One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Thu Jul 21, 2011 1:04 pm

Support Group: Documenting the Peace Laureate's Progressive Atrocities
Written by Chris Floyd
Sunday, 17 July 2011 23:11

Do you support the policies and political fortunes of President Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate? Then this is what you support: cowardly, cold-blooded mass murder. You support mass murder. You support the shredding to pieces of innocent people, many of them children, week after week, month after month. You support the murder of children. You support the cultivation of extremism and hatred: hatred aimed at you, and your children, for the mass murder -- the state terrorism -- committed in your name by your progressive president. You support extremism. You support hatred. You support terrorism.

The Guardian tells the remarkable story of Noor Behram, who for three years has been rushing to the scene of the long-distance, remote-control drone strikes launched by the Peace Laureate against undefended villages in Pakistan. Braving roadblocks, suspicious (and shell-shocked) locals, and secondary strikes -- like terrorists the world over, the Laureate's Droners like to draw people to the site of one strike, then fire another at those who've come to help the first victims -- Noor Behram has taken his camera to some 60 killing fields in North and South Waziristan. As the Guardian notes:

Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important – and unreported – truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. The world's media quickly reports on how many militants were killed in each strike. But reporters don't go to the spot, relying on unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials. Noor Behram believes you have to go to the spot to figure out whether those killed were really extremists or ordinary people living in Waziristan. And he's in no doubt.

"For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant," he said. "I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed." ...

According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population. "There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can't find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.

"The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater."

Even when the drones hit the right compound, the force of the blast is such that neighbours' houses, often made of baked mud, are also demolished, crushing those inside, said Noor Behram. One of the photographs shows a tangle of debris he said were the remains of five houses blitzed together.


Do you support this? Do you support the progressive president, the Peace Laureate? Then this is what you support:

The photographs make for difficult viewing and leave no doubt about the destructive power of the Hellfire missiles unleashed: a boy with the top of his head missing, a severed hand, flattened houses, the parents of children killed in a strike. The chassis is all that remains of a car in one photo, another shows the funeral of a seven-year-old child. There are pictures, too, of the cheap rubber flip-flops worn by children and adults, which often survive: signs that life once existed there. A 10-year-old boy's body, prepared for burial, shows lipstick on him and flowers in his hair – a mother's last loving touch.


If you support the president, this is what you support. (And yes, if you support his so-called opponents in our bipartisan militarized state -- where the only political "issue" is how much more we can give to the rich while expanding our state terror overseas -- this is what you support as well.) A boy with the top of his head torn off. From a thunderbolt of metal and explosives hurled at him from thousands of miles away. Is this what you support?

Or maybe that's the wrong question. If you support the president, it's obvious that you do support this. I suppose a better question is the one that Arthur Silber has been asking, over and over, for years, as the Atrocity Machine of the rightwing Bush regime morphed effortlessly into the Atrocity Machine of the progressive Peace Laureate:

Why do you support this?

Why do you support it?

Why?
"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby 8bitagent » Thu Jul 21, 2011 9:03 pm

Thanks so much for posting that. I remember seeing the aftermath of the infamous May 2009 strike in Afghanistan that killed 147 people in the new John Pilger documentary, remembering Obama was yucking it up the next night at an elite correspondent's dinner.

To me it's shocking, though sadly not surprising, that (as Jeremy Scahill says) there is no anti war movement in America. Certainly at least not compared to the Bush years, and not even a micron fiber what the late 60's were. Even during the Bush years, I don't recall too many angry college liberals bringing up Afghanistan. I just love how so many typical liberals play mental gymnastics with "right wars" while getting angry about Iraq in another breath...though these days, I think a lot are sick of it all.

But my god, military action by Obama in SIX countries in the past 30 days...Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Crazy.

I'm glad someone is trying to document the horror going on in Pakistan. I think there needs to be video of the Americans remote controlling these drones half a world away like it's a damn video game.
At the state fair the other day I saw a huge Army recruiting drive aimed at teens, stationed next to this big WTC 9/11 memorial. The scene of smiling recruiters handing out freebies to passerbys while a twisted core column from the south tower was on display nearby almost made me want to vomit.

