Half of military drones may broadcast unencrypted footage

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Published time: October 29, 2012 18:59
Edited time: October 29, 2012 22:59

An Air Force MQ-9 Reaper. (AFP Photo / James Lee Harper)

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Information Technology, Military, Planes, USA

The unmanned drones that have become a hallmark of the Obama administration’s foreign policy wreak havoc across the world every day as part of the broadening war on terror, but you don’t have to be an insurgent or soldier to have a front-row seat.

The US military relies on stealthy, remote controlled Reaper and Predator drones — unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVS — to take out insurgents and suspected terrorists overseas without ever putting boots on the ground. But while the transmissions sent from the empty cockpits to control centers around the globe broadcast each and every move of America’s insanely expensive and extraordinary technology, that doesn’t mean the data is streamed solely to Uncle Sam.

In 2008, the US discovered that Shi’ite militants in Iraq had accessed the video feed sent from those stealth drones using only a $26 piece of software, then sent the footage to laptops that eventually landed in the hands of American intelligence. Wired.com’s Danger Room reports that the problem stemmed from something that warranted a relatively easy solution: retrofitting those aircraft with encryption devices that ensured only authorized eyes could see the stream. Four years down the road, however, a source involved in those upgrades tells the website that it’s still easy to hijack transmissions with hardly any trouble.

Only “30 to 50 percent” of the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones are using fully encrypted transmissions, a source familiar with the retrofitting effort tells Danger Room, adding that the United States’ missile-firing fleet of secret spy ships aren’t likely to be fully fixed until 2014, at which point US President Barack Obama says we will already be ending the war in Afghanistan.

As Noah Shachtman and David Axe write for Wired, transmissions sent from drones to command centers can be routed either via satellite or with Common Data Link radio signals, although full encryption is only applied in the former.

”Standard unencrypted video is basically a broadcast to whoever can figure out the right carrier frequency, so essentially, we are simulcasting to battlefield commanders and the opposing force. If that opposing force knows we can see them and from where, they can take better evasive maneuvers,” a source involved in Navy UAVs tell Wired.

Several sources speaking to Danger Room say that the military is in the midst of spending tens of millions of dollars to upgrade both UAVs and on-the-ground receivers, but full encryption won’t be available across the whole array of arsenals for years to come.

Comments (10)

PawelPOLAND 02.01.2013 22:58

From what i heard they are coming out with DRONES this year with lasers that turn you to dust. No evidence left

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SuperiorEuropean (unregistered) 21.12.2012 11:46

Given the sophistication of the Maker Community, pretty soon I expect to see a bunch of 3DPrinter models for the components of a simple, cheap, lightweight Ground-To-Air missile; with everything from integrated baffles in the one-piece integral fuel tanks, to prevent destabilizing fuel sloshing, to mounting clips for the $9 arduino gyro chip and the 9V battery that gets it from the ground to 20000feet using only ingrediants found at WalMart, without needing thermal batteries, titanium-boron alloys, fuels that melt your face and $20k hammers like the military use!

'Lots of cheap' beats 'a few expensive' in warfare.
Most talk of force multipliers is just talk.
See Russian T-34s vs worthless nazi 70ton super-panzers during WWII for the more details!

Dron es over the usa? Used by the cops? Boy, is that going to be fun!

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juda 30.10.2012 17:11

Surprise surprise. Here's a story a Russian ethnic told me years ago and insisted it was true. I had a pen my grandson brought me back from the Smithsonian. It writes upside sidedown he told me joyfully, knowing it drove me nuts when I had to write higher than myself & the ink would attack gravity. He told me Astronauts use them. I thought nice. And about 5 years after that I was using it within the company of this Russian Ethinic and he said, " Oh you have that pen that the Amerians spent 1 million to develop so the Astronauts could write in space? I said yeah. He laughed (you know that Russian way that you know something is coming) and he said. "Good idea, works great. We Russians sent up pencils, ---with extra lead. About $100, U.S." Yeah. I can't help but believe it. What we USAans seem to not internalize, really internalize, really get to our real consciousness, ---we are working our bums off for that tax money that pays for all these Schizophrenic politicals and military and private contractors to play 'kill' with --and taking away our security and the security of our children and grandchildren in personal/home/countr y protection, medical, education, fair wage, and retirement security. What? Just what? Come on what? What is WRONG with US? Trillions and trillions of $ since WW11? Try to play around with the concept of Trillions and how that figures out per U.S. citizen and all that we could have had for a strong social foundation and still trillions left over to innovate those things that bring a culture up and protect 'our' borders. THINK. These trillions of our brow.brain. brawn. and blood are in the hands of a very few really really bad people! Hey, --ya what goes up must come down, I know. But it seems that what comes down goes up again --is this called elitist power wind? How much longer are we agressive passives gonna take it? The rest of the world seems to have a lot more passion for 'right' than we do!

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