CIA used inaccurate, hacked code to guide killer UAVs

on the phone with you guys to talk about some options in the event we need an alternative TwinFin solution,” Shepherd told Netezza engineers in an e-mail.

On the Thursday one of the engineers told Jim Baum via e-mail that “it appears” Geospatial was working on TwinFin. On Friday it emerged that however Netezza adapted the software, the results were inaccurate. “For some strange reason many of the calculations are a little off, from 1 to 13 meters,” wrote Joe Wiltshire, a federal account manager at Netezza.

“The customer is not confident they can live with the uncertainty in meters unless we can tell them a bit about why this is happening.”

“No matter how you slice this, we are likely screwed,” Netezza CEO Baum replied.

Williams writes that the unreliable results were traced to a floating point problem, but less than a week later Wiltshire reported to Shepherd that in fact “they are satisfied” and believed “the minor discrepancy in metrics… is due to [TwinFin] doing a better job”.

“Thank God for optimists,” came Shepherd’s reply.

The solution was later referred to as “the spatial toolkit hack” in Netezza e-mails when it began producing further errors in November. The existence of the hack, and its use at the CIA was only revealed after Netezza sued IISi, claiming it breached its 2008 contract by refusing to port Geospatial to TwinFin.

 

That case was dismissed last month, with the judge finding that contrary to Netezza’s repeated claims, IISi was under no obligation to carry out the work. Discovery also revealed that Shepherd had called on staff to develop “our own version of the spatial toolkit,” which was introduced in January this year as Netezza Spatial, which is available on the open market.

Now IISi claims both the hack and Netezza’s own software are illegally based on reverse engineering and misappropriation of its trade secrets, and is pursuing an injunction that if granted would block their use by anyone. Williams notes that it is unclear which, if either, is currently in use at the CIA. A hearing on the injunction application is scheduled next week.

The complex case, which has so far received scant press attention, has the potential to embarrass the CIA, and the White House. President Obama has significantly expanded use of clandestine drone assassinations, despite heavy criticism from the UN and others.

Questions remain over whether repeated Netezza claims that the CIA needed Geospatial for drone assassination operations were correct, and the full truth is unlikely to be made public. The suggestion the agency accepted a rushed job and saw inaccuracies in an optimistic light, however, is likely to draw further controversy to the program.