Sometimes I do feel like the only left leaning person I know on or offline(away from this forum) who is greatly upset by the ongoing wars and everything. I see all these "donate now to help returning vets"...yeah, how about helping the survivors and victims family of Obama's killing spree? Casey Anthony ain't the only baby murderer on the loose
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 22, 2011 9:13 am

U.S. drone targets two leaders of Somali group allied with al-Qaeda, official says
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... story.html

Pakistan to US: No more drone strikes from base
Defense minister says Americans have been asked to vacate remote site
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43587402/
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby brekin » Thu Aug 04, 2011 6:49 pm

DIY Spy Drone Sniffs Wi-Fi, Intercepts Phone Calls
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/0 ... hat-drone/

Image

LAS VEGAS — What do you do when the target you’re spying on slips behind his home-security gates and beyond your reach?

Launch your personal, specially equipped WASP drone — short for Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform — to fly overhead and sniff his Wi-Fi network, intercept his cellphone calls, or launch denial-of-service attacks with jamming signals.

These are just a few of the uses of the unmanned aerial vehicle that security researchers Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference here Wednesday.

At a cost of about $6,000, the two converted a surplus FMQ-117B U.S. Army target drone into their personal remote-controlled spy plane, complete with Wi-Fi and hacking tools, such as an IMSI catcher and antenna to spoof a GSM cell tower and intercept calls. It also had a network-sniffing tool and a dictionary of 340 million words for brute-forcing network passwords.

The GSM hack was inspired by a talk given at last year’s DefCon hacker conference by Chris Paget, who showed how to create a cellphone base station that tricks nearby handsets into routing their outbound calls through it instead of through commercial cell towers.

That routing allows someone to intercept even encrypted calls in the clear. The device tricks phones into disabling encryption, and records call details and content before they’re routed to their intended receiver through voice-over-internet protocol or redirected to anywhere else the hacker wants to send them.

The drone takes that concept and gives it flight. The plane weighs 14 pounds and is 6 feet long. Per FAA regulations, it can legally fly only under 400 feet and within line of sight. But the height is sufficient to quiet any noise the drone might produce, which the researchers said is minimal, and still allow the plane to circle overhead unobtrusively.

It can be programmed with GPS coordinates and Google maps to fly a predetermined course, but requires remote control help to take off and land.

The two security researchers created the spy plane as a proof of concept to show what criminals, terrorists and others might also soon be using for their nefarious activities.

Tassey, a security consultant to Wall Street and the U.S. intelligence community, told the conference crowd that if the two of them could think up and build a personal spy drone, others were likely already thinking about it, too.

The spy drones have multiple uses, both good and bad. Hackers could use them to fly above corporations to steal intellectual property and other data from a network, as well as launch denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle attacks. They could also transmit a cellphone jamming signal to frustrate an enemy’s communications.

“It’s hard to keep something that’s flying from getting over your facility,” Tassey said.

A drone could also be used to single out a target, using the target’s cellphone to identify him in a crowd, and then follow his movements. And it would be handy for drug smuggling, or for terrorists to trigger a dirty bomb.

But the drones don’t just have malicious uses. The researchers point out that they would be great for providing emergency cellular access to regions hit by a disaster.

The drones could also be outfitted with infrared cameras and shape-recognition technology to run search-and-rescue missions for lost hikers. The military could use them for electronic countermeasures to jam enemy signals or as communication relays flown over remote areas to allow soldiers on two sides of a mountain, for example, to communicate.

“You don’t need a PhD from MIT to do this,” Perkins said.
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby psynapz » Wed Aug 10, 2011 1:20 pm

brekin wrote:“You don’t need a PhD from MIT to do this,” Perkins said.


Or even a big budget:

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-main-page
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:01 am

Tased From Above! New Robot Copter To Begin Patrolling Our Skies
by Peter Murray
Singularity Hub
August 21st, 2011


Forget the idea that weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are only for military operations in wars fought in far off lands. Soon they’ll begin setting their sights on criminals within our borders. And they’ll be packing heat, not the long-range missiles of the X-47B, but with up close and personal stun guns, 12-gauge shotguns and, believe it or not, grenade launchers.

