Everything you transmit will be used against you
Last week news broke out that late last year a laptop seized from an Iraqi insurgent contained video intercepted from US drones. Then in July, the Wall Street Journal reported that more laptops with feeds were discovered confirming that militants were tapping into the live video feed from spy drones, the Wall Street Journal reports.
WIRED Danger Room blog has more:
How did the militants manage to get access to such secret data? Basically, by pointing a satellite dish up, and waiting for the drone feeds to pour in. According to the Journal, militants have exploited a weakness: the data links between the drone and the ground control station were never encrypted.
Apparently, this vulnerability has been out there for more than 10 years and it is not limited only to spy drones. In 2008 KBR, an Iraq contractor, banned all cell phones “for safety and security” measures across the Middle East and Asia. The ban was prompted when a KBR employee was killed because, it is suspected, insurgents were monitoring all cellular communications in the area (see CNN report of the event).
The DoD and its contractors choose to accept the risk of using unencrypted satellite feeds and commercial GSM technology without any additional protection to avoid delays in development and roll out – the rationale behind it being that opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan did not possess the necessary technological know-how
But as the author Gretchen Peters regularly exposes in her blog, there are massive economical interests at stake created by the opium export (in Afghanistan) and the $25 necessary to buy the Russian-made SkyGrabber software to watch drone video feeds does not strike as a very high barrier to entry. The same equipment can be used to listen to satellite calls (which are unencrypted by default) as well as GSM calls.
This CBS report from 2002 shows how little has changed in terms of video security:
Read more at WIRED Danger Room: Drone Feeds Gave Insurgents ‘Early Warning’, Insurgents Intercept Drone Video in King-Size Security Breach
