This doesn’t sound good. From today’s WSJ:
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.
L Nettles says:
Hack or police scanner. Hack seems kinda inflammatory here when it seems this is little more than a high tech police scanner.
December 17, 2009, 9:31 amJKB says:
Sounds like an unsecured broadcast capture. Of course, the bad guys don’t know for sure if it’s live or if it’s Memorex.
December 17, 2009, 9:40 amAnderson says:
Too damn funny. “I knew we shouldn’t have bought that comm system from Radio Shack!”
December 17, 2009, 9:43 amTamerlane says:
Give the devil his due. They really are clever little rascals. But a minor design change should solve this: Even a simple encyphering of the signal would be enough to prevent real time use of interceptions.
December 17, 2009, 9:43 amGreg says:
Any chance we are just leading them on, pretending that what they captured was the true video and not some BS to throw them off? Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, but I have a hard time believing military video from a drone is not secure.
December 17, 2009, 9:50 amGabriel McCall says:
Yes, it’s easy enough to encrypt the transmissions. But that leads us to ask the obvious next question: Why in the world weren’t they encrypted already? It’s not as if the idea that unsecured RF communications are observable by anyone in the vicinity should be a big surprise to, well, anybody.
On the other hand, Tamerlane, simple encryption can equate to broken. WEP, for example, can be decrypted in real time once the key is found, which can happen in 5 minutes or less. Some algorithms are definitely better than others.
December 17, 2009, 9:50 amGino says:
“The Department of Defense is nothing more than the Post Office in fatigues.” — Harry Browne
December 17, 2009, 10:17 amEric Rasmusen says:
I hope somebody told the Air Force to also not use the CB channels for radio communication.
This is one of those many cases where it is obvious that a number of people ought to be fired, or at least publicly demoted. If nobody else is fired, the Secretary of Defense ought to be.
“U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights.” Translated, that means, “U.S. officials say there is no reason the militants couldn’t take control of the drones and make them crash, though we can’t prove they did it.”
I wonder how long this was going on before the Air Force figured it out? I bet months– and that some army soldiers captured a laptop with the software on it. Or, maybe the drones kept crashing, and the Air Force puzzled over it long enough to figure out why.
December 17, 2009, 10:37 amAllen says:
In the article it says the Air Force knew about it as far back as Bosnia but figured it was low risk. Also said it’s unencrypted because the satellite network hasn’t been updated to handle encrypted video streaming.
I’d almost guess that this is breaking news now because A) it’s really stupid and someone blew the whistle because they wanted it fixed or B) the new video sensor pods have a fix installed and they’re going to be broadcasting a stream of prerecorded stuff for the locals to see.
December 17, 2009, 10:44 amApeMan says:
@Gabriel McCall:
WEP can be cracked in just a few seconds. WPA takes a couple of minutes.
And it is decidedly *not* trivial, cheap, or easy to add encryption to this system at this point. It would be a Herculean task, and very expensive.
December 17, 2009, 10:53 amSkyler says:
Our security in Iraq has been pathetic at times. I was living in a hydroelectric dam full of engineers and spies. Yes, the Iraqis had spies living among us every day and we actually caught a few of them.
Iraqis are a generally well educated population, especially in a hydroelectric dam.
Someone at a high echelon of the army came up with the idea that we needed to have RFID tags on all our cargo trucks which contain an inventory of their contents. This was a theater-wide initiative. It was unencrypted.
Now, I’m not the smartest engineer in the world, but I am smart enough to intercept unencrypted RFID tags and so are the Iraqis.
I promised the idiots that communicated this to me that if I found any trucks in our area with RFID tags on them that I would personally rip them off and smash them.
I didn’t have much direct contact with the drones in our area. Any feeds we got were handled by their own operators. I just assumed that they were being encrypted. I guess that was a bad assumption. Not that I could do anything about it.
