Life Imitates Blog

by Eric Martin

Freaky prescience from Robert Mackey.  He noted in his prior post on the preferability of bombers to drones:

Actually, there is a lot that drones cannot do. They cannot fly uninhibited into hostile territory like a manned bomber. Simply put, the nature of modern air warfare (jamming, counter jamming and so on) requires airframes that can carry a substantial load of electronic equipment.  Drones, as currently built, just aren't big enough.  Most are not even protected from small arms fire, from jamming, or from interference from their live-video feeds. 

Today in the Wall Street Journal:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

That's some fancy timin'.

Comments

[Fraud Guy]

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights.

But they could track the signals and flights, time events to avoid known drones, and, conceivably, a la Clancy, know when they returned and mount an attack on the launch site.

Didn't they figure out in WWI that en clair signals were a bad thing?

[...now I try to be amused]

Measure, countermeasure.

Now what will the counter-countermeasure be?

[Morat20]

Why aren't the video feeds encrypted? It's not like it's hard to do.

Now, trying to spoof someone with satellites from determining position from the existance of a signal, that's one thing -- but why on earth is ANY of the predator signal (video, control, whatever)-- not encrypted?

[Marty]

"Now, trying to spoof someone with satellites from determining position from the existance of a signal, that's one thing -- but why on earth is ANY of the predator signal (video, control, whatever)-- not encrypted?"

I assume because they used commercial satellites to carry the last leg and didn't reencrypt it before shipping home. Silly.

[Hogan]

Morat20: According to the WSJ article, the military has known about this vulnerability since the Bosnian operation, but decided that local populations would never figure out how to exploit it so it wasn't worth fixing. Oopsie!

[Porlock Junior]

I was going to conribute some highly depressive post about the astounding ability of the military to exceed our wildest estimates of what totally unimaginable stupidity it is capable of, has been, and evermore shall be, world without end. (But I won't say Amen.)

But 8gb usb drive is cheering. One tries to figure out the relevance of that comment to the thread, and momentarily suspects that it was accidentally mis-posted; but then I figured it out, and feel much better about the world now. The key is that God may hoave chosen to put intelligent life somewhere, because God knows there's bugger-all here on Earth.