What is ABI - and will it make drones even deadlier?

S AT U R D AY 22 FEBRUARY 2014 This week Senator John McCain mo e! to shi"t contro# o" US !rones "rom the C$A to the !e"ence !e%artment& Meanwhi#e' "ears (row a)o*t the a%%#ication o" acti it+, )ase! inte##i(ence to !rones&

Barack Obama's reforms to US spying will seriously limit what data the NSA can hold about Americans, but its vast intelligence operations against terror targets abroad are only likely to grow

!rones will be central to this e"pansion by tracking and defining potential targets and combining with an emerging data trend# activity$based intelligence, or AB%, which has been called &the most important intelligence methodology of the first 'uarter of the ()st century& by one of the most senior heads of US intelligence

!rones have become the vital tool in drawing &patterns of life& in conflict *ones and hostile foreign lands, to help track people and potential terror threats $ even when the identities of those individuals are unknown S%eci"ic in!i i!*a#s are )ein( tar(ete!' e en tho*(h the Unite! States !oesn-t know their i!entities&+eremy Scahill AB% is now essential for sucking meaning from the ever$e"panding mass of surveillance and signals intelligence gathered by the US and its allies ,he sheer volume of data collected means that more and more work is being done by computers $ on the ground, and also carried by the drones themselves

,he -.$/ 0eaper drone is being used in Afghanistan to find potential targets and draw their life patterns using surveillance systems made by US company 1"elis $ and it may soon be doing a lot more

Bernard Brower, a development manager at 1"elis, told 2hannel 3

News that unmanned aerial vehicles &are definitely not able to identify people, identify threats&, but may only be a few years away from being able to divine a target's motives &At this point the UA4s are 5ust finding patterns of life,& -r Brower says &%t's a hard 'uestion of when will they be able to identify a certain pattern as threatening % think we're minimum )6 years away from something like that if not more, because the problem becomes more and more comple", it becomes e"ponentially more difficult to look at intent &

,he intelligence collected by drones and other methods is already a ma5or component of targeted killings by US forces, according to +eremy Scahill, author of !irty 7ars# ,he 7orld is a Battlefield, who has carried out e"tensive research on targeted killings by US forces Read more: Why big business and the NSA sift through your data patterns He paints a frightening picture of impersonal military strikes on unknown individuals, claiming that the !A and the covert "oint Special #perations ommand create basic data profiles of targets without establishing who the people actually are$ S*ch is the a%%ea# o" AB$ that it ma+ ser e as a cata#+st to )rin( inte##i(ence a(encies to(ether Under programmes run by the 2%A and +SO2, individuals were given &numbers and code names&, based on profiles defined by the changing locations of their mobile phone and its S%- card, he said

&%f that handset or that S%- card have been in a particular mos'ue and then in a certain restaurant, then they're in a gathering with three other S%cards that they're monitoring, those people move up the list, even if their individual identity is not known &

&%n some cases, the specific individuals are being targeted, even though the United States doesn't know their identities, and may not have any actual evidence that they're involved in terrorist activity & ,he 2%A and +SO2 both refused to comment to 2hannel 3 News on their intelligence methods, but -r Brower says individuals do not need to be identified when establishing their &patterns of life&

!rones use wide$area motion surveillance to collect images over large areas, at a low frame rate and at high resolution &,hink of it as 8oogle 1arth, only being updated at one or two frames a second,& -r Brower says

&7ith that we're able to start tracking cars, tracking individuals, and while we don't actually see the individual or identify the individual or identify the car, we can see the trends that happen in the imagery &

&7e can also derive 9! models from this, so we have an entire city in a model, and therefore we're able to identify things like certain types of building, how big they are &

!rones can help determine the &normal& patterns of behaviour across entire cities and send warnings when activity deviates from those patterns, drawing templates for activity around schools which can be applied to similar buildings elsewhere, he says

2oncerns have long been held over the use of drone strikes by the US in areas such as :akistan, prompting a shift in policy from Barack Obama in

+uly last year when he promised to rein in their use

But a recent attack in ;emen suggests that little has changed# at least )( people were killed at a wedding in !ecember during a drone attack, raising doubts about Obama's commitment to more responsible military action AB$ is now essentia# "or s*ckin( meanin( "rom the e er e.%an!in( mass o" s*r ei##ance an! si(na#s inte##i(ence !espite the persistent worry over US decision$making, rapid advances in technology will mean ever greater data volumes that people will find even harder to sift through to find patterns $ which in turn strengthens the need for AB%

,he principles behind AB% are not new, originating in techni'ues used to track submarines in the )/<6s and =6s, but AB% itself is starting to dominate strategic thinking in America's myriad intelligence&community& of )< independent agencies What is A%!, and how does it work& 'he practice of activity(based intelligence grew out of the need to find patterns in huge amounts of information, gathered in various ways from different sources$ According to )etitia )ong, director of the National *eospatial( !ntelligence Agency, A%! helps to find +weak signals+ of potentially interesting activity in the midst of +big and noisy data+ ( in everything from social media to the welter of signals picked up from earth,uake and ocean sensors$ A%! is key to finding what former -S defence secretary .onald Rumsfeld called +unknown unknowns+ ( that is, unknown targets with unknown behaviours$ A%! uses data on activities collected over a larger area and a prolonged period of time, much like a fingerprint database: building up what currently seems like irrelevant data for when it may be needed in the future, for solving a case that no one has thought of yet$ !n operations,A%! could be used to collect the licence plates of all cars in a certain area for searching at a later date$ Advances in technology mean that future data collection sensors will be able to +tip off+ one another automatically when activity of interest occurs, helping to record vital information with less human intervention$ Automated metadata tagging ( describing what the data refers to ( will also make correlation much faster$ Such is the appeal of A%! that it may serve as a catalyst to bring agencies together and

standardise their working methods ( making them ever more capable of spotting trends even as #bama tries to rein in their data activities$

A%! is in the same family of intelligence analysis as Raytheon/s controversial R!#' research programme, which can mine social media like 0acebook and 'witter to track people/s movements and predict what they will do ne1t$

0%O, has not disappeared $ it has simply been renamed %ntersect 2onnect $ and its technology was reportedly shared with the US government in (6)6 as part of a 5oint research pro5ect %ts potency as an intelligence tool may only grow as younger people appear to become less concerned about the eventual uses of the information they put online Read more: 2arch of the machines ( is the future of warfare robotic& 'he -S appetite for the treasures that A%! can unearth has not diminished, despite the widespread trauma caused by 3dward Snowden/s intelligence leaks$ !f anything, the hunger is growing$

)etitia )ong is director of the powerful National *eospatial(!ntelligence Agency, which spans intelligence and military operations$ She said at the end of 4567 that A%! has become +the most important intelligence methodology of the first ,uarter of the 46st century+$

She went further, calling A%! +as basic and as important as photographic interpretation and imagery analysis became during world war !!+$

As 2r %rower says, computers and drone sensors will only get +faster, better, cheaper and smaller+$ Which means more data, more computer processing ( and a lot more A%!$