CIA used inaccurate, hacked code to guide killer UAVs

— quickly combining intelligence with live mobile phone surveillance from the air — are reportedly central to the CIA’s targeting of missile strikes by unmanned aircraft.

Williams writes that the partnership between the two firms strengthened, and in August 2008 Netezza acquired exclusive rights to distribute Geospatial, alongside its NPS hardware. By August last year, Netezza was starting to promote its next generation appliance, TwinFin. Whereas NPS was based on IBM’s Power PC chip architecture, the TwinFin relies on cheaper x86 silicon. As a result, Geospatial would not run on the new gear.

Nevertheless, Netezza sales staff sold Geospatial running on TwinFin to a “U.S. government customer,” which later turned out to be the CIA. The purchase order, totaling $1.18 million, via an obscure Virginia IT consultancy, came through on 11 September last year. This despite the fact — as claimed in IISi court documents — that the software product referred to on the order “in fact did not exist.”

Williams notes that up to this point IISi had done little work porting Geospatial, as its engineers had not had physical access to a TwinFin. Indeed, the agreement between the two firms did not require IISi to support the new machines — a fact confirmed last month by a Boston judge — but it agreed to begin the process in September 2009.

Netezza supplied the software firm with TwinFin hardware on 1 October. Within a week, Richard Zimmerman, IISi’s CTO reported that porting Geospatial was “proving fraught with difficulties” and would take at least two months.

Two days later, on 9 October, the relationship took a strange turn. Jon Shepherd, Netezza’s “general manager, location-based solutions,” called Zimmerman to pressure him to deliver the code quicker, court documents say. “He basically told me the CIA… wanted to use [Geospatial] to target Predator drones in Afghanistan and that, quote/unquote, it was our patriotic duty to work with them to get [Geospatial] ported to the TwinFin as fast as possible and that we need to have a phone conversation the next day to discuss that,” Zimmerman said in a sworn deposition to the court.

During a conference call the next day, Netezza CEO Jim Baum repeated Shepherd’s claims that national security demanded IISi’s help, according to the deposition. Shepherd suggested the CIA would accept untested code in chunks, Zimmerman said.

“My reaction was one of stun, amazement that they want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work,” Zimmerman said.

According