Source-Washington Times/30,000 Drones over America Soon
30,000 Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress
Shaun Waterman is a award winning reporter for the Washington Times, covering foreign affairs, defense and cybersecurity. He was a senior editor and correspondent for United Press International for nearly a decade, and has covered the Department of Homeland Security since 2003. His reporting on the Sept. 11 Commission and the tortuous process by which some of its recommendations finally became ...
Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.
The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.
Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.
“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.
The provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones” in American airspace, she added.
According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars once the FAA clears their use.
The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020.
The highest-profile use of drones by the United States has been in the CIA’s armed Predator-drone program, which targets al Qaeda terrorist leaders. But the vast majority of U.S. drone missions, even in war zones, are flown for surveillance. Some drones are as small as model aircraft, while others have the wingspan of a full-size jet.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. use of drone surveillance has grown so rapidly that it has created a glut of video material to be analyzed.
The legislation would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies. The FAA currently issues certificates, which can cover multiple flights by more than one aircraft in a particular area, on a case-by-case basis.
The Department of Homeland Security is the only federal agency to discuss openly its use of drones in domestic airspace.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the department, operates nine drones, variants of the CIA’s feared Predator. The aircraft, which are flown remotely by a team of 80 fully qualified pilots, are used principally for border and counternarcotics surveillance under four long-term FAA certificates.
Officials say they can be used on a short-term basis for a variety of other public-safety and emergency-management missions if a separate certificate is issued for that mission.
“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.
Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.
The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.
The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.
“We need a list so we can ask [each agency], ‘What are your policies on drone use? How do you protect privacy? How do you ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment?’ ” Ms. Lynch said.
“Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.
The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.
“We are looking at our options” to oppose that, she added.
Section 332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic control system by 2015.
The agency must establish six flight ranges across the country where drones can be test-flown to determine whether they are safe for travel in congested skies.
Representatives of the fast-growing unmanned aircraft systems industry say they worked hard to get the provisions into law.
“It sets deadlines for the integration of [the drones] into the national airspace,” said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group.
She said drone technology is new to the FAA.
The legislation, which provides several deadlines for the FAA to report progress to Congress, “will move the [drones] issue up their list of priorities,” Ms. West said.
30,000 Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress
Shaun Waterman is a award winning reporter for the Washington Times, covering foreign affairs, defense and cybersecurity. He was a senior editor and correspondent for United Press International for nearly a decade, and has covered the Department of Homeland Security since 2003. His reporting on the Sept. 11 Commission and the tortuous process by which some of its recommendations finally became ...
Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.
The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.
Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.
“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.
The provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones” in American airspace, she added.
According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars once the FAA clears their use.
The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020.
The highest-profile use of drones by the United States has been in the CIA’s armed Predator-drone program, which targets al Qaeda terrorist leaders. But the vast majority of U.S. drone missions, even in war zones, are flown for surveillance. Some drones are as small as model aircraft, while others have the wingspan of a full-size jet.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. use of drone surveillance has grown so rapidly that it has created a glut of video material to be analyzed.
The legislation would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies. The FAA currently issues certificates, which can cover multiple flights by more than one aircraft in a particular area, on a case-by-case basis.
The Department of Homeland Security is the only federal agency to discuss openly its use of drones in domestic airspace.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the department, operates nine drones, variants of the CIA’s feared Predator. The aircraft, which are flown remotely by a team of 80 fully qualified pilots, are used principally for border and counternarcotics surveillance under four long-term FAA certificates.
Officials say they can be used on a short-term basis for a variety of other public-safety and emergency-management missions if a separate certificate is issued for that mission.
“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.
Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.
The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.
The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.
“We need a list so we can ask [each agency], ‘What are your policies on drone use? How do you protect privacy? How do you ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment?’ ” Ms. Lynch said.
“Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.
The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.
“We are looking at our options” to oppose that, she added.
Section 332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic control system by 2015.
The agency must establish six flight ranges across the country where drones can be test-flown to determine whether they are safe for travel in congested skies.
Representatives of the fast-growing unmanned aircraft systems industry say they worked hard to get the provisions into law.
“It sets deadlines for the integration of [the drones] into the national airspace,” said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group.
She said drone technology is new to the FAA.
The legislation, which provides several deadlines for the FAA to report progress to Congress, “will move the [drones] issue up their list of priorities,” Ms. West said.
Drone pilots tired of endless wars
They say war is hell. Don’t believe it? Ask any of the US servicemen suffering from the battlefield blues, as a new study reveals that launching strikes overseas is overtly stressful, even from thousands of miles away from warzones.
