Death By Metadata: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald RevealNSA Role in Assassinations Overseas
GUESTS
Jeremy Scahill, co-founder ofThe Intercept, a new digital magazine published by First Look Media which launched today. He is also the producer and writer of the documentary film, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, and also the author of the book by the same name. The film is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. He is a longtimeDemocracy Now!correspondent.
Glenn Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept, a new digital magazine published by First Look Media which launched today. As a columnist for The Guardian, he first broke the story about Edward Snowden.
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In the first exposé for their new venture, First Look Media’s digital journal The Intercept, investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald reveal the National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes. The NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, an unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent and unidentified people. The United States has reportedly carried out drone strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. Scahill and Greenwald join us in this exclusive interview to discuss their report and the launch of their media project.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a breaking news story about the National Security Agency and its secret role helping the military and CIA carry out assassinations overseas. According to journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
A former drone operator for JSOC, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, said the NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, but it’s proven to be an unreliable tactic that’s resulted in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. The U.S. has reportedly carried out strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. The former drone operator, who was a source in the story, said, quote, "It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy," the quote says.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have also revealed the NSAhas equipped drones and other aircraft with devices known as "virtual base-tower transceivers." These devices create, in effect, a fake cellphone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge.
Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s article appears in the new online publication, TheIntercept.org, published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras.
Glenn Greenwald Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist atThe Guardian newspaper. He’s joining us via Democracy Now!video stream from his home in Brazil.
Jeremy Scahill is producer and writer of the documentary film Dirty Wars, which has just been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. He’s also author of the book by the same name. Jeremy joins us from Los Angeles.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Jeremy, let’s begin with you. Lay out the significance of this explosive story.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, we’re living in the era of pre-crime, where President Obama is continuing many of the same policies of his predecessor George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And there’s this incredible reliance on technology to kill people who the United States thinks—doesn’t necessarily know, but thinks—may one day pose some sort of a threat of committing an act of terrorism or of impacting U.S. interests. And the U.S. wants to shy away from having its own personnel on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, eventually Afghanistan, and so what’s happened is that there’s this incredible reliance on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, i.e. drones.
What we discovered in the course of talking to sources, including this new source that we have who worked with both the Joint Special Operations Command and the National Security Agency, is that theNSA is providing satellite technology and communications intercept technology to the U.S. military special operations forces and the CIA that essentially mimics the activities of a cellphone tower and forces individual SIM cards or handsets of phones—there’s two separate devices. When you have your telephone, your mobile phone, you have a SIM card in it, and that can be tracked, but also the device itself can be tracked. And what they do is they force the SIM card or the handset of individuals that they’re tracking onto these cellphone networks, and the people don’t know that their phones are being forced onto this cellphone tower that is literally put on the bottom of a drone and acts as a virtual transceiver. And so, when they are able to triangulate where this individual is, they can locate or track them to within about 30 feet or so of their location.
And what we understand is that under the current guidelines issued by the White House, President Obama gives a 60-day authorization to the CIA or the U.S. military to hunt down and kill these individuals who they’ve tracked with these SIM-card-tracking technologies or handset-tracking technologies, and that they only have to have two sources of intelligence to indicate that this is the individual that they’re looking for. Those two sources cannot—can be signals intelligence, which is what I’ve just been describing, and they can also be what’s called IMINT, or imagery intelligence, meaning just a satellite image of an individual that they think to be this suspected terrorist. They do not require an actual human confirmation that the individual SIM card or phone handset that they’re tracking is in fact possessed by the person that they believe is a potential terrorist. And so, what we understand is that this is essentially death by metadata, where they think, or they hope, that the phone that they’re blowing up is in the possession of a person that they’ve identified as a potential terrorist. But in the end, they don’t actually really know. And that’s where the real danger with this program lies.
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