The ShadowHawk is the seven-foot, 50-lb copter that is the toy-sized dealer of destruction from Texas-based Vanguard Defense Industries. The copter is the result of three years of development. If being tased from above sounds frightening to you, I suggest you cease all criminal activities now (simply staying indoors is an option). There’s a good chance ShadowHawk’s spine tingling buzz could be heard approaching a city near you. As a sign of new law enforcement tactics to come, the Sheriff’s Office of Montgomery County, Texas was recently awarded a grant by the Department of Homeland Security for a squadron of ShadowHawks. Montgomery County’s Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel is psyched. “We are very excited about the funding and looking forward to placing the equipment into the field. Both my narcotics and SWAT units have been looking at numerous ways to deploy it and I absolutely believe it will become a critical component on all SWAT callouts and narcotics raids and emergency management operations.”

The Department of Homeland Security grant is just the latest indication that the US is taking the military’s lead – with over 7,000 drones in the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan – and using drones as a key tactical tool. In 2009 a surveillance drone called the Wasp was used during a SWAT raid in Austin, Texas. The Wasp climbed to 400 feet and beamed realtime video of a house in which an armed drug dealer was hiding. After the team had confirmed that there were no unforeseen dangers lurking in the backyard, they stormed the house and arrested the suspect. Drones are also helping the US to secure its borders against illegal immigration and drug trafficking. Just a few months ago the Obama administration began sending drones to Mexico to gather intelligence and help in the country’s war on drugs.

Not limited to our borders, ShadowHawk will soon be swooping down on bad guys off the shores of Africa. Vanguard Defense justwon a multi-million dollar contract for “several” ShadowHawks to patrol the east African coast against pirates. Hired by a “global leader in the oil and gas exploration and production industry,” the initial plan is to use the copter drones strictly for surveillance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the local authorities get involved at some point and bring the heavy stuff. Pirates might respond better when looking down the nose of a 40mm grenade launcher.

ShadowHawk is not nearly as agile as the acrobatic quad-copter from UPenn’s GRASP Lab. But it’s definitely more agile than a perpetrator fleeing on foot. All of the cameras can be used to track ground targets with amazing effectiveness. The following video demonstrates the ability of the CCD (1:40) and infrared cameras’ (2:00) ability to track vehicles and humans fleeing on foot. You can run, but ShadowHawk is going to stick to you like flies on…shady characters.

The ShadowHawk comes in four different flavors with different options for outfitting. Both turbine or piston engines are available and guidance systems include laser pointers, range finders, illuminators, CCD TV optics and a FLIR infrared camera. Take off, flying and landing can be fully automated or pilot assist, semi-autonomous. The military and law enforcement can opt to add an XREP taser, 37mm or 40mm grenade launchers or a meaty single shot or multiple shot 12 gauge shotgun. The final variety is for military use only and they don’t tell us what sorts of ballistics toys they get to pick from.

ShadowHawk can travel over land or sea for up to 3.5 hours in its hunt for perpetrators. Its maximum range is 35 miles with a top speed of 70 mph. The XREP taser sits on ShadowHawk’s nose with four barbed electrodes that can be shot to a distance of 100 feet. After hitting the target they deliver ‘neuromuscular incapacitation’ for a hellish 20 seconds. The cameras are on continuously, which means, when they are inevitably leaked, we’re due for some of the craziest videos-gone-viral ever to hit YouTube.

A nice, cute copter for hobbyists – if your hobby happens to be going after bad guys with tasers and grenade launchers. But you shouldn’t be worried about your neighbors getting their hands on a ShadowHawk. Hobbyists can have drones as long as they keep them from flying higher than 400 feet. And, of course, they won’t be armed with tasers or grenade launchers. But after that the FAA guidelines are pretty loose concerning ShadowHawks or any such “unmanned aircraft.” The FAA “encourages good judgment on the part of operators so that persons on the ground or other aircraft in flight will not be endangered.”

