Could the mods remove the blogspam link and link to the source?<p><a href="http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-destroys-isis-hq-building-using-social-media/" rel="nofollow">http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-d...</a><p>> <i>“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.”</i><p>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.<p>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.
So let's ask the question: why did they announce this to the press? That sounds like a whole series of classified things.<p>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.
It's worth noting that the US Air Force knows <i>exactly</i> where <i>all</i> of the command posts are for ISIS but due to situations beyond their control (political, civilian populations etc.), they cannot engage.<p>These media stories are cute, but are a mere snapshot into a very complicated world of engagement.
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?
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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter" rel="nofollow">http://www.sri.com/work/projects/hunter</a>
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?<p>The whole story seems plain stupid.