US Air Force destroys ISIS HQ building after spotting it through social media | Hacker News Reader

US Air Force destroys ISIS HQ building after spotting it through social media

defensetech.org

33 pointsub37 comments

Could the mods remove the blogspam link and link to the source?

http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-d...

> “The guys that were working down out of Hurlburt, they’re combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command. And in some social media, open forum, bragging about the command and control capabilities for Daesh, ISIL. And these guys go: ‘We got an in.’ So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] take that entire building out.”

As with many things, the devil is in the details...in this case, the "long story short" part. And I don't see what the big deal is; social media is just another way that information gets accidentally leaked...because it came from a "selfie" or whatever, doesn't make it inherently less "truthy"...it just may require different levels and methods of verification before discovered information becomes actionable information.

And honestly, I don't think this kind of information is much more inherently flimsy than information that comes from a paid informant, or through tortured confessions.

Even worse is that the photo at the top of the article is clearly a photoshopped image of a plane over the desert. The landing gear is down. It makes the entire thing sound like US military propaganda.

This is the image from the original article, completely different airplane too.

http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airst...

It's all stock images either way, nothing I saw even mentioned what kind of jets were deployed.

Also of note is that the airplane pictured in the original article (a F-35) is not used in combat yet, nor is it likely that the limited numbers delivered by now will be rated for combat any time soon unless the US gets into a serious peer fight and actually need all their planes.

Those are F15E aircraft.

The F35 has some signature green lights that really stand out at night (I assume they'll be turned off during combat): http://www.edwards.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/2013/0...

Here is a picture of 2 F35s being refueled at the same time: http://breakingdefense.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/0...

That image looks like a F-15 to me. Either way, just random stock imagery we don't know what kinda of planes deployed the missiles.

Ok, url changed from http://techti.me/2015/06/04/us-air-force-targets-and-destroy.... Sorry we didn't see this sooner.

So let's ask the question: why did they announce this to the press? That sounds like a whole series of classified things.

It sounds more likely to me that the US wants to weaken ISIS' influence on social media, and by planting the idea that posting pictures results in buildings exploding, they'll be less willing to show off images of anything interesting.

Alternatively, the guy in charge of releasing things to the press gains points for doing this, and the guy who loses points by having it released to the press is someone else who didn't have control over it. As with all organisations, there is politics and point-scoring and competing agendas and just plain incompetence.

Well I guess that ISIS selfie guy won't get that promotion after all ...

It also hurts their credibility by portraying them as a bunch of amateurs who a superior force (the US) can destroy with ease.

Perhaps they already knew about the location, but were looking for some appropriate cover to protect an asset. Further, the US military may wish to make ISIS fearful of using social media, which has been a powerful tool for them.

It depends on how stupid the selfie guy was. He could've accidentally left his GPS coordinates in the EXIF data of the image (many phones do this by default). Not much classified sleuthing required to track that down.

You are correct in your analysis. ISIS's main recruitment source is the social media. So, if the US defense can get ISIS to use less social media, it is a net win.

It's worth noting that the US Air Force knows exactly where all of the command posts are for ISIS but due to situations beyond their control (political, civilian populations etc.), they cannot engage.

These media stories are cute, but are a mere snapshot into a very complicated world of engagement.

It's probably more accurate to say that the DoD has a reasonable level of confidence for the location of most of the ISIS command posts. The "situations beyond their control" would also include those confidence intervals. These things are dynamic and complex, like you pointed out. As such, it's unwise to declare absolutes about things like this in warfare.

You're right - I won't edit my post but I agree. I went overboard to contrast the article which might make it appear as though the US military lacks this intelligence.

So based off of the article, they bombed a building based off of a selfie accompanied by some text... am I the only one that sees this as a horrendously awful idea?

Yes, what could possibly go wrong with a policy of bombing every building that an ISIS member posts a selfie in front of?

Of course in real life this is probably some sort of misinformation campaign to try to misdirect from the fact that they have some sort of informant or other means of figuring things out that they want to cover for.

I imagine that the building was remote and likely marked as a suspected terrorist site. The person who posted the photo was likely flagged as a terrorist based on previous data and was identified by facial recognition in the photo. Having a known terrorist at a suspected terrorist facility was likely enough justification to label the site as malicious and bomb it.

The implications of something like this are interesting - it's just a graph theory problem, and hypothetically the computer could be programmed to automate a drone strike when a location reaches a certain score threshold.

Have you watched the movie "Eagle Eye"? How about "WarGames: The Dead Code"? If not, please do. Both, in their own way, have some interesting points regarding the risks involved in using A.I. in warfare, as well as the reduction of complex social interactions to mere graph theory and statistics.

Even if more went into it, it looks awefully gameable, a more extreme version of swatting.

This is my thought as well.

This incident has created the need for ISIS to have disinformation campaigns disseminated on social media by people who would be targeted by the strikes-- they can easily implement a policy in which they allow themselves to have a digital footprint in certain irrelevant areas in order to bait an attack, creating civilian casualties and bringing in new recruits.

This was a serious problem in the early stages of the Afghanistan campaign, when people realised that they could settle longstanding neighbourhood disputes by denouncing their enemies to the Americans. That was partly why the US bombed a number of wedding convoys.

It would be horrendously awful if it was the only signal they had. And yes, to be clear, the military has hit the wrong target in the past.

In this specific circumstance, it appears they got the right target.

The photo was likely just the lead that tipped them off to building. After that they were likely able to confirm it through other means.

It's like looking for a needle in a haystack - the hard part is finding the needle, what's easy is verifying that what you have in your hand is a needle.

Maybe it's parallel construction?

During 2nd Iraq War, some newly arrived Apache helicopters were mortared while they were in hangar area and destroyed. US commanders were mystified because they were in the middle of a huge base and the insurgents couldn’t have know the exact area they were kept in.

And than they discovered that some troops has taken selfie with Apache in the background. The photos unfortunately has GPS location embedded. Insurgents found the photos on social media, figured out the GPS data, and figure out exact location of the Apaches.

I wonder if they used something like Hunter to find it. Seems unlikely that someone just recognized what the building looked like.

http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter

Where's the open source alternative :(

Does it make sense that the USAF will reveal their true tactics and sources of intel to ISIS, or do they want to help ISIS along by showing them where they are making mistakes?

The whole story seems plain stupid.

Did anyone find the tweet or a screenshot of it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com