The army and the Marines have an ongoing dispute (the army is much bigger and probably isn’t much aware of it) with respect to which is better, the army’s Blue Force Tracker or the Marines’ C2PC via EPLRS. Like any software made by the Marines, C2PC is clunky, slow, and hard to work with. But it is encrypted. The army system is easy to use, fast, handy and it works right all the time. The problem is that BFT isn’t encrypted (this was several years ago, I had heard they were changing that, let’s hope so). So, if you knew how to get at the BFT data you could see where everyone is all the time.
We have too much contempt for the incompetence of our enemies. Sure, we’re not up against the Soviets anymore, but the Soviets aren’t the only smart people on the planet.
December 17, 2009, 10:57 amSkyler says:
WEP can be cracked in just a few seconds. WPA takes a couple of minutes.
And it is decidedly *not* trivial, cheap, or easy to add encryption to this system at this point. It would be a Herculean task, and very expensive.
Put a TACLANE on each end of the data stream and voila you’re NSA encrypted. Easy as pie, so long as it can fit in the aircraft. It takes some effort to retrofit aircraft and such, but changes like this are made to aircraft all the time.
NSA encryption is not WEP or WPA and takes substantial effort to crack.
It really is just arrogance that kept this from being encrypted.
December 17, 2009, 11:04 amMalvolio says:
Stalin used to shoot people who made mistakes like this, calling them “wreckers”. It’s beginning to seem like a good idea.
For Predator missions, you could easily use a one-time pad, a wholly unbreakable form of encryption. As for problems encrypting satellite feeds, well, did I mention my idea about wreckers?
December 17, 2009, 11:06 amSkyler says:
But there might be a time-lag problem associated with encryption. That might be a part of the problem. Seems like a good reason to use manned aircraft to me.
December 17, 2009, 11:12 amaeronathan says:
I wish I could say I’m surprised, but having worked in DoD for a while now, I’m not…
December 17, 2009, 11:14 amAnon says:
Sklyer — that will work only if the architecture supports TACLANE, from the hardware up. If you have proprietary cables, connectors, voltage levels, etc. all the way up to the bits/bytes/words level, this won’t be an easy fix.
December 17, 2009, 11:24 ambobc says:
So, if it truly is the state of the satellite network, what do you do?
Do you deploy the plane or sit on it?
December 17, 2009, 11:49 amArthurKirkland says:
The United States spends billions. The natives spent thirty bucks.
Is it any wonder that after years of death, dismemberment, squandered fortunes, broken lives, shattered credibility and the other costs of America’s expedition to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have little or nothing to show for it, and no apparent prospect for anything approaching success?
This episode bolsters my belief that the primary reason the United States has not been attacked by large-scale terrorists since 2001 has been our opponents’ disinclination rather than any anti-terrorism activity — expenditure, spying, torture, infiltration, invasion, kidnapping, occupation, fighting or anything similar. If bin Laden chooses to strike again, I doubt our defenses will be any more successful than they were in September 2001.
December 17, 2009, 11:55 amSkyler says:
Anon, this is an aviation program. Cables and connectors are not even worth thinking of, as far as cost goes. The drones use internet protocols of some sort. Encrypting isn’t that hard. It just wasn’t considered cost effective for some reason. They’d rather buy a small fleet of F-22′s to replace their larger fleet of F-15′s that already have absolute and global air supremacy rather than admit that other people are clever too. New airplanes mean pork to important voters, such as Lockheed Martin, whereas encrypting critical communication just keeps the riff raff people in the military and the country safer.
December 17, 2009, 11:56 amPintler says:
I’m not an electrical guru, but in addition to encryption, I would think that some kind of LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) technology would be pretty important. Otherwise you don’t know what the drone is watching, but you know where it is, which enables both getting the heck out of Dodge and home on signal attacks.
December 17, 2009, 11:56 amSkyler says:
Arthur, you haven’t been paying attention I guess. There is now a democracy in Iraq besides Israel that is friendly to us. I’d even say that Iraq is even friendlier than Israel at times. This is huge.
