Cyberwar (2016) s02e07 Episode Script

1 BEN: The US builds a global surveillance machine.
It's a really large system.
You can think of it as an internet of hellish things.
Designed to track and kill its enemies.
The covert war is borderless.
Unfortunately, our governments are playing double game with each other, and we are paying the price.
Did they turn the world into a battlefield? The fact that we've moved into this new age of just killing people we want to kill is one of the most disturbing things.
It's a pillar of America's War on Terror.
The US government runs a cyber-surveillance machine, tapping and tracking suspected terrorists around the world.
In the shadows, American spies use it to put names on a top secret kill list, and then tick them off by covert assassination.
SOLDIER: Oh, you got it.
BEN: Osama bin Laden was infamously at the top of that list.
But in order for this surveillance machine to work, the US has turned foreign countries into virtual Big Brother states, using methods which would be illegal on American soil.
Shelby Sullivan-Bennis is a lawyer who works on abuses in counter-terrorism, representing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and the victims of US drone strikes.
Now, how much does the data and the intelligence that is sucked up in order to carry out these strikes, how much does it rely on human intelligence and how much does it rely on signals intelligence? What we do know is that in places where drones are operating that are considered areas of active hostilities, there are fewer and fewer human intelligence sources.
Those are areas where we know that the government is using metadata to target people.
Shelby's extremely concerned about so-called "signature strikes" - drone strikes that don't even require the government to know who its killing.
So what exactly is a signature strike? So a signature strike is essentially when the government identifies a target based on a pattern of behaviours based on metadata that they've determined signal you as a terrorist.
So this can be using several different cellphones with a single SIM card, only receiving calls and not making any phone calls.
So it's basically when the government kills people but they don't know who they are.
To be killed because you're holding a gun or because you've just been witnessed blowing up a marketplace, well, that's one thing.
But it's another thing entirely to consider that your internet accessibility and how many phone calls you've made to and from people in different areas, anonymous people, that that sort of thing can get you killed.
The kill list program started in Afghanistan, where the US hunted al Qaeda and Taliban operatives.
Within US intelligence, the strategy is considered a huge success, but the Taliban is still alive and well.
I want to know how the Afghan Taliban is still somehow evading the massive surveillance system designed to hunt them down and kill them.
We arranged a rare telephone interview with a Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan who calls himself Zabiullah Mujahid.
Some say he's not one person, but several, all to avoid being tracked down by American spies.
As a Taliban commander, Mujahid believes he's on the list, and he gets easier to find every time he opens up Google or picks up a telephone.
I understand that you co-ordinate how all the information passes between Taliban commanders.
Can you tell me a little about how all that works? Now, when you use your walkie-talkie networks, do you assume that the Americans are listening in? You're someone who is almost certainly on an American kill list.
Are you ever afraid of being tracked down and killed yourself? And death really has come to thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
But the porous Afghan-Pakistan border allows terrorists to cross back and forth between the two countries, using the Pakistani tribal areas as a base of operations.
So the Americans, with their covert kill list and sophisticated surveillance tools, follow them.
But Pakistan isn't an enemy of the US.
In fact, it's a crucial ally in the War on Terror.
I'm going to Pakistan to see how the Americans run a targeted killing campaign in a country they're not at war with.
(TRAFFIC NOISE) So we just landed in Pakistan, which is one of the places where the CIA and NSA pioneered the kill list.
In Pakistan, the main targets of the US kill list are in the tribal areas, where the government and army have almost zero control.
For years, Pakistanis and others have protested that the drone strikes kill innocent civilians.
Malik Jalal is a tribal elder from the Waziristan region.
He claims he's on that top secret CIA kill list, and that he's already survived four attempts on his life.
He agreed to meet with me in the safety of my guarded Islamabad hotel.
Jalal believes the US began profiling him because of his contacts with members of the Taliban.
He doesn't deny it; as a tribal leader, he says his job is to keep the peace.
But after one meeting in 2011, Jalal openly called for jihad against America.
Do you think that's why the Americans put you on their kill list? What happened there? Did you actually say those things? According to him, those four missiles killed 27 tribal chiefs and inflamed the locals.
Declaring jihad on America isn't exactly the best way to stay off a kill list.
And since there's no way of knowing for sure if you're on it, there's no way of getting off it either.
But for the Americans to be operating the way they are in Pakistan, some argue that the Pakistani government must be giving them a helping hand.
EN: For more than a decade, the S has run a surveillance system around the world designed to take out terrorists.
In order to kill people in countries where the Americans aren't at war, they use targeted drone strikes, a technique that was pioneered in the tribal regions of Pakistan.
But if the US is killing Pakistani citizens in their own country, there must be some cooperation with Pakistan's all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, the state's premier spy agency known as the ISI.
