It's not just the NSA that is trying to break codes...
US "drone attacks" may be vunerable to false GPS location signals, video transmissions, flight controls, etc.
Washington Post
Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman
9/3/13
U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones
Quote:
Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways
to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the
technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses
upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.
<snip>
Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign
are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post
by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor.<snip>
In 2011, the DIA concluded that an “al-Qaeda-affiliated research and development cell
currently lacks the technical knowledge to successfully integrate and deploy
a counterdrone strike system.” DIA analysts added, however, that
if al-Qaeda engineers were to “overcome these substantial design challenges,
we believe such a system probably would be highly disruptive for U.S. operations
in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”<snip>
Beyond the threat that al-Qaeda might figure out how to hack or shoot down a drone,
however, U.S. spy agencies worried that their drone campaign was becoming
increasingly vulnerable to public opposition.
Intelligence analysts took careful note of al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray drone strikes
as cowardly or immoral, beginning in January 2011 with a report titled
“Al-Qa’ida Explores Manipulating Public Opinion to Curb CT Pressure.”
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