Bill Ryan's Other Blog

About a week ago, a story came across the wire about Iraqi insurgents hacking our predator drones using little more than stuff bought at a Radio Shack.  There was a lot of hysteria and misinformation but the real news isn’t a whole lot better.

Anything that echoes back information can have that information possibly intercepted.  The same mechanism that is used to read the info can be used by someone else.  (For those of you old enough, think back to the Darth Vader HBO Hack).  Ideally, this information should be encrypted and well, I thought pretty much everyone did.  Back when i worked at Discovery Channel Latin America (’97) we regularly did encryption tests and it was a huge deal (ostensibly b/c interception of their signal was such a big deal).  Anyway, grabbing onto an encrypted signal is one thing, actually taking it over is a whole different one.  It seems really pathetic but it’s conceivable that you could leave the echo unencrypted, it’s inconceivable that the control signal would be left open.

Anyway, here’s the latest….One quote sums it up pretty well..”.This was just one of the signals, a broadcast signal, and there was no hacking. It is the interception of a broadcast signal”

Still piss poor but not nearly as bad as the original posts.  If someone could gain control of a predator, they could crash it or use it against us, all of which would be devastating.  IMHO, Predators are an excellent weapon both in terms of efficacy and in terms of human lives.  Right now, only we have them. But as time goes on, they’ll become cheaper and more mainstream.  If you have to fight wars, Robots fighting Robots seem to be the ideal IMHO b/c that reduces human casualties.  I know Code Pinkos don’t like them, but that’s b/c Predators reduce the # of dead soldiers they can exploit… that and the fact they hate America.  It’s hard for most people to imagine how Predators actually work (or how amazingly accurate they are) so it wouldn’t be hard for anti-Predator types to demonize them.  This was a bad screw up which hopefully didn’t result in any deaths, but it’s easily fixed and hopefully we won’t have any screw ups like this again.

[tags]Predator Drones, Predator Hacking[/tags]