In its first flights the ShadowHawk’s job will probably be strictly surveillance. But as law enforcement such as Montgomery County’s gains experience and field tests the drone, perhaps they’ll decide when using that taser might be the best option. As more drones like ShadowHawk take to the sky over our cities and that high-pitched whine draws terribly closer, probably best to just lay down, hands on your head, feet spread apart.


"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Saurian Tail » Thu Sep 22, 2011 11:16 am

When our boys are not flying killer drones, they are living large in a tropical paradise! Feel better yet?

In tropical paradise, U.S. drones meant revenue
By Craig Whitlock
Posted at 08:09 AM ET, 09/22/2011
Image
U.S. Navy Commander Greg Hand speaks to participants during a media day event in Victoria, Seychelles, in 2009. An MQ-9 Reaper can be seen in background. (Maj. Eric Hillard — U.S. Africa Command)

Drones can clearly track down terrorists. But they can apparently boost an economy, too.

The U.S. military’s deployment of MQ-9 Reaper drones to the Seychelles, a tropical paradise in the Indian Ocean, generated $3.1 million in revenue for local businesses during their first four months of operations, according to an unclassified U.S. diplomatic cable buried in the database of State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

As the subject line of the 2010 cable touted: “U.S. Military Presence Benefits Seychelles Economy.”

The Reapers – known as “hunter-killer” drones for their tracking ability – may be unmanned. But it takes a whole village of military personnel and contractors to operate the aircraft from the ground. In this case, that meant 82 people deploying to Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, the island chain known for its Sports Illustrated swimsuit model shoots and royal honeymoons.

When they weren’t flying the Reapers, the drone crew spent $937,260 on “Food/Liberty,” or about $11,400 per person over a four-month period ending in December 2009 (the Reapers arrived in late September).

Expenses also included $51,760 for vehicle rentals, $70,777 for aircraft fuel and $598,363 for the catchall category of “facilities/services.”

All told, “a significant sum in a country as small as Seychelles,” the cable noted.

“The Seychellois have already taken notice of the economic benefits,” the cable continued. “Local shop owners and restaurateurs have commented that the U.S. military is bringing a steady income into hotels, restaurants, and shops: a direct influence of the American presence.”

Accommodations accounted for a particularly large chunk of change. The drone crew accumulated a tab of $1,457,784, which comes to roughly $150 per night per person over four months.

Not bad for a tropical dreamland. The Four Seasons Resort nearby charges more than $500 a day.
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby elfismiles » Fri Oct 07, 2011 4:45 pm

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10 ... one-fleet/
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Nordic » Sat Oct 08, 2011 12:09 am

thank god somebody shut them the fuck down.

i hope they stay completely disabled.
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby justdrew » Sat Oct 08, 2011 5:06 pm

possibly a reworked version of stuxnet? :rofl2
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby eyeno » Sat Oct 08, 2011 6:07 pm

It didn't shut them down. It was just a key logger from what I understand.
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 10, 2011 4:03 pm


http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10 ... one-fleet/

Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet

By Noah Shachtman October 7, 2011 | 1:11 pm | Categories: Drones



A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.


Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.

But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.

Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.

But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”

However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”

Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones




Perhaps related to this?!


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sunda ... nted=print

October 8, 2011
Coming Soon: The Drone Arms Race
By SCOTT SHANE

Scott Shane is a national security correspondent for The New York Times.

WASHINGTON

AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

What was a science-fiction scenario not much more than a decade ago has become today’s news. In Iraq and Afghanistan, military drones have become a routine part of the arsenal. In Pakistan, according to American officials, strikes from Predators and Reapers operated by the C.I.A. have killed more than 2,000 militants; the number of civilian casualties is hotly debated. In Yemen last month, an American citizen was, for the first time, the intended target of a drone strike, as Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda propagandist and plotter, was killed along with a second American, Samir Khan.

If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them.

“The problem is that we’re creating an international norm” — asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of “Missile Contagion,” who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. “The copycatting is what I worry about most.”

The qualities that have made lethal drones so attractive to the Obama administration for counterterrorism appeal to many countries and, conceivably, to terrorist groups: a capacity for leisurely surveillance and precise strikes, modest cost, and most important, no danger to the operator, who may sit in safety thousands of miles from the target.

