Gives one a lot of faith in DC doesn't it. Not only can college students hack electronic voting machines but $26 software can hack drones. Part of the problem is doing the programming on the cheap using desperate compliant denizens of the third world.
How To Take Down A Military Drone Without Firing A Shot Friday, 01 May 2015 02:23 Joshua Krause
There is a fundamental law of warfare that no member of any conventional military wants to admit to. For every million dollar weapon, somewhere out there, perhaps waiting to be discovered, is a $10 countermeasure. The more expensive and sophisticated the device, the more vulnerable it is to dirt cheap exploits. But they don’t want to think about that. The military-industrial-complex thinks in terms of money. If there’s a threat, they throw money at it until it goes away, which usually winds up creating boondoggles that get exploited in the most embarrassing ways.
There are numerous examples of this happening throughout history. My personal favorite, is the molotov cocktail. When Russia invaded Finland in 1939, they poured over the border with thousands of tanks. The Finns soon discovered that if they lobbed molotov cocktails into the ventilation system of a tank, it would quickly ignite the fuel and ammunition supply, and utterly destroy the tank and its crew.
See what I mean? That’s a $10 solution to a million dollar problem (roughly speaking).
The reason why I’m bringing this up, is to illustrate a problem with the mindset of our own military. They love high-tech gadgets. We have the most technologically advanced military on the planet, and they carry the most sophisticated equipment. Which means that from time to time, our enemies find horrendous flaws in our weapons, that allow them to disable these systems at a fraction of the cost it took us to build them.
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A 2011 study, titled “The Requirements for Successful GPS Spoofing Attacks,” explains how to fool GPS sensors like those in drones by mimicking GPS signals.
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In 2009 it was discovered that Iraqi insurgents had figured out how to hack the camera feeds of our drones, and view the video feed for themselves. They pulled this off with a commercially available software program called Skygrabber, which at the time cost $26. The US military had known that their satellite signals were unencrypted since the early 90’s, but did nothing to fix it until after they were hacked.
It just goes to show you that global superpowers like the United States are not as invincible as they seem. They think that every problem they face has a dollar sign next to it, and that they can use technology to bully and spy on everyone that gets in their way. In fact, they seem to be under the impression that they will be able to dominate the future with automated war machines, and ignore the humans that won’t go along with it. In reality, they’re going face stiff resistance from people who know to take down their flying boondoggles for pennies on the dollar.
"The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop it up." Montgomery Scott, USS Enterprise
========================================================================================== By the way, I'm growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That's why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences.
When he [Chamberlain} died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.
So please don't insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. -- Mark Steyn"