Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones. The video feed rather than the control protocol, but still.... “Fixing the security gap would have caused delays, according to current and former military officials. It would have added to the Predator’s price. Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies.”
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So SkyGrabber pulls media streams from unencrypted public satellite broadband multiplexes. Is this really the drones' downlink mechanism? Or are these intercepts actually of rebroadcasts from a terrestrial base station?
There's some good background on the proliferation of both the military and covert Predator programmes here: http://newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa _fact_mayer
Turns out that CIA operators fly their Afghan drones from Langley.
phl - 17th December 2009 12:13 - #
I don't even know what to say about that. It's the most stunning thing I've read today.