According to new study released by the US Air Force, an overwhelming number of the pilots that command unmanned robotic drones from operation centers in America are suffering from intense stress, even if they are on the other side of the world from where their attacks are being carried out. With the US continuing drone strikes despite opposition from allies overseas such as Pakistan, the toll that the task of commanding the controversial crafts could be having on its pilots could be detrimental to the Department of Defense, who insists on pushing through with the program even with the end result including droves of dead civilians since the missions began.
When quizzed by Air Force personnel to gauge their level of stress on a scale of 0-to-10, with 10 representing the most stress, 46 percent of pilots commanding Reaper and Predator drones say that their stress level meets or exceeds a standing of 8 points, according to the new study.
Additionally among the findings is the fact that a smaller but significant number of pilots also suffer from what the Air Force describes as “clinical distress,” a condition which includes symptoms such as anxiety, depression and severe enough stress that job performance is impacted.
Despite soldiers being subjected to work that brings on these conditions, the Department of Defense continues drone usage all over the world, with 57 American-led drones being in international skies at any given moment. A report issued earlier this year out of Britain’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism put the number of civilian casualties carried out by American drones in Pakistan alone to be at 400 since US operations began there, and in just the few months that the US involved itself in the Libyan uprising, the American military dispatched almost 150 airstrikes with drones, despite Congress never declaring a war. While troops thousands of miles away dispatched drones and fired missiles into the land beneath Libyan skies, now it is being revealed that an overwhelming number of the pilots put in charge of such missions were suffering from conditions that could impact their job performance.
While the men and women that command the stealth aircraft are thousands of miles from the battlefields where bombs are dropped, the toll on their health can have consequences on Americans back home. Earlier this year RT reported that a computer virus made its way into the cockpits of drone aircraft dispatched from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada with pilots going weeks without being aware of it. Even more recently, the US managed to lose communication with two separate drones in a manner of two weeks, costing America upwards of not just $100 million in parts but a priceless toll on the nation’s security as Iranian authorities insist that they have decoded the top-secret technology onboard a recovered Sentinel RQ-170.
As a cyber war sprouts between American and Iranian intelligence, Tehran is becoming aware of an extremely exploitable target in the US military. The Pentagon says that almost 30 percent of its drone pilots suffer from the military calls “burn out.” In their own follow up on the report, National Public Radio reports that a large majority of the pilots say that they are not getting any counseling for their increasing stress.
Instead, the US is upping its drone operation. In the last decade the number of drones has grown from 50 to 7,000. At least half a dozen spy craft planes currently fly over America to conduct clandestine surveillance, and the FAA is working out plans to approve the drones for use among local law enforcement agencies.
They say war is hell. Don’t believe it? Ask any of the US servicemen suffering from the battlefield blues, as a new study reveals that launching strikes overseas is overtly stressful, even from thousands of miles away from warzones.
According to new study released by the US Air Force, an overwhelming number of the pilots that command unmanned robotic drones from operation centers in America are suffering from intense stress, even if they are on the other side of the world from where their attacks are being carried out. With the US continuing drone strikes despite opposition from allies overseas such as Pakistan, the toll that the task of commanding the controversial crafts could be having on its pilots could be detrimental to the Department of Defense, who insists on pushing through with the program even with the end result including droves of dead civilians since the missions began.
When quizzed by Air Force personnel to gauge their level of stress on a scale of 0-to-10, with 10 representing the most stress, 46 percent of pilots commanding Reaper and Predator drones say that their stress level meets or exceeds a standing of 8 points, according to the new study.
Additionally among the findings is the fact that a smaller but significant number of pilots also suffer from what the Air Force describes as “clinical distress,” a condition which includes symptoms such as anxiety, depression and severe enough stress that job performance is impacted.
Despite soldiers being subjected to work that brings on these conditions, the Department of Defense continues drone usage all over the world, with 57 American-led drones being in international skies at any given moment. A report issued earlier this year out of Britain’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism put the number of civilian casualties carried out by American drones in Pakistan alone to be at 400 since US operations began there, and in just the few months that the US involved itself in the Libyan uprising, the American military dispatched almost 150 airstrikes with drones, despite Congress never declaring a war. While troops thousands of miles away dispatched drones and fired missiles into the land beneath Libyan skies, now it is being revealed that an overwhelming number of the pilots put in charge of such missions were suffering from conditions that could impact their job performance.
