U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones

[Recursion]

I always thought the "living in caves" rhetoric was a bad idea, because people forget about stuff like this...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-documents-detail-al-qaedas-efforts-to-fight-back-against-drones/2013/09/03/b83e7654-11c0-11e3-b630-36617ca6640f_story.html?hpid=z1

Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.

Although there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has forced a drone crash or interfered with flight operations, U.S. intelligence officials have closely tracked the group’s persistent efforts to develop a counterdrone strategy since 2010, the documents show.

Al-Qaeda commanders are hoping a technological breakthrough can curb the U.S. drone campaign, which has killed an estimated 3,000 people over the past decade. The airstrikes have forced ­al-Qaeda operatives and other militants to take extreme measures to limit their movements in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places. But the drone attacks have also taken a heavy toll on civilians, generating a bitter popular backlash against U.S. policies toward those countries.

Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor. The top-secret report, titled “Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” is a summary of dozens of intelligence assessments posted by U.S. spy agencies since 2006.

[joshcryer]

1. I think a release like this just bolsters the intelligence community.

Something smells fishy about the entire Snowden data dump. It seems to me the most damaging stuff came out already and the rest of it is evidence that the "system works." Hope I'm wrong, but I read the article twice and the Washington Post attempts to paint the drone program as in danger but even it has to admit the countermeasures are working.

[Recursion]

2. Well, a former CIA agent releasing politically damaging information entirely about the NSA

and not at all about the CIA, two weeks after the President publicly urges a shrinking of the security state, doesn't even remotely seem suspicious, you know?