U.S. Predator Drone
Yesterday, Thursday 17th December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iraqi Militants have been able to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones.
Why is this important? By intercepting the feeds the militants are able to identify areas that are being targeted.
The use of unmanned drones in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased six-fold and they have been the source of much debate and controversy, particularly in Pakistan where they have led to numerous civilian deaths.
The drones constitute some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the US Army’s arsenal and so the hacking, which was achieved using readily available software, can be seen as an embarrassment!
According to reports, the hacking was first discovered 12 months ago when hours worth of recordings were found on laptops captured from militants. Now, you’d think that hacking into this expensive equipment would require some sort of super computer, or at least expensive software, right?
Well, not really. It seems that this was achieved using a $26 software tool, Skygrabber. According to a description on its website, Skygrabber is a software that can be used to intercept satellite data and save the information on your hard-disk!
According to military sources, adding encryption to the streams would have been expensive and it would have caused delays, because of the proprietary nature of the communication technology used.
“There’s a balance between pragmatics and sophistication,” Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.
That’s absolutely true, Mr. Wynne, but it was obviously, you know, important!
DOH! My bad. :-)
That’s no hacking, it’s just gathering unencrypted data. The word “hacking” is misused so much these days…
See what you Dumb-Fuck Yanks get for allowing judges to allow Microsoft patents on living programming languages! Internationally understood, and very much living languages, cannot be patented except in the U.S.A.! Good knowledgeable programmers not confronted by this idiocy could have avoided the asinine notion that since “Americans” did it it was secret knowledge that even lowly peons of other nations would never understand! If even one tenth of the hacking on U.S.A.’s secrets were disclosed publicly by Asians, Americans would come to realize that they stand naked before the rest of the world in the foolish belief that U.S. patents are even acknowledged abroad! Only in the U.S.A. is this “Patent Bull Shiite’ even enforced! Asians have full well written manuals on everything you do Yankee Doodle and Windows 7 is available on the streets of Shanghai for the price of the copy disk! Grow Up!
Easy, Angry-saurus Rex. Try to stay on topic and maintain some composure.
It’s important to note that UAV use is relatively new, and hasn’t seen much use before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yes, there are going to be some hiccups, like ALL new military technology. Discovering these problems help us fine tune it.
The truth is, Wynne’s comment was correct, there is a balance of pragmatics and sophistication. If it were perfectly secure, soldiers on the ground wouldn’t be able to receive the data in real time. Perhaps a patrol is wiped out because they were waiting for their system to decrypt a video stream that would have shown an ambush ahead of them, or IED’s on a road. Then columnists would be crying that the data is being mishandled and this could have been prevented.
The point is that words are cheap, but action speaks volumes. Just because you can make claims against or for an issue doesn’t make the solution obvious or easy. Everything is a cube and has multiple facets; we must look at them all before we make egregious claims.