Afghanistan has fallen back a bit, but if you remember back a few years ago it was also quite successful. Remember, the enemy gets a vote too. Now the enemy is rebuilding in Afghanistan after getting their butts kicked out of Iraq. No success is permanent, not even theirs.
It’s not all rosy, but to say we have nothing to show for it is intellectually dishonest. Maybe you don’t like what we have to show for it, but it’s not nothing.
December 17, 2009, 12:01 pmoclet says:
Do you really think the insurgents paid $29.99 for the software? HA HA
December 17, 2009, 12:10 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Modern encryption is effectively instantaneous and trivial to add at both ends. The problem here is the data in the middle. End-to-end encryption, by design, makes it impossible for things in the middle to understand the data. The communications network that they use between the drones and the operators relies on understanding the data it’s passing. Changing the software on deployed satellites in significant ways is not a fun thing to do.
Probably the simplest fix is to use link encryption rather than end-to-end encryption. That is, encrypt the data on both ends of each link that could be intercepted, and still keep it decrypted “in the middle”. This might be difficult if one end is a satellite that doesn’t support encryption in hardware or have enough horsepower to do it in software. (Upgrading the CPU on a satellite is also not a simple endeavor. Even if you could get to the satellite to do it, there’s still issues of radiation hardness, power generation, heat removal, and so on. Everything on a satellite is carefully budgeted.)
Another more complex solution is to use an encryption scheme whose output still looks like video. This could be done with a small box at each end. The network would still think it’s passing unencrypted video — except the video would look like garbage. This can be done using a technique that mixes the video with a pseudo-random video signal prior to transmission and after reception in such a way that the two mixes cancel out.
December 17, 2009, 12:30 pmArthurKirkland says:
Iraq is an unstable, immoral mess positioned to collapse if the United States stops propping it up with dollars, people and force.
Afghanistan is worse; disaster with a steadily increasing pricetag.
In both locations, American blunders have generated unacceptable volumes of fierce and understandable hatred toward the United States.
Huge? As foreign policy mistakes and operational failures, sure.
December 17, 2009, 12:31 pmSkyler says:
What a pessimist.
David, apparently this has been known since the Bosnia campaign. That was, let’s see, hmmm, during the Clinton administration. We’re almost at 20 years that this has been recognized as a problem. On that scale, the fix was quite easy. I’m not saying it could be done in a half hour. I used the example of a TACLANE, but clearly there are other encryption devices available that would be appropriate. I don’t know the drone’s data architecture, I just gave the TACLANE as an example.
In 20 years they could have fixed this quite easily. For the cost of one absolutely unnecessary F-22 they could have built ten drone programs from the ground up and include encryption.
It’s been pure misfeasance on the part of the air force.
December 17, 2009, 12:44 pmPete says:
Decent off-the-shelf encryption libraries have been available for a long time and the additional lag imposed by them would be minuscule compared to the RF communications lag, networking overhead, not to mention the extra time required for the standard video compression algorithms they must certainly use. They might not have wanted to upgrade the rest of their infrastructure to support it end-to-end, but this sounds like a simple case of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. Perhaps they underestimated the use of these drones when they first designed them and the sophistication of the targeted enemies.
December 17, 2009, 12:49 pmThe Watcher says:
The Watcher recalls that the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Secretary were both fired. Perhaps they were not fired for doing a good job.
December 17, 2009, 1:00 pmDouglas2 says:
A predator drone is just a giant radiotelevision transmitter in the sky. There is no way to hide it from anyone who is looking for such a thing.
December 17, 2009, 1:00 pmChris Travers says:
Reminds me of the use of microwave ovens to thwart HARMS in Serbia. The basic tactic was:
1) Watch for B-52 overflights
2) Turn off anti-aircraft radar (necessary because it is far more powerful signal-wise than the microwave oven)
3) Turn on microwave ovens aimed at the sky with doors rigged open.
4) HARMS would then divert to the microwave ovens instead of the anti-aircraft radar (which was off, hence not emitting regular signal).
