Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia

Years ago Pine Gap would be in the news at different times, it doesn't seem to be so so much
these days. I haven't seen the series. It's likely worth a look, so will have a peek myself.

Ryan Gallagher

August 20 2017, 8:05 a.m.

[...]

Richard Tanter, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has studied Pine Gap for years. He has co-authored, with Bill Robinson and the late Desmond Ball, several detailed reports about the base’s activities for California-based security think tank Nautilus Institute. He reviewed the documents obtained by The Intercept and said that they showed there had been a “huge transformation” in Pine Gap’s function in recent history.

The documents “provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa,” Tanter said. “It shows us that Pine Gap knows the geolocations — it derives the phone numbers, it often derives the content of any communications, it provides the ability for the American military to identify and place in real-time the location of targets of interest.”

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The documents “provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved
in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world.”
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The base, which was built in the late 1960s, was once focused only on monitoring missile tests and other military-related activities in countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and India. But it is now doing “a great deal more,” said Tanter. It has shifted from “a national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence — actionable, time-sensitive intelligence — for American operations in [the] battlefield.”

In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Pine Gap played a key role in controversial U.S. drone strikes. Over the past decade, drone attacks have killed a number of top Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Taliban militants. But the strikes — often taking place outside of declared war zones, in places such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan — have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and in some cases are considered by human rights advocates to constitute potential war crimes and violations of international law.

The U.S. and its allies regularly use surveillance of communications as a tactic to track down and identify suspected militants. The NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a cellphone’s SIM card, rather than the content of the calls — an imprecise method that can lead to the wrong people being killed, as The Intercept has previously revealed. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cellphone,” a former drone operator told us in 2014. “We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

Concerns about such tactics are amplified in the era of President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration earlier this year, Trump has dramatically increased drone strikes and special operations raids, while simultaneously loosening battlefield rules and seeking to scrap constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths in such attacks. According to analysis from the group Airwars, which monitors U.S. airstrikes, civilian casualties in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State are on track to double under Trump’s administration.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/19/nsa-spy-hub-cia-pine-gap-australia

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Pine Gap: behind the secret US military base in the Australian desert
ABC-Netflix co-production’s main source is an intelligence veteran who worked at the base for 18 years
Steve Dow @dowsteve
Tue 9 Oct 2018 04.00 AEDT
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/oct/09/pine-gap-behind-the-secret-us-military-base-in-the-australian-desert