So I'm just waiting right now for my armed guards to come escort me through Islamabad so I can meet with Hamid Mir, a famous Pakistani journalist who's actually had multiple assassination attempts against him, one of which allegedly was done by the ISI.
How are you guys doing? The ISI has an infamous reputation - everywhere.
Its relationship with the US government is complicated.
Since the Cold War, Pakistan's been a vital ally in one of the most strategically important regions in the world, and it receives billions of dollars in US military aid.
But what makes Pakistan such a valuable asset for the US and its intelligence agencies? (TRAFFIC NOISE) Think like an American policy maker.
Think like an American general.
So his problem is Iran, his problem is China, his problem is Russia, his problem is Afghanistan.
Pakistan is in the centre.
Hamid Mir is one of the most prominent journalists within Pakistan to report on the covert collaboration between Pakistan and the US.
So how dangerous is it to report on things like the ISI and drone strikes in this country? I can only give you an example.
There was a journalist, his name was Hayatullah Khan.
He was the one who disclosed the secret of drone strikes in Pakistan.
Because he was living in North Waziristan, and he was the one who pictured part of an American missile, and it was written "Made in USA".
After that, he was threatened to please leave this area, or don't report about the drone strikes.
But after that, he was kidnapped and and then he was killed.
(SIGHING) So I mean, you were shot too.
I was also shot.
I'm not There are many other journalists who were also shot.
So the Pakistani media is in a crossfire.
So that's why now it is very difficult to report about drone strikes, because we cannot go in that area.
And if we have some contacts in that area, and those contacts are providing information to us, so they become also vulnerable.
Because not one, not two, not three, not Pakistani, but many non-Pakistani intelligence agencies, they are listening on our phones! (LAUGHING) Everyone is listening on our phones! We are exposed to everyone, so we are not safe.
Since the first drone strike in Pakistan more than a decade ago, civilians, lawyers, activists and journalists like Hamid Mir have fought their government for more transparency on the American kill lists, and the surveillance program they use to build it.
But it's almost impossible to get answers.
Mohammed Nafees Zakaria is the face of Pakistan's Foreign Office, the equivalent of the US State Department.
He agreed to an interview, but only if we sent him questions in advance, something we don't normally do.
And yeah, he literally read scripted answers to me.
We know from the Snowden documents that there was massive surveillance by the NSA on Pakistan, and there also was some money given to Pakistan by the NSA.
How do you How do you react to that? How did the government respond when that came out? Well, I think When this issue came up of surveillance in 2014, actually we immediately sought explanation from US over their these reports.
And we actually asked for the To respect the privacy of our citizens.
And I think we also made them realize that this was against the spirit of friendship, to subject a friendly country's citizen to surveillance.
How does Pakistan reconcile the illegal spying and drone strikes within its territory by the US, and then also have a security relationship with them and a diplomatic relationship with them? So Pakistan has not and will not reconcile on this issue.
This breaches the mutual trust between the two countries, and obstructs the meaningful cooperation which is going on between the two countries to counter terrorism.
Between the lines of Zakaria's answers, the question remains: How much does the Pakistani government help the US with the kill list and the surveillance state required to sustain it? (CHATTERING) BEN: The American cyber-surveillance machine killing terrorists globally likely needs collaboration.
And as a key ally in the War on Terror, Pakistan allegedly gives the US access to some of the mass surveillance it conducts on its own citizens.
That surveillance explains why it's so hard to get a SIM card for a phone, even in a big city.
So because we know the ISI is so prolific, we brought ourselves a selection of North American burner phones.
So no hotel Wi-Fi for us.
Let's just put it this way: As our fixer tells us, it's easier to get coke and booze and prostitutes in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan than it is to get a burner phone and a SIM.
Because literally everything is getting tapped and tracked by the government.
In order to help Pakistan track its citizens, the US helped build an extensive electronic data system called NADRA, the largest biometric database of citizens in the world.
Everyone in that database is required to provide facial and fingerprint information.
And an NADRA-issued ID card is required for everything from banking, to buying a train ticket, to getting a SIM card for your cellphone.
But according to WikiLeaks, the Pakistani government has offered to share information from the database with the Americans.
Shahzad Ahmad is with Bytes For All, a Pakistani organization working for digital privacy.
SIM cards used to be fairly easy and then again, it is security centered approach.
They thought that SIM cards are being used by terrorists, so everybody needs to be registered.
And what they did was linked the verification of the SIM cards with the citizen's database.
- NADRA, right? - NADRA, yeah.
So NADRA maintains database of every citizen in the country.
That's like over 100 million people.
Yeah.
All that data, for me, for my family, for my kids, everything is there.
And how is it being used, we don't know.
We are not aware of this.