While the men and women that command the stealth aircraft are thousands of miles from the battlefields where bombs are dropped, the toll on their health can have consequences on Americans back home. Earlier this year RT reported that a computer virus made its way into the cockpits of drone aircraft dispatched from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada with pilots going weeks without being aware of it. Even more recently, the US managed to lose communication with two separate drones in a manner of two weeks, costing America upwards of not just $100 million in parts but a priceless toll on the nation’s security as Iranian authorities insist that they have decoded the top-secret technology onboard a recovered Sentinel RQ-170.
As a cyber war sprouts between American and Iranian intelligence, Tehran is becoming aware of an extremely exploitable target in the US military. The Pentagon says that almost 30 percent of its drone pilots suffer from the military calls “burn out.” In their own follow up on the report, National Public Radio reports that a large majority of the pilots say that they are not getting any counseling for their increasing stress.
Instead, the US is upping its drone operation. In the last decade the number of drones has grown from 50 to 7,000. At least half a dozen spy craft planes currently fly over America to conduct clandestine surveillance, and the FAA is working out plans to approve the drones for use among local law enforcement agencies.
By Ismail Salami
Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:54:46 GMT
In what seems to be nothing but US-style barefaced arrogance, President Barack Obama has demanded the return of a spy drone which violated the airspace of the Islamic Republic but which was to the humiliation of the US officials downed by the Iranian army.
The top-secret RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which was used by Washington as part of the covert operations the US officials have already vowed to conduct inside Iran, was hunted down by an electronic ambush and landed with a minimal degree of damage over the city of Kashmar about 140 miles inside Iran.
Consciously blind to the realities of Washington's abysmal policies, the Western media treated the report with a predilection for suspicion and disbelief and used the somewhat innocuous-sounding term 'reconnaissance drone'. However, when Pentagon later acknowledged the “mysterious loss of a surveillance drone”, they had no choice but to face the truth.
What strikes as bizarrely ridiculous is the fact that Washington has demanded the return of the drone which they have confessed was sent on a secret mission for gathering information.
''We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond,'' Mr. Obama has said.
Nonetheless, Iran says that it has no intention of returning the drone and that Washington should compensate Tehran for violating the country's airspace.
Brushing aside the possibility of returning the drone, Chairman of Iran's Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said on Tuesday that the White House must face the consequences of violating Iran's airspace.
Washington's insistence on having the drone returned springs from some secret concern over the nature of what the Iranians would glean technologically from the spy drone.
Iranian military experts are reportedly in the final stage of extracting information from the drone. The extracted information will be used to sue the United States, an Iranian official says.
When asked at a White House news conference if he was concerned that Iran could weaken US national security by obtaining intelligence from the downed drone, Obama said, “I'm not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified."
Without directly referring to the spy drone, Obama had earlier repeated the same old threat that 'all options are on the table in dealing with Iran', saying, “Today Iran is isolated, and the world is unified in applying the toughest sanctions that Iran has ever experienced. They can break that isolation by acting responsibly and forswearing the development of nuclear weapons . . . or they can continue to operate in a fashion that isolates them from the entire world.”
Obama's threatening words against Iran evidently reek of the literature of his predecessor George W. Bush. In fact, he is following in the footsteps of Bush and has metaphorically metamorphosed into the belligerent personality of the latter.
It is manifest that Washington has recently ramped up its espionage activities in Iran.
On May 21, 2011, Iran's Intelligence Ministry arrested an espionage network comprising of 30 individuals who were working for the CIA and another 42 CIA operatives who had links with the network. The CIA-linked network deceived citizens into spying for the agency under the pretext of issuing visas, assisting with US permanent residency, and offering job and study opportunities in American universities.
According to Iran's Intelligence Ministry, the disbanded network was chiefly focused on targeting the country's nuclear plants, energy fields, and sensitive oil and gas centers with the main purpose of sabotaging these areas.
Iranian intelligence officials have learned that the CIA agents had gathered information from universities and scientific research centers in the field of aerospace, defense and biotechnology industries.
Also, on November 24, 2011, Iran arrested another 12 CIA agents who were working with Israel's Mossad and targeted the country's military and nuclear program. Member of the Iranian Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Parviz Sorouri said that the CIA and Mossad espionage apparatuses were making efforts to damage Iran both from inside and outside and deal a heavy blow with the help of regional intelligence services.
“Fortunately, with the swift reaction of the Iranian intelligence department, their attempts proved abortive,” Sorouri said.
If truth be told, the downing of the spy drone has surely delivered a heavy blow to the intelligence apparatus of the CIA and rustled many feathers in Washington. In an atrociously antagonistic manner, former Vice President Dick Cheney unleashed his anger on President Barack Obama, saying that he should have doubled down on being caught spying with an overt attack on Iran.
