Phone Location

The United States’ top defense of its Middle Eastern drone program has always come down to two talking points. President Obama says it’s the most efficient, least intrusive thing we’ve got, and he always says that the utmost care is taken to make sure we’re killing terrorists, not innocent civilians.

Well you can probably scratch that second one off the list: Glenn Greenwald has a new NSA informant, and he says that the government regularly uses cell phone metadata to decide where a drone should hit.

According to the Greenwald report in the Intercept, the newly-launched surveillance section of his First Look media venture, a former drone operator with the military’s Joint Special Operations Command who also worked with the NSA said that, “rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the US military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believe to be using.”

In other words, if you leave your phone in a cab in the United States, you hope you can get it back. If you leave your phone in a cab in Pakistan, you might have just killed someone.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that: The phones that are targeted were presumably used at some point for terrorist activity, but anytime you base something as serious as a drone strike on a cell phone tower and not physical evidence, you’re playing with potentially innocent people’s lives.

The JSOC officer says that terrorists have long since caught on: Taliban leaders reportedly hand their phones out to others, and he said that they often “go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave.” The JSOC officer says the program has definitely led to civilian deaths.

“People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” the officer told Greenwald. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

In May, Obama defended the drone strike program, saying it was the best way to reduce civilian casualties while still killing terrorists.

“Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and outrage,” he said. “It is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result in civilian deaths.”

At the same time, the drone program continues to receive pushback as civilian deaths add up. The phone-targeting story isn't going to help, especially in light of the Congressional testimony from Pakistani drone victims during an October hearing held by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), during which Rafiq ur Rehman asked why his family was targeted in a drone strike that killed "not a militant, but my mother."

"Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day," he said. "Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed."

There's no indication that the strike that killed Rehman's mother was based on a cell phone, but it serves to highlight the ramifications of misguided drone attacks. The US has always claimed that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes is far lower than public estimates, which have ranged from about 150 up to about 1,000 in Pakistan, depending on who you ask. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the most often cited source, estimates that 273 civilians have been killed in Pakistan.

“Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured, the highest standard we can set,” Obama said in his May speech, which is one of the only times he’s ever spoken extensively on the subject.

Launching drone missiles at cell phones, however, certainly seems to be one way to kill a lot of people you weren’t meaning to.