One always has to assume that for every expensive weapon there is an inexpensive weapon. For example mining (as in digging under) areas tanks might go across is cheaper than building tanks, so determined little guys will often win against moderately motivated big guys.
December 17, 2009, 1:03 pmMikey says:
I was doing encrypted video over satellites as far back as 1996. The capability exists, it just wasn’t implemented in this case. As I recall it added a non-trivial amount of overhead, which reduced the bandwidth available for the actual application, but we knew that and engineered the link to support it.
I think intercept just wasn’t viewed as a high risk back when the UAVs were developed, and not worth the extra expense and reduction in throughput. Even if the bad guys got a look at what the UAVs were seeing, it isn’t worth a whole lot to them (unless they looked at the video and said, “Hey, that’s MY goat…”).
Of course, that raises the question “why didn’t someone think to update the system in the last 15 years?” We can only speculate, but none of the answers is particularly good, I think. IPSec is not that difficult to implement and can be done in software. So why didn’t they?
December 17, 2009, 1:07 pmArthurKirkland says:
Is there another reasonable assessment? Stable? Moral? Capable of not relying entirely on American people, dollars and force? Successful?
December 17, 2009, 1:15 pmSigivald says:
Eric: Why should the Secretary of Defense be fired?
“Because we need to fire someone to make a point!” isn’t a very good answer; Gates didn’t almost certainly (from timing if nothing else) make the decisions in question, and shouldn’t have anything to do with decisions like that. If the Secretary of Defense gets fired every time it comes out that someone five or ten years ago made a mistake nobody noticed and that he somehow didn’t uncover and fix, well… that makes for all kinds of bad incentives and ludicrous pressures.
Whoever was in charge of the program at the time ought to justify the decision to Congress, perhaps, and if he’s still there, lose his job if he can’t.
Arthur: Who hates the US now because of Iraq or Afghanistan that didn’t already? Ordinary Iraqis don’t seem to. The jihadists already did. Afghans don’t seem to uniformly hate us, and it’s not like they were super-friendly under the Taliban either.
December 17, 2009, 1:17 pmrarango says:
To this old military deception planner, this sounds to me like a classic deception operation. But perhaps this is just the nail my deception hammer sees, but I am betting on deception.
December 17, 2009, 1:25 pmGranite26 says:
Playing Devil’s Advocate here:
In order to take advantage of the hack, you would need a reasonably technically proficient insurgent, combined with a communications network capable of deseminating the knowledge gained in a timely manner. That overhead is likely more expensive than 30 dollars, and also increases intelligence gathering opportunities. You’d need a computer to run it, which means electricity and an increased likelyhood of electronic intelligence after the fact.
You are increasing the danger the soldiers face, but also increasing the value of the targets (in intelligence and trained personnel) while also forcing the insurgence into a more regulated environment. Taking advantage of the security hole means coming together into something worth attacking.
In the forewarned case, having the nest start to swarm when you look too close seems like a valuable confirmation of your intelligence.
___
I’m not sure I agree, but there’s more than black and white to this.
December 17, 2009, 1:31 pmZooko says:
My comments are on my blog: http://➡.ws/zooko .
Which is encrypted, by the way, except that you when follow that link you automatically get access to the decryption key.
December 17, 2009, 1:41 pmravenshrike says:
It has little to do with the construction of F-22s as it does to internal resistance in the AF to unmanned aircraft. Mainly because there are some that fear if unmanned aircraft ever really take off that the AF might be absorbed back into the Army.
December 17, 2009, 1:42 pmsubpatre says:
Those claiming adding encryption is ‘the answer’ or easy are ignoring simple physics. There are choices : secure lines, decent video quality, or the current number of drones flying. Pick any two. The limitation is bandwidth, and encryption uses more of it.
There are other considerations like the satellite control protocols, or that many of the DoD encryptions are IP based and the drones are not. But bandwidth is an absolute limit; which raises the next point that the drones are already operating at or beyond the limits of technology.