“The right response would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down,” Cheney said.
Confusing Iran with Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested that this could have been done either with a land invasion to recover the lost drone or by bombing the area until the drone was destroyed.
“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can't do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn't take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren't going to do that.”
The fury of poor Mr. Cheney is quite perceptible and pathetic and the predicament of President Obama is not hard to imagine.
However, it would be better if the US officials confessed to the military prowess of Iran instead of attributing the desperate loss of their drone to their President's ineptitude.
The downing of the spy drone is a good sign that Iran is militarily powerful and efficient. However, the secret mission of the drone, which is purported to have been the collection of secret data on the Iranian nuclear sites, consolidates the idea that Washington is more than ever bent on carrying out secret black operations inside Iran and that it is harboring a malicious plan to orchestrate an attack on the Iranian nuclear sites if not an Armageddon in the region.
-- Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.
Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:54:46 GMT
In what seems to be nothing but US-style barefaced arrogance, President Barack Obama has demanded the return of a spy drone which violated the airspace of the Islamic Republic but which was to the humiliation of the US officials downed by the Iranian army.
The top-secret RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which was used by Washington as part of the covert operations the US officials have already vowed to conduct inside Iran, was hunted down by an electronic ambush and landed with a minimal degree of damage over the city of Kashmar about 140 miles inside Iran.
Consciously blind to the realities of Washington's abysmal policies, the Western media treated the report with a predilection for suspicion and disbelief and used the somewhat innocuous-sounding term 'reconnaissance drone'. However, when Pentagon later acknowledged the “mysterious loss of a surveillance drone”, they had no choice but to face the truth.
What strikes as bizarrely ridiculous is the fact that Washington has demanded the return of the drone which they have confessed was sent on a secret mission for gathering information.
''We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond,'' Mr. Obama has said.
Nonetheless, Iran says that it has no intention of returning the drone and that Washington should compensate Tehran for violating the country's airspace.
Brushing aside the possibility of returning the drone, Chairman of Iran's Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said on Tuesday that the White House must face the consequences of violating Iran's airspace.
Washington's insistence on having the drone returned springs from some secret concern over the nature of what the Iranians would glean technologically from the spy drone.
Iranian military experts are reportedly in the final stage of extracting information from the drone. The extracted information will be used to sue the United States, an Iranian official says.
When asked at a White House news conference if he was concerned that Iran could weaken US national security by obtaining intelligence from the downed drone, Obama said, “I'm not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified."
Without directly referring to the spy drone, Obama had earlier repeated the same old threat that 'all options are on the table in dealing with Iran', saying, “Today Iran is isolated, and the world is unified in applying the toughest sanctions that Iran has ever experienced. They can break that isolation by acting responsibly and forswearing the development of nuclear weapons . . . or they can continue to operate in a fashion that isolates them from the entire world.”
Obama's threatening words against Iran evidently reek of the literature of his predecessor George W. Bush. In fact, he is following in the footsteps of Bush and has metaphorically metamorphosed into the belligerent personality of the latter.
It is manifest that Washington has recently ramped up its espionage activities in Iran.
On May 21, 2011, Iran's Intelligence Ministry arrested an espionage network comprising of 30 individuals who were working for the CIA and another 42 CIA operatives who had links with the network. The CIA-linked network deceived citizens into spying for the agency under the pretext of issuing visas, assisting with US permanent residency, and offering job and study opportunities in American universities.
According to Iran's Intelligence Ministry, the disbanded network was chiefly focused on targeting the country's nuclear plants, energy fields, and sensitive oil and gas centers with the main purpose of sabotaging these areas.
Iranian intelligence officials have learned that the CIA agents had gathered information from universities and scientific research centers in the field of aerospace, defense and biotechnology industries.
Also, on November 24, 2011, Iran arrested another 12 CIA agents who were working with Israel's Mossad and targeted the country's military and nuclear program. Member of the Iranian Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Parviz Sorouri said that the CIA and Mossad espionage apparatuses were making efforts to damage Iran both from inside and outside and deal a heavy blow with the help of regional intelligence services.
“Fortunately, with the swift reaction of the Iranian intelligence department, their attempts proved abortive,” Sorouri said.
If truth be told, the downing of the spy drone has surely delivered a heavy blow to the intelligence apparatus of the CIA and rustled many feathers in Washington. In an atrociously antagonistic manner, former Vice President Dick Cheney unleashed his anger on President Barack Obama, saying that he should have doubled down on being caught spying with an overt attack on Iran.
