You really can't tell a lot from this article. It all comes down to what this piece of software does. A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.
They definitely aren't modifying the guidance system on the weapon - those weapons are not built by the CIA. It sounds like this piece of software helps them correlate coordinates for targeting from one computer system to another. That may be bad, it may not.
(Also, in my experience the vetting of designs is pretty rigorous, but I work on the mechanical side and our customer is DOD not CIA so your results may vary.)
Netezza appliance has nothing to do with controlling drones. The tenuous link in the article is established by a failure to understand the intel use of the word targeting (gathering info on a target), as opposed to the aiming a missile military sense. Why would a drone use a data warehouse plugin to control anything operational? It wouldn't. Could a coordinate come out of the system- sure, but just a coordinate that someone else put in there.
Netezza sued IISi in 2009 for failing to deliver the port of their software. It looks like they didn't seem to get much traction with that, made some surprisingly clumsy document releases, showing where they laid down some stupid spy BS to try and push IISi to deliver or give up, or at least hand over the code so the customer could get it working.
http://www.thestreet.com/print/story/10810646.html
Now, we're at the third stage, where the countersuit is claiming reverse engineering (considering that Netezza probably wrote the specs, hard to prove) and Netezza is getting bought by IBM, perhaps to get their legal team aimed at the issue...meanwhile, it gives everyone a good excuse to talk about drones.
> A faulty component in the UAV doesn't necessarily mean that the weapon lands off target.
Someone on reddit pointed out that even if it does, it doesn't matter. If the kill radius is 20 yards, and the bugs mean that it has an error of up to 5 yards... that's not really significant.
edit: Unless, of course, you happen to be bombing something next to an elementary school, a mosque, or a hospital.
I would argue that any time accuracy (or any feature) is expected, then a lack of said feature does matter. You never know when someone somewhere could be relying on the fact that they can get within 5 yards.
Look up "circular error probable" (CEP). When they say "accurate to x meters", they might well mean that 50% of munitions land in an x meter circle --- the other 50%? anywhere (maybe gaussian distro). So all this talk of x meter accuracy is quite misleading.
That may be true, but (assuming a normal distribution [1]) that would also imply that 99% of shots land within 2.6x meters (assuming I didn't mess up my arithmetic).
Whoever is doing the aiming gets a big red circle that encloses the margin of error. If you are off by 5 meters, that big red circle is in the wrong place. The pilot expects a 1% chance of error, in reality it might be 4% (i.e., 4x as many screwups).
[1] Of course it isn't a normal distribution, but this only changes the programming details.
They definitely aren't modifying the guidance system on the weapon - those weapons are not built by the CIA. It sounds like this piece of software helps them correlate coordinates for targeting from one computer system to another. That may be bad, it may not.
(Also, in my experience the vetting of designs is pretty rigorous, but I work on the mechanical side and our customer is DOD not CIA so your results may vary.)