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Australia Cracked US Combat Aircraft Codes
SpamSlapper writes "Former defense minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes in the 1980s to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft. The radar on Australia's US-made Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region — they were set up for European threats — but despite many requests, the codes were not provided, so 'In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves.' The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made."
It won't apply in Australian jurisdiction. Though I would like to see how well DMCA fares if the US ends up unable to export weapons systems due to customers going to suppliers who support their products and do not engage in strong-arm legislative programs to prevent such things.
The timing is not important - the story was told in Parliament as part of his farewell speech.
Kim Beazley, former opposition leader (crude US translation - Minority Leader combined with non-incumbent party presidential candidate) is retiring from politics, and with an election due soon, today was the last day parliament would be sitting before the election. This made today the last time he'll set foot in the parliament as a member of the House of Reps (hence farewell speeches containing a lot of retrospectives). During his time, he was Defense Minister when Labor was last in power (the party / coalition with the most seats in the House of Reps).
Here's a different article that puts his words into context:
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=569118
His comments came "In his farewell speech to parliament before retiring"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Nemeses.
Chris Mattern
AND ITS A B Select Start For the Love of God!
Read the original comment:
The export restrictions on military hardware doesn't just stop Joe Shmoe from buying an F-18. It helps to create an entire bureaucracy around the sale of same items. Let's take an example of something that isn't strictly military, but dual-use.
Hughes aircraft puts up a satellite on a Chinese launch vehicle (rocket) because it is cheaper than the US alternative and the launch window is more favorable (only so many launch vehicles fly at any given time). Rocket blows up in the air. Hughes aircraft gives the Chinese some pointers in ground control as to what caused the failure and how to avoid it in the future. partially becausee the ground operators were just THERE, partially because Hughes wants to put other satellites up later on the same kind of vehicle, and they don't want a 120 million dollar fireball for their efforts.
OOPS. Turns out that that 'advice' improved a dual use technology, and that the State Department (and Congress, blah, blah) wasn't too happy about it.
How did we figure out which bits of information were allowed or forbidden? It isn't just as simple as "are you an ally? Are you buying our stuff? Ok, go nuts." there is a complex (read: clumsy) enforcement scheme designed to stop information from leaving US borders. We all know this as what stopped cryptosystems from being exported--even though they weren't military-created or robust in any way.
Export enforcement schemes are complex and unwieldy. There is a strong incentive to streamline these restrictions (from Defense Corporations), but also strong incentives to strengthen them (From organizations like the state dept, the NSA, and from Congresscritters who get elected by raising up bogeymen).
The total number of combinations is 11110 because you don't need to use all the available positions. For example you could just use one position to enter a number between 0-9 instead to 0009. So the actual number of combinations is 10+100+1000+10000=11110.