OSINT – Austin Plane Crash
Wow. We may be watching a canary in the coal mine. (Bear in mind, this is very, very ad-hoc analysis, but may yield higher quality in the future.)
UPDATE The website was Joe Stack’s prior to this event, and wasn’t his manifesto.
OSINT reveals that one Joseph Stack crashed a plane into a building in Northwest Austin. He may or may not have burned down his house (with or without his wife Sheryl and kids inside) and stolen a single engine aircraft (now appearing to be his) from Georgetown Airport (a small municipal facility north of Austin).
The address of the hit building is is 9430 Research Blvd, Bldg 1. Austin, TX 78759. Apparently there is an IRS office housed in the building but I haven’t seen the source. Building 3 houses an FBI satellite office for its San Antonio field office.
Basic flightplan:
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He may have published his suicide note here. (Full text is below the fold. Verification on the way). Whois (for what it’s worth) –
Stack, Joe
925 E Hwy 80
287
San Marcos, TX 78666
US
Stack also shows up on bankruptcy filings here (page 21).
The full text of his note follows.
Lara M. Dadkhah On CAS = FAIL
Lara M. Dadkhah, once a graduate student in Security Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, has written the most brain-dead op-ed I’ve read on the war in Afghanistan in years. It’s an infantile perspective on a complex dynamic. Lots of cheerleading, no insight.
There’s not much to it:
So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.
Or this one:
Logic dictates that no well-ordered army would give up its advantages and expect to win, and the United States military, which does not have the manpower in Afghanistan to fight the insurgents one-on-one, is no exception.
Her point is much like Zen’s anecdote of the drunk guy looking for his keys under the streetlamp rather than where he lost them, because that’s where he can see. She’s saying CAS sorties haven’t kept pace with the increase in US operations. No shit. There’s lots of material available to her if she wants to come out of the scorched earth school of thought and understand even the basics of what it takes to win the kind of war we’re fighting.
What even more bizarre about this nonsense, is the vagueness of Dadkhah’s background and current employer. Why is she shilling for the air power folks? Does she work for Boeing – in marketing? Is she just an incompetent self-declared ‘intelligence analyst’?
Jumping into what is available on Dadkhah, she:
has worked as an open source analyst covering biodefense issues in Iran and Afghanistan, and as a data analyst for current coalition information operations in Afghanistan.
The first fluff sounds like an internship or research assistantship of some kind. The second… none of the IO operators I know would be remotely interested in publishing an op-ed in one of the most widely read newspapers in the world calling for more civilian deaths in Afghanistan. In fact, this is precisely the kind of thing they work hard to mitigate and counter.
NYT’s Kouwe = Victim of the System
Unless news outlets are going to lock their bloggers down to utilize only their own raw data/articles, this kind of thing is going to be pretty prevalent.
Poor guy’s job was to centralize news from a disparate news streams in an effort to generate advertising revenue. Of course he was digging into other people’s journalism (raw data). That was kind of the point. Unfortunately, the failing rule set of his profession resulted in a blown up career.
Please Rob Me
Looks like someone’s taken my idea on listening + location, and made a first pass at it. PleaseRobMe. Cool.
Next steps are outlined here.
ECONned
Yves of Naked Capitalism has a book coming out on March 2.