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$26 of Software Defeats American Military
reporter writes "A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecured channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers. '... 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 US surveillance.'"
Well, demodulating an unencrypted digital signal is not news.
I am more interested in what kind of RF equipment one would need to capture it off the air. ;)
It's not like you can do this with your WiFi card.
It could be a deliberate ploy to manipulate what the enemy "sees". Why not have a "leak"?
It's a bit like leaving USB keys around for the unsuspecting to pick up...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Is there any real security risk in this? I suspect it is very small. The Russians never bothered to encrypt the telemetry on their ICBM tests, because after all even assuming someone was reading it, they had no way of stopping the thing. Even if you know where the drone is, it is going to be very hard to shoot down; RPGs and IEDs really aren't much use. And given that this is a video feed, how do you ray trace back to the actual position of the camera?
Unfortunately there are plenty of assholes out there who will exaggerate anything in order to claim that they are more security conscious than the next person (and perhaps hope to get a contract for their company). But this is surely small war, no-one dead, move along please.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
From TFA:
The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes.
As an engineer in the defense industry and with experience integrating communication systems, I can't even think of one military data radio system in use that doesn't have encryption ability. Even if they are using off-the-shelf wifi (doubtful) they wouldn't need to change hardware to at least have some encryption. Either this quote is a lie, or someone did something monumentally stupid.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
No more words needed.
I went to school with a guy that was student body president, captain of the basketball team, and valedictorian of his class. He went to the Air Force Academy, and after graduating won a Rhoades Scholarship. He has three master degrees, and graduated first in his class from flight school.
He was (maybe still is) in command of the 89th Airlift Wing, which is responsible for flying and maintaining the planes that carry the president, vice president and other top U.S. officials. I believe he was recently promoted to Brigadier General.
Yes -- I'd describe him as "the best and brightest". He also happens to be a very nice guy.
Well, its a fine demagoguery you got there, but the actual reality was that the Taliban demanded to see evidence of Bin Laden's responsibility before handing him over ... and the USA flatly refused.
Your first mistake is assuming that operations against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan started in 2001. The rest of your argument is rendered moot by that mistake. The US has been operating in Afghanistan since the 90's, as a response to earlier Al Qaeda attacks. The 2001 invasion was just the final commitment in a much longer campaign.
I'd say the odds of "victory" in Afghanistan for the USA are pretty much on the same level as those of all the previous Empires ... not entirely zero but any Vegas slot machine looks like a guaranteed retirement plan by comparison.
That, of course, hinges on how you define "victory". If all we care about is maintaining majority control over the country and preventing it from being used as a staging area for further attacks against the west, then we've already won. The Taliban is now using Pakistan as a staging area for it's attacks in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda is broke and mostly useless.
Under any other reasonable definition we ... we haven't achieved all of the goals we've set for ourselves, but the odds of eventually meeting them are pretty much 100%. The opposite forces have no chance of achieving a military victory - the best that they can hope for is that we get bored and go home. As long as we're willing to stay, we can't lose. Unfortunately, it seems likely that we will decide to leave, largely due to opinions such as yours. I find that truly depressing. Seems like people didn't learn a damn thing from the American mistakes in the 80's.
The Germans did not think the Poles could break their codes. The Japanese did not think the US and the Australians would break their codes.
The problem was never breaking the codes.
The problem was breaking the codes more or less instantaneously.
You need time to frame and execute an appropriate response - and far too often the correct response will be to do nothing.
Since to do anything will invite suspicion.
Eavesdropping on the Rising Sun
The Code War
The Edison of Secret Codes
Actually, this is typical US-centric ignorance showing, Taliban and Al Qaeda are both derivatives of Wahhabi Sunni Arabic Islam sect, while Iranians are not only Shiites but also Persian, not Arabs. Their language is Farsi, not Arabic. Taliban and Bin Laden were always at war with Iran, they consider Shiites to be "apostates". It is one of the reasons the US chose Saddam as its cat's-paw to attack Iran, he was (at least nominally) a Sunni and held deep contempt of all things Shiite, Iran in particular. Curiously, Saddam and Bin Laden were also at odds, mainly because Bin Laden saw Saddam's Iraq in the way of re-creating his utopian Caliphate, with the Caliph restored to Baghdad in its centre. Needles to say pretty much secular and socialist Saddam would not be welcome in the epicentre of the zealot paradise and Bin Laden had fatwas issued calling for Saddam's head to roll (which makes Dick Cheney's idiotic claims of Saddam - Al Qaeda cooperation truly comical).
As I pointed out in another post, should Bin Laden not take credit, some other wacko (and most likely several of them at once) would. Bin Laden's main claim to fame is that the US chose him to be the "Celebrity Evildoer #1" single-handedly responsible for all evils globally, past, present and future. Needless to say this instantly gave him far greater credibility then all the others combined.
It was in the interest of every radical loon to claim that he, and only he, was the "mastermind" of the most famous and successful terrorist foreign strike on the US soil. The instant ego expansion possibilities were just endless on this one for the Jihadists.
Actually, no, it is not great. We do not want you to be the "bad guy". In fact we'd rather that the US came to its senses and started to act like its actions were based on the great principles and traditions it always boasts about being at its core. The world would be a much better place for it than with the US as a hypocritical, back-stabbing, duplicitous, greedy, self-centred, arrogant bully it is acting like now.