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hospitalized, and was eventuallyy allowed to return to the United States.
The murder of Greg Faull remains unsolved. McAfee now lives in
Tennessee, and in 2015 he decided to run for president to advocate for more
cyyberfriendlyy policies in the US government. He doesn’t blog nearlyy as
often nowadayys.
Let’s sayy yyou are an ambitious yyoung jihadist, and yyou are proud to be
posted to a recentlyy established militaryy headquarters of Daesh, or ISIL.
What’s the first thing yyou do? You pull out yyour cell phone and take a
selfie. Worse, in addition to the photo of yyou and yyour new digs, yyou post a
few words about the sophisticated equipment available at this particular
facilityy.
Half a world awayy, reconnaissance airmen at Florida’s Hurlburt Field are
combing social media and see the photo. “We got an in,” one of them sayys.
Sure enough, a few hours later three JDAMs (joint direct attack munitions)
take out that shinyy new militaryy building. 2 All because of a selfie. 3
We don’t alwayys consider what else lies inside the frame of a selfie
we’ve just taken. In film and theater this is called the mise-en-scène,
roughlyy translated from the French as “what’s in the scene.” Your picture
might show a crowded cityy skyyline, including the Freedom Tower, outside
yyour apartment window. Even a picture of yyou in a rural setting—mayybe a
prairie extending out to the flat horizon—gives me valuable information
about where yyou live. These visuals provide tinyy location clues that might
tip off someone who is eager to find yyou.
In the yyoung jihadist’s case, what was in the scene was a militaryy
headquarters.
Embedded in the metadata of the selfie were the precise longitude and
latitude, or geolocation, of the place where the photo was taken. General
Hawk Carlisle, the head of the US Air Combat Command, estimated it was
a mere twentyy-four hours from the time that selfie was first posted on social
media to the complete destruction of that headquarters.
Certainlyy the metadata inside yyour image files can be used to locate yyou.
EXIF data in a digital image contains, among other things, the date and time
when the picture was snapped, the make and model number of the camera,
and, if yyou have geolocation activated on the device taking the photo, the