Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Australia Cracked US Combat Aircraft Codes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-run-around-the-bureaucracy dept.

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."

7 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. DMCA violation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Is this a DMCA violation, or does it predate the legislation?

  2. Re:Impotance? by j-pimp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Because its more than 20 years old and historians can use FOIA requests to study this.

    --
    --- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
  3. Happening again with the F-35? by aktzin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This reminds me of news reports about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It's meant to replace the F-16 and also be available for export to allied nations starting with the UK. Unfortunately for the potential buyers, the US government wasn't offering to share all the technical details and source code that our allies would need to fully operate and maintain the aircraft. With a quick Google search I just found this article from last year saying the US and UK came to an agreement, don't know what's happened since then. I vaguely remember the Royal Air Force and Navy threatened to cancel their orders and just buy Eurofighter Typhoons instead.

    http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f35-jsf-program-us-uk-reach-technology-transfer-agreement-02495/
    --
    Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
  4. They needed to protect Qantas from the US Navy by tetranz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/13.66.html#subj1

  5. Take up lockpicking .. by cheros · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Best go to the MIT site then and pick up Matt Blaize's document about picking locks.

    Just one word of warning: a Samsonite briefcase with 4 digit digital lock has actually MORE than 10000 different combinations, the true number of possible combinations of that lock is 11111, which is why a bunch of hackers on a hacker weekend spend the whole weekend trying to open it and didn't succeed (very evil grin) - I hadn't corrected their assumption that it had 10000 combinations :-).

    Not that you need that long - it has a far more basic vulnerability in the electronics by which you can open it in under 10 seconds :-).

    --
    Insert .sig here. Send no money now. Owner may sue, contents will settle. Batteries not included.
  6. Re:Just wondering... by trongey · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ...Australia can never step foot in the US again

    You apparently don't realize that Australia is a very large island south of Asia. Islands don't have feet. They have roots.
    --
    You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
  7. Rumsfeld the epistemologist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    People give Rummy a lot of grief for this passage. However, it not only parses as grammatically correct, but also displays a sound and fairly sophisticated understanding of epistemology.