The cheerleaders for targeted assassination need to be reminded that some of those killed are “identified” based on the length of their shadow or the timing of their walk. Reducing photo resolution just makes it clear that we are killing brown people —any brown people— because our
magictechnology that makes the people at home feel safer.____
Missing from this conversation is that the [talked about] intercepts are from satellites, not from the drones. The larger and more capable drones are controlled from the US, raising the realistic scenario that unsecured feeds are deliberate. The insatiable bureaucratic appetite for ‘warheads on the foreheads’ videos and ‘predator porn’ is well known; and is well known to stimulate —besides base interests— funding for yet more drones.
Interestingly, the rise in the use of remote UAVs can be directly correlated with poorer outcomes. It’s weakly true in Iraq and outstandingly prominent in Afghanistan.
December 17, 2009, 1:45 pmArturo says:
If Tamarlane is right, it would’ve been nice if the military had thought to encode the feed before the enemy had fun with it. Jeesh…
December 17, 2009, 1:54 pmDoc Merlin says:
IT WASN’T HACKED!
They played video data on an open channel and someone listened in. It wasn’t hacked, at all. This is more like criminal turning on a police scanner and listening to cops chatter.
December 17, 2009, 2:02 pmHowdy says:
I’m sorry, but most encryption algorithms I’m aware of do not require any more bits to transmit than the equivalent cleartext. (It is true that encrypting video takes a bit of computing power, so if you mean the term “bandwidth” colloquially, to refer to CPU cycles, then yes, I agree with you.)
December 17, 2009, 2:06 pmJames T. Carrington says:
Nah, you just run the program every so often to confirm the operators are using the same flight patterns as last week, around the same time, and then you have a more-clear understanding of the surveillance coverage. Didn’t the Taliban know about the satellite coverage times-of-day and cover assets accordingly?
And apparently the drones are already encrypted w/ regards to controls. Which is either a lie to cover a lack of actual encryption – or that makes the non-encryption with video look even more foolish.
God forbid they figure out how to arm and fire the Hellfires..
December 17, 2009, 2:29 pmAnon says:
Sklyer wrote:
“The drones use internet protocols of some sort.”
Now that’s pretty big assumption — and at odds with TFA, which states, “Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren’t readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.”
This thing dates to the 1990s. I’m sure General Atomic’s business model includes “use proprietary stuff down to the hardware layer so that they have to come to us.”
December 17, 2009, 2:38 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » It’s Cheap to Hack a Drone -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Nate Swanson, Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh said: It’s Cheap to Hack a Drone: This doesn’t sound good. From today’s WSJ: Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the.. http://bit.ly/7Ho71Q [...]
December 17, 2009, 2:45 pmRyan Waxx says:
Please, PLEASE tell me the firing controls for the Hellfire missiles we are putting on these things is more secure than the video feed.
Update: Looks like James T. Carrington beat me to it.
December 17, 2009, 3:07 pmJeff Walden says:
Malvolio suggests a one-time pad. I had the same thought, but I’m not immediately sure it’s feasible. Exactly how much data do drones send back each trip? You need an equally-sized pad, and if we’re talking video that would add up quickly. (You could split the data into blocks and reuse the pad, but at that point you give up the security capabilities. It’s “one time” for a reason, and I have little doubt such reuse could be broken. Defeating that isn’t a whole lot more difficult than an elementary problem in a cryptography course.)
December 17, 2009, 3:29 pmArthurKirkland says:
blockquote>Arthur: Who hates the US now because of Iraq or Afghanistan that didn’t already?
I suspect the soldiers dodging (or not dodging) IEDs, or taking precautions against ambushes, could answer this question more comprehensively, but here are some candidates:
The relatives of Iraqis — far too many of them innocents — detained, humiliated, and/or tortured by Americans?
The witnesses to killings and maimings of Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy, unaccountable, U.S.-paid mercenaries?
The dependents of Iraqis whose livelihoods have been shattered by American military operations?