(TRAFFIC NOISE) The average Pakistani has no idea who controls all that personal information.
And the Americans aren't the only foreign power helping build Pakistan's Orwellian surveillance state.
In the name of security, China invests billions in a program called Safe Cities.
It's a network of thousands of security cameras monitoring and recording people as they're coming in and out of the city.
And it's already been activated here.
So China basically just exported their Big Brother CCTV systems to Pakistan? I mean, we have we have all the reasons to believe that.
What they are doing with this data that is being generated on a daily basis? We know that we do not have any data protection laws in this country.
We do not have privacy commissioners in this country.
We do not have any other legislation or any other oversight mechanism that could ensure that the data being generated by these cameras, or this Safe City project, is not going to be abused or misused.
And with so much interest from China, who unfortunately is known for their for being enemy of the internet and enemy of the cyberspace, we need to be worried.
Ahmad worries about all this personal data that's collected by foreign governments.
And given that the US government uses surveillance data to target and kill people in Pakistan, the stakes are incredibly high.
What we call this is the kill list.
It's an assassination project.
If you consider that the US government can't today decide that it wants to kill me without having arrested me and let me face my accuser and defend myself, the same should be true no matter where you are.
And the fact that we've moved into this new age of just killing people we want to kill is one of the most disturbing things.
Is it getting better from a US military perspective in that they're being more surgical about it? "Surgical" I say with quotations.
Yeah, we certainly stand by the idea that one cannot have a surgical or precise drone strike that is based on not an individual and their identity, but on their SIM card.
SIM cards which can be taken out of phones and put into other phones, which can be transferred in a large group.
You could effectively take the SIM cards out, put them in a bag and redistribute them.
We're essentially killing nameless people.
There is no way, just logically, that that can be precise.
BEN: It's almost indisputable; The American government runs a mass surveillance system tracking terrorist targets around the world.
And they've used the information they collect to build a bona fide, global, data-driven killing machine.
Since the beginning of the War on Terror, the US has annihilated al Qaeda's formal command structure and taken out senior Taliban.
But there's no doubt that the Americans have killed innocent people in the process.
I'm in San Francisco to meet someone who was part of that drone program.
It's a really large system.
You can think of it as an internet of hellish things.
Lisa Ling worked on the data system that makes drone strikes possible, and has since become an outspoken critic of the program.
But I mean, you're somebody who helped identify what was it, 121,000 insurgents? That's what the paperwork does say.
Do you feel guilty about that? I feel like it's unforgiving It's unforgivable, it's unconscionable.
When I joined in '91, right, I thought perhaps maybe I would have to kill someone.
Maybe that's possible.
I mean, nobody joins the military and does not think about that, right? But never in my wildest dreams did I think I would participate in the identification of 121,000 insurgent targets.
And really what we mean is mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles.
You know, those are quote unquote "insurgent targets", right? Ling has no idea where those targets were or what happened to them.
The system is deliberately designed to keep people like her in the dark.
Now, I know you can't say because you don't want to get charged under the Espionage Act, but can you give me any sense at all as to how much surveillance the military is doing and needs to carry out these drone strikes? I I don't think anybody actually knows.
I think it's an insatiable appetite.
There's so many areas of gradation in every single culture, and you can't get that through an algorithm.
You can't see that no matter how crystal clear they make the video from drones.
If there were drones loitering right here, right now on the United States of America, I guarantee you that the majority of people would want to have some sort of oversight.
And yet in other countries, in other cultures, what, it doesn't matter? They're less human? Pakistan is one of the first countries outside a declared war zone to be targeted, but it's definitely not the last.
Today, the killing program is operating in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and of course Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But is this industrial killing system, designed to eliminate America's enemies, really just creating more of them? Hamid Mir thinks so.
Unfortunately, wherever they are using their troops or the drone strikes, we don't see peace.
Afghanistan is facing suicide attacks.
Pakistan is facing suicide attacks.
Iraq is facing suicide attacks.
So suicide attacks are still there.
Drone strikes are still there, and suicide attacks co-existing.
I want a friendly relation with America, and America also needs friendly relations with Pakistan.
But unfortunately, our governments are playing double game with each other, and we are paying the price.
The Americans have already decided that the strategy of killing foreign targets based on electronic surveillance is working.
In fact, under President Trump, the military and the CIA now have expanded powers to carry out more strikes and targeted assassinations.
But even if the endless kill lists are taking out bad guys, the policy itself may be threatening America's core values.
The protection of privacy, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the ability to face your accusers.
It's a system that could not be deployed against Americans in their own country.
We contacted dozens of US officials directly or indirectly involved in the kill list program.
Not one would agree to talk to us about it on the record.
And so the lists keep growing, American enemies keep fighting, and the body count keeps rising.