But seriously, this seems to be a very poorly designed program. That being said, there has to be something were missing here. Like a manual second level process where a human sorts through the machine selected terrorists and evaluates them. Right? ....
Yeah. This article discloses a very real and very important program, and completely takes it out of its very real and very important context in order to make it sensational. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of this kind of information, and you never stop asking whether or not you did the right thing or even if there is a right thing if you pull the trigger, or drop the bomb, or call in heavy hitters or whatever you do to end that person's life. It's just done. Nobody who has ever killed in these programs would ever glibly send something to the top of a priority list based on a single input from a poorly known NSA program. Every drone strike has a human pilot behind the controls, and their ass is on the line if they don't question suspicious direction. No matter whether it's a well-supported kill or not, that human has to live with it. They have to go back to their lives and tell their children that hitting is wrong when they know they just killed a father. They watch murderers get locked up and ask how they are different because of geography and power. I see the children of men I killed in my son's face. So please don't dismiss the humanity of these men because they have done bad things. It's hard enough for them to not dismiss their humanity for themselves.
From what I understand, sorties are assigned by human coordinators who evaluate intelligence from multiple sources in order to measure out priorities. It's entirely possible that the stuff from the NSA gets added to the pool as "SKYNET says this guy is a baddie." It's also entirely possible that these human coordinators then roll their eyes and say "well if SKYNET says he's a baddie..." and passes them on to the kill pile. After all, they're just Hajis.