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Brian Everstine writes at Air Force Times that US intelligence officers were able to locate and bomb an Islamic State command center based on a photo and comments in social media. "The [airmen are] combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command," said Gen. Hawk Carlisle, commander of Air Combat Command. "And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da'esh, ISIL, And these guys go 'ah, we got an in.' So they do some work, long story short, about 22 hours later through that very building, three JDAMS take that entire building out. Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours."
Carlisle was careful to not go into great detail about the how the information was gathered and what additional effort went into targeting those bombs. It's easy to imagine that in addition to the information gleaned from the initial post that the Air Force used satellite and drone reconnaissance data. It's also possible that US intelligence could have actively engaged with the original poster in order to draw out information. Attackers and researchers have shown time and time again that simply asking a target for information—either by posing as a trusted individual or using carefully created phishing attacks—works even better than fancy information-stealing digital attacks.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:20AM
Your phrasing appears to be choosen to deliberately conceal the facts.
There is no reason to believe the photo was not made public on social media. Ergo no reason for special spy access required. If their goal was to sell special spy access, they would have said that's what they used.
> because Americans don't like the idea of government spying on them through social media.
Of all the spying things that people have been unhappy about, spying on them through social media is at the bottom of the list. Its all the other stuff, stuff that people think of as private like phone calls, email, text messages and web-browsing that people are unhappy about. Someone looking at publically posted pictures on instagram, not so much.
But kudos for pulling in least four conspiracy-theorists to mod you up on the basis of misleading framing. Of course, being a sucker for misleading framing goes with the territory for conspiracy-theorists.