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Iranian TV Shows Downed US Drone
First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."
Just FYI, most other reports are saying that the United States acknowledges this the only incredulity surrounds how the drone went down -- not whether it was there or not. US says technical malfunction. Iran says Allah helped them hack it and control it themselves.
My work here is dung.
Looks closer to 20 meters across to me. A plane doesn't need to be small to be stealthy, look at the B2 Spirit...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My recollection is that it was only the video feed returned from the drone that was unencrypted. The control signals sent to the aircraft were still encrypted. Even signal jamming is apparently a difficult way to disable the drone because it has a degree of autonomy.
If Iran's claims are true (that it gained control of the plane) then that is either quite an achievement on their part, or quite a failure on the part of the US engineers.
I guess the suits in Washington never had a hobby otherwise they would know this.
Their hobby is screwing people. I guess they did not get around to R/C model aircraft.
I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.
According to the US government, the drone was CIA operated. The idea that CIA operatives even sneeze unencrypted mucus is ridiculous. They'd be concerned the particulates could reveal something about the operative.
It was either a technical malfunction or plain old jamming of the control signal. The malfunction is more likely, as I'm sure they have better fail-safe procedures for signal jamming.
Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.
That could very well be, but the Iranians likely didn't bring it down. The US got caught when the technical malfunction caused the thing to crash. Nevertheless, I doubt the US gives a shit about being caught spying on Iran, they're more concerned about the technology being reverse engineered.
Actually, many drones are programmed to just fly home if the signal is lost. From Wired: "Like just about every spy drone operating today, the RQ-170 can follow GPS waypoints, instead of being steered by a remote operator. And when drones like the Sentinel loses radio or satellite contact with their human overlords, they are usually programmed to do something reasonable, ranging from circling until contact is resumed to continuing with the mission autonomously to flying home. Moreover, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told reporters there was no indication the Sentinel was brought down by “hostile activity of any kind.”"
If you read the updates on this article, there's still some doubt:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iran-drone-video/
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Yes, most likely it's communication was jammed. I'm sure the flight control software for it allows for autonomous landing when control communication is lost after a designated period of time.
the SR71 was rendered obsolete because it was expensive.. it was to be the replace ment for the U2 but failed to be cheaper than keping the U2 (which is why the U2 is still in service).
Both the U2 and the SR71 are useful compared to satellites because they can be dispatched to an area for information far quicker than a satellite. (and cheaper for short term recon).
the Drones are the replacement for the U2 .. so far they are falling behind - one of the requirements of them - is that they are cheaper than the U2 program. (only time will tell with that one).
But the high and fast are feature+ for the U2 over the current drones.. Most missile systems are not able to identify and shoot down a U2 before it leaves the missiles operating range. (if you look at the U2's that where shot down, several of them went down not because a missile made contact but because the light air-frame broke up at altitude from the shock waves of the missiles blowing up lower int the atmosphere)
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Evidently you think American engineers are idiots. The frequency hopping patterns for drone communications are produced by a cryptographically-secure random number generator with a pre-negotiated seed. Snoop it all you like; this isn't your neighbor with unsecured wifi, it's your neighbor with AES512 and a fifty-word passphrase surfing over a VPN tunnel.
If your engine cuts out, there's not much else you can do.
The US flies lots of these things all the time. One had to have a critical failure and go down sometime.
With frequency hopped spread spectrum, even if some of the hop frequencies are jammed, the transmitted symbols will not necessarily be because they can be spread over multiple hops. It does not have to be a transmitter that dwells on a single frequency long enough to send some information. A single symbol can be spread over multiple hops.
Further, this sort of thing exposes in a very blatant way how the DoD and the contractors responsible for developing these vehicles have made little to no effort to safeguard them from radio interference
According the NYT, it is exceedingly unlikely that Iran captured the drone with some of cyber attack.
Of course, at this point, who knows who's lying. But I would not take Iran at their word.
Also, before you get all pissy about the US invading Iran's airspace, maybe you should look into Iran's recent history.
The aircraft shown on Iranian television today was not the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran last week, as the Iranian government claimed, but was likely just a model, U.S. officials told ABC News.
Minutes after a Pentagon spokesperson said that military personnel and others were examining the footage broadcast today of what appeared to be an undamaged stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, multiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel. U.S. officials previously confirmed that an RQ-170 did, in fact, crash land somewhere in Iran.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-rq-170-sentinel-stealth-drone-shown-iran/story?id=15115781#.TuEsofJbeV0
No. This is exactly your neighbor with unsecured wifi.
From the wall street journal, Dec 17, 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html
"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."
Hate to break it to you buy the Predator and first run Reaper drones have completely unencrypted communications links, the com links on later drones might actually be up to snuff but there's no guarantee of that since they aren't public. The drones with unencrypted communications are still in the field since they're too valuable to pull for an overhaul.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
This needs to be repeated. We used SINCGARS when I was in the Army over 20 years ago. I can not be jammed. I can not be eavesdropped. It changes frequency over 100 times a second. If you gave the guy who invented it the previous 10 minutes of frequencies, he could not tell you what the next frequency is going to be.
Again, this was over 20 years ago. I seriously hope that our military is at least using the same SINCGARS I used when I was in the Army.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I don't think what that video showed was an American Spy drone.
It looked more like a garage kit-bashed fiberglass ooh that would be cool concept of a drone. Lets see, first the shape. It's a flying wing, and what the heck are those large things standing up on the back like that? It's completely different than anything I've ever seen on any flying wing design before. I'm not a plane expert by any imagination, but still, it looks like something a George Lucas wannabe would build, not the military.
It's totally the wrong color, honestly, nothing the military makes is that color, and there's reasons for it. If it was really a spy drone, it would most likely be radar absorbent black. By the way, the SR71 was NEVER flat black when they were in use, it was a special radar absorbent black paint that is still top secret.
The drone is called the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel, AKA "The Beast of Kandahar" after photographs of the thing were snapped at an airfield in Kandahar. Those photos show a fat flying wing, painted a light color, with a pair of distinctive bulges over the "shoulders" of the wings, and a covered inlet above the nose. What the Iranians showed is an RQ-170- or else a decent copy. It is hard to believe the drone came down in one piece, which raises the possibility that this is a fake. It's not clear why they would present a fake, however. The only reason I can imagine is that there just wasn't enough left of the drone to put on TV- perhaps it came down hard and fast and broke into hundreds of little scraps, or perhaps the fuel caught fire and burned up the crash. However, if it's *not* the real drone, the guys who built it should be able to tell, and you would expect the U.S. to come right out and say so.
You can clearly see the bumps in photos and schematics of some models.
When dealing with cutting edge and secret military technology there are bound to be changes no civilian has seen. The US did admit they lost one too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Sorry, some of my links didn't work. You can see the bumps here:
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/usaf-reveals-rq-170-sentinel-is-new-stealth-uav-335875/
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?172150-RQ-170-Clear-Daylight-Photo
Since the US has already admitted they lost one around that time I'd say there is fair chance it is genuine. Iran is not some backwater country, they have the technology to do this kind of thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC