It's like looking for a needle in a haystack - the hard part is finding the needle, what's easy is verifying that what you have in your hand is a needle.
Of course in real life this is probably some sort of misinformation campaign to try to misdirect from the fact that they have some sort of informant or other means of figuring things out that they want to cover for.
The implications of something like this are interesting - it's just a graph theory problem, and hypothetically the computer could be programmed to automate a drone strike when a location reaches a certain score threshold.
In this specific circumstance, it appears they got the right target.
This incident has created the need for ISIS to have disinformation campaigns disseminated on social media by people who would be targeted by the strikes-- they can easily implement a policy in which they allow themselves to have a digital footprint in certain irrelevant areas in order to bait an attack, creating civilian casualties and bringing in new recruits.
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.
http://defensetech.org/2015/06/03/us-air-force-targets-and-d...
> “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.”
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.
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.
http://defensetech.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/ISIL-Airst...
It's all stock images either way, nothing I saw even mentioned what kind of jets were deployed.
These media stories are cute, but are a mere snapshot into a very complicated world of engagement.
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.
The whole story seems plain stupid.