To date, only the United States, Israel (against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza) and Britain (in Afghanistan) are known to have used drones for strikes. But American defense analysts count more than 50 countries that have built or bought unmanned aerial vehicles, or U.A.V.’s, and the number is rising every month. Most are designed for surveillance, but as the United States has found, adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge.

“The virtue of most U.A.V.’s is that they have long wings and you can strap anything to them,” Mr. Gormley says. That includes video cameras, eavesdropping equipment and munitions, he says. “It’s spreading like wildfire.”

So far, the United States has a huge lead in the number and sophistication of unmanned aerial vehicles (about 7,000, by one official’s estimate, mostly unarmed). The Air Force prefers to call them not U.A.V.’s but R.P.A.’s, or remotely piloted aircraft, in acknowledgment of the human role; Air Force officials should know, since their service is now training more pilots to operate drones than fighters and bombers.

Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis for the Teal Group, a company that tracks defense and aerospace markets, says global spending on research and procurement of drones over the next decade is expected to total more than $94 billion, including $9 billion on remotely piloted combat aircraft.

Israel and China are aggressively developing and marketing drones, and Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and several other countries are not far behind. The Defense Security Service, which protects the Pentagon and its contractors from espionage, warned in a report last year that American drone technology had become a prime target for foreign spies.

Last December, a surveillance drone crashed in an El Paso neighborhood; it had been launched, it turned out, by the Mexican police across the border. Even Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, has deployed drones, an Iranian design capable of carrying munitions and diving into a target, says P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, whose 2009 book “Wired for War” is a primer on robotic combat.

Late last month, a 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested and charged with plotting to load a remotely controlled aircraft with plastic explosives and crash it into the Pentagon or United States Capitol. His supposed co-conspirators were actually undercover F.B.I. agents, and it was unclear that his scheme could have done much damage. But it was an unnerving harbinger, says John Villasenor, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that the Army had just announced a $5 million contract for a backpack-size drone called a Switchblade that can carry an explosive payload into a target; such a weapon will not long be beyond the capabilities of a terrorist network.

“If they are skimming over rooftops and trees, they will be almost impossible to shoot down,” he maintains.

It is easy to scare ourselves by imagining terrorist drones rigged not just to carry bombs but to spew anthrax or scatter radioactive waste. Speculation that Al Qaeda might use exotic weapons has so far turned out to be just that. But the technological curve for drones means the threat can no longer be discounted.

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” Mr. Singer says. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Gnomad » Tue Oct 11, 2011 2:45 am

There was also one theory that stated that the keyloggers found might as well be from some other arm of Pentagon, keeping tabs / surveilling the drone pilots.
Here : http://techzwn.com/2011/10/predator-dro ... m-analyst/

The U.S. line of Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) was hit by a computer virus that is logging the keystrokes of pilots as they steer the UAVs remotely through Afghanistan and other warzones, found Wired’s Danger Room blog.

According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, however, the virus may be an internal Department of Defense (DoD) security monitoring package. He noted there are “a couple of vendors” who sell such technology to the DoD, which are “essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.” The comments were sent to the Dailydave security mailing list, which was posted through SecLists.org.

“I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally,” Fidelman adds.

The virus hit the “cockpits” of the pilots—computer stations at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base. It was first detected by the military’s Host-Based Security System close to two weeks ago, according to Wired.

The military tried removing it several times, but it keeps coming back. Still, it doesn’t seem to have stopped them from continuing their missions, and no classified data has been taken. A source familiar with the network infection told Danger Room, “We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back. We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”


That does sound slightly implausible, but what do you know...
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Nordic » Tue Oct 11, 2011 3:07 am

Shit, so that's all? Somebody put some malware in them that records the keystrokes? The state-sponsored terrorism of the U.S. drone strikes continues?

Fuck.
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Re: One Drone Thread to Rule them ALL

Postby Gnomad » Tue Oct 11, 2011 3:58 am

Yeah, and the keyloggers are in the control stations, not the drones themselves, is what is said.
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