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U.S. Forces Viewed Encrypted Israeli Drone Feeds (theintercept.com)
iceco2 links to The Intercept's report that the U.S. and UK intelligence forces have been (or at least were) intercepting positional data as well as imagery from Israeli drones and fighters, through a joint program dubbed "Anarchist," based on the island of Cyprus. Among the captured images that the Intercept has published, based on data provided by Edward Snowden, are ones that appear to show weaponized drones, something that the U.S. military is well-known for using, but that the IDF does not publicly acknowledge as part of its own arsenal.
Notes iceco2: U.S. spying on allies is nothing new. It is surprising to see the ease with which encrypted Israeli communications were intercepted. As always, it wasn't the crypto which was broken -- just the lousy method it was applied.
Ars Technica explains that open-source software, including ImageMagick was central to the analysis of the captured data.
As always, it wasn't the crypto which was broken -- just the lousy method it was applied.
So I should just know that and expect that at all times?
What about how good the military is in using it? Shall I also assume it's always implemented in bad enough ways?
(Speaking of which: Storage encryption, boot drive SSD with built in encryption? HDDs with software encryption? Multiple layers? I wonder if Slashdot would want to make a post about suggestions for how to keep your data private.)
Even allies know the rules.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If it didn't involve Israel.
This is clickbait, plain and simple. You can't tell me that Israel is the ONLY foreign military that the United States is surveilling. But Timothy won't approve a post about our viewing encrypted Zambian attack camel feeds because people will engage in more WHAARGARBL if Israel and/or Palestine is somehow involved.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
It should be no surprise that Israel has weaponized drones. They carry out air strikes in areas where militants have surface to air missiles. It's probably the safest way to carry out missions against hostile targets in those areas. However, it's a shame that the spying was leaked because the drone feeds could be valuable information for human rights advocates. Israeli forces have a history of violating human rights, such as the cluster bombing of Lebanon and Gaza as well as striking civilian targets. These drone feeds would be valuable for documenting those abuses, which could then be used to prosecute those who commit human rights violations.
They seriously want intelligence agents to randomly pick antisky values until it looks good? Anyone ever heard of a script?
And don't change it to 12345. That's the combination on my luggage.
Where on earth did the information to back up this difficult-to-parse statement come from? The video was encoded with VideoCrypt. VideoCrypt, which was released in 1989, has a number of ways that it can be attacked. Including brute force, which was used here in the form of the Antisky app (from 1994).
When one considers the $8 billion we taxpayers are forced to hand over to the apartheid state of Israel each year, combined with technology stolen by traitors such as Jonathan Pollard, it's not as if we didn't have a right to the images.
Besides, since they deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, claiming they couldn't see the American flag flying and didn't know it was a U.S. ship despite repeated radio transmissions in the clear stating as much over a 20 minute period, we need to be sure the next time they attack us they can't use the same excuse.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Big error describing the facts: as The Intercept reports, the feeds weren't encrypted but were scrambled like a premium cable TV channel. That allowed basic unscrambling using readily available tools. It's "spying", as reported with much angst in Israel (as a huge failure, sign of incompetency) but it seems to me to ask why they didn't bother. My guess is they didn't care that much about the security of these feeds. As for what they "reveal" about Israeli drones, the piece confuses intentionally public knowledge versus what we as a country know. I have to believe we know what these drones do, given that we work so closely with Israel on so many defense issues, including missiles, with Raytheon, our largest missile contractor, acting as lead US subcontractor on the newly operational mid-range missile defense system.
Jonathan Polard is still under house arrest
. . . I thought you said you were leaving.
You didn't stay away too long. Or were you just hiding out for a while, hoping I wouldn't notice?
And here I would have figured that, after all your complaining, surely by now you would have offered some suggestions on how to improve Slashdot.