The friends and neighbors of innocent Iraqis classified as “collateral damage” after bombing missions or neighborhood sieges?
The millions of Iraqis whose families, neighborhoods and country have been torn asunder by Americans?
If an invading force (put aside the issue that the wrong country was attacked, or that the occupation was botched for years) killed your child, or maimed your spouse, or bombed your neighborhood, or wrecked your home, or imprisoned and humiliated you because of a business rival’s accusations, or tortured your sibling, or let the religious police harass your friend, would you hate the country that unleashed this horror from without?
I’d be seething, and looking for vengeance. Is it that difficult to understand these motivations?
December 17, 2009, 4:05 pmSkyler says:
Arthur, get off this thread. you’re way off topic.
December 17, 2009, 4:46 pmroger thistle says:
I bet Arthur is a sniviling little wimp who got his a$$ kicked over and over again as a kid. And stop beating around the bush with the mercenary crap (“The witnesses to killings and maimings of Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy, unaccountable, U.S.-paid mercenaries?”)and just man up and say what you really think: US MARINES.
You are a sad little dude. Go get laid and hug a Marine the next time you are in an airport. It just may do you some good.
Hey have you Liberals helped those poor souls in Darfur yet??? Tick tock. People are being murdered every day and suddenly there’s silence about it.
December 17, 2009, 5:01 pmArthurKirkland says:
I was not referring to Marines. Marines are properly motivated, properly commanded, properly trained, honorable and altruistic soldiers governed by a time-tested system of military justice. I was referring to private contractors — mercenaries — who are nothing like United States armed forces.
I figured that was obvious. I apologize for the mistake.
December 17, 2009, 5:46 pmArthurKirkland says:
I have been responding to your point, Skyler, about “success” and an apparently related question concerning the consequences of the costly and counterproductive folly — illustrated by the billions-vs-thirty bucks episode — in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The aptness of that illustration was, and is, my point. Those who decline to learn from evidence such as this are doomed to repeat it (ask the Russians) . . . or send other people overseas to die, kill and bleed for little or no sensible purpose.
December 17, 2009, 5:59 pmSkyler says:
Um, this Marine wants no part of that!
December 17, 2009, 6:03 pmDennis N says:
It looks they fixed it.
http://www.physorg.com/news180275339.html
Until the next time.
December 17, 2009, 6:24 pmJ. Aldridge says:
All this means is the bad guys get to watch themselves die.
December 17, 2009, 6:43 pmSkyler says:
Well, then. Looks like it was easy after all. Hmmm . . . didn’t someone here claim that? :)
December 17, 2009, 6:57 pmroger thistle says:
Thanks for the clarification, Arthur. Happy Hanakkah or Merry Christmas as appropriate. As a dad of a Marine, I mistook you for a basher. I apoligize.
December 17, 2009, 6:58 pmMalvolio says:
Mmmm, I doubt it’s a terabyte and a terabyte of memory could be the size a half of a pack of cigarettes (what would we do without cigarettes as a standard measure?)
This might not have been true ten years ago, of course. Still, these people are, almost literally, rocket scientists. They couldn’t figure something out?
December 17, 2009, 7:30 pmKirk Parker says:
James,
If our guys running the drones really are emulating satellites with them (i.e. using invariant flight paths at exactly predictable times) then we have problems way worse than just a little intercepted video.
And apparently you have no idea of the order(s) of magnitude difference between the control stream and the video stream. What other knowledge of this subject area are you lacking?
December 17, 2009, 7:42 pmreadery says:
It’s such an obvious tactic we’d have to be idiots not to expect them to make every effort to try it. I don’t think we’re idiots, although there have been times when people who’ve thought that have been wrong before. Maybe we provide dummy video feed.
December 17, 2009, 8:21 pmJohn Moore says:
I remember reading some years back about amateurs watching Predator videos. Apparently the military was(is) renting bandwidth on commercial communication satellites and at least some of the data was being sent unencrypted. I suspect this is the case, and that is what the story is about.
The rather confused reporting on this mentioned that encryption “caused delays” in cases where multiple sites wanted to watch the video, which is apparently a very common practice. These “delays” probably would involve key distribution and setup, rather than actual transmission delays. A properly designed system could avoid this problem.
However, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have led to a dramatic increase in the usage of UAV’s, and I suspect communication systems have not kept up with increased demand. For example, often multiple layers of command want to watch an operation, which may not have been anticipated by the original systems designers.
Thus my best guess is that a lot of this stuff isn’t encrypted (or wasn’t until recently) because of encryption-key management issues in multiple-receiver use cases.
A couple of comments…
The terms “hack,” in the computer world, often refers to a clever programming trick – a “clever hack.” As such, this “hack” of predator video is probably someone’s work to easily decode ordinary unencrypted satellite video – rather than the alternate meaning of a security penetration. There apparently wasn’t any security to hack.
As another commenter mentioned, modern encryption does not require additional bandwidth, although it does require an additional amount of computer power (unless it is done in hardware – as with broadcast satellite video). It may require a small amount of additional bandwidth at the start of communications in order for key establishment, but after that, the bandwidth impact is negligible to zero.
December 17, 2009, 8:26 pmGuy says:
You need to take a refresher course in press release-ese. The proper translation of “there is no evidence that X” is always “X obviously didn’t happen, and you’re a fear-mongering idiot for trying to spin this story as if that were a valid concern, don’t you have a celebrity scandal to report on or something?”
Except sometimes when it means “X obviously didn’t happen, but try to make it sound it might have because that will encourage the uninformed public to support my goals, but I don’t want to do that myself because then people will point out I’m a liar.”
December 18, 2009, 1:05 amJim - Hacker Forums says:
The Done’s were not actually hacked, they just got lucky and found a laptop that had images on it. Iraqis are free to roam our posts in Iraq because they do most of our cleaning over there. I bet the laptop was stolen. There just is not enough proof to say the Dones themselves were actually “hacked”.
December 18, 2009, 7:37 amRichard Aubrey says:
AK’s view of Iraq reminds me of a song some decades back, “Wishin’ and Hopin”.
Some girl group.
He also omits the much larger number of Iraqis killed and maimed by other Iraqis or infiltrators. Pretty clear where he’s coming from.
December 18, 2009, 10:06 amgeokstr says:
Can’t wait until the federal government has all my medical records in a giant database. Security won’t be an issue, probably because there won’t be any.
And it’s likely in the case of the drones, that the enemy won’t recognize the terrain on the drone’s camera anyway, because most of them have it never seen it from any higher than atop a camel.
December 18, 2009, 11:22 amDiogenes says:
Poor you – having a kid whose only option was to participate in a machine that is busy raping TWO sovereign countries that posed no threat to his Fatherland, baed on lies told by its political overlords.
You must be sad that he didn’t do better in school. My Dad was annoyed when I joined the military, because he knew it was the dumpiong ground for academic and socio-economic also-rans. (I got out, got educated, and got my head rid of most of the sociopathy that was embedded there during Basic).
And you didn’t “mistake [him] for a basher” – you descended to pissant-style attacks on his sexuality and displayed the sort of glassy-eyed stupidity wrt the military that we condemn the ‘Good Germans’ for doing between 1933 and 1945.
Happy Hannukah? Not so much if you’re a brown kiddie where the Yank sociopaths roam… but I guess raghead kids don’t count? Gott Mit Uns, ja?
Hoo-ah. (I wore my country’s uniform, and did shit that would make your and your son’s eyes water – all for a series of fucking lies).
Cheerio
December 18, 2009, 7:17 pmJohn Moore says:
Diogenes:
and
and
Sounds like BS to me. So you couldn’t hack the military, eh, so now you hang out here, anonymously, and attack folks.
Good thing they got rid of you before you hurt someone.
December 18, 2009, 7:31 pmIt’s Cheap to Hack a Drone | Liberal Whoppers says:
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April 21, 2010, 4:22 pm