“The right response would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down,” Cheney said.
Confusing Iran with Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested that this could have been done either with a land invasion to recover the lost drone or by bombing the area until the drone was destroyed.
“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can't do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn't take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren't going to do that.”
The fury of poor Mr. Cheney is quite perceptible and pathetic and the predicament of President Obama is not hard to imagine.
However, it would be better if the US officials confessed to the military prowess of Iran instead of attributing the desperate loss of their drone to their President's ineptitude.
The downing of the spy drone is a good sign that Iran is militarily powerful and efficient. However, the secret mission of the drone, which is purported to have been the collection of secret data on the Iranian nuclear sites, consolidates the idea that Washington is more than ever bent on carrying out secret black operations inside Iran and that it is harboring a malicious plan to orchestrate an attack on the Iranian nuclear sites if not an Armageddon in the region.
-- Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.
Air Force thinks "Auto Landing" may be to blame in Iran???
Auto-Landing May Have Led to Drone Capture
Updated: Monday, 12 Dec 2011, 3:28 PM CST
Published : Monday, 12 Dec 2011, 3:28 PM CST
(FOX News) - A US surveillance drone that came down in Iran earlier this month may have done so because of a system malfunction that triggered an automatic landing.
The theory has emerged as the strongest of several scenarios being examined by intelligence officials who are anxious to determine how the hi-tech stealth plane fell into Iranian hands.
President Barack Obama acknowledged publicly Monday that Tehran had the RQ-170 Sentinel and that US officials had asked for its return.
One US official told FOX News Channel the landing was in line with an "internal or system failure" that would be consistent with the theory that the drone went into a default setting for an automatic landing pattern.
But the pressing question remains what triggered it. "The forensics are ongoing," said an official.
When asked about the lost drone Monday, Obama said he would not comment "on intelligence matters that are classified."
"As has already been indicated, we have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," he added.
Two intelligence sources said the other scenarios include a catastrophic or navigational malfunction that caused the Sentinel drone to break contact with its base. But that scenario is problematic, the sources said, because it does not fully explain how the drone made a "soft landing."
Once contact with the operators is broken, drones such as the RQ-170 are programmed to circle an area until contact is re-established, sources said. If contact is not re-established during a pre-programmed period, it is designed to return to base or to self-destruct -- directed through a separate channel or program.
A common outcome is that the drone crashes and is burned by its fuel.
Under a third "plausible but remote" scenario, the drone's data stream was compromised or jammed. One US official emphasized there was "no evidence of jamming" or that "hostile fire took down the drone."
Iran has claimed to be unlocking the aircraft's software secrets, but US officials said the drone is "not a guaranteed gold mine for Iran," partly because the Islamic Republic may not have the "expertise" to exploit or reverse-engineer the craft.
Russian and Chinese cooperation could help the Iranians decipher the sophisticated software, but the extent to which international partners have broken into the code is "one of the big unknowns," one intelligence source said.
US officials are reluctant to describe the capabilities of the drone. It is understood that it can be used for video mapping of targets on the ground including buildings and tunnels as well as drawing samples of emissions.
Both the CIA and Defense Department declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the program.
Read more: FOX News
Auto-Landing May Have Led to Drone Capture
Updated: Monday, 12 Dec 2011, 3:28 PM CST
Published : Monday, 12 Dec 2011, 3:28 PM CST
(FOX News) - A US surveillance drone that came down in Iran earlier this month may have done so because of a system malfunction that triggered an automatic landing.
The theory has emerged as the strongest of several scenarios being examined by intelligence officials who are anxious to determine how the hi-tech stealth plane fell into Iranian hands.
President Barack Obama acknowledged publicly Monday that Tehran had the RQ-170 Sentinel and that US officials had asked for its return.
One US official told FOX News Channel the landing was in line with an "internal or system failure" that would be consistent with the theory that the drone went into a default setting for an automatic landing pattern.
But the pressing question remains what triggered it. "The forensics are ongoing," said an official.
When asked about the lost drone Monday, Obama said he would not comment "on intelligence matters that are classified."
"As has already been indicated, we have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," he added.
Two intelligence sources said the other scenarios include a catastrophic or navigational malfunction that caused the Sentinel drone to break contact with its base. But that scenario is problematic, the sources said, because it does not fully explain how the drone made a "soft landing."
Once contact with the operators is broken, drones such as the RQ-170 are programmed to circle an area until contact is re-established, sources said. If contact is not re-established during a pre-programmed period, it is designed to return to base or to self-destruct -- directed through a separate channel or program.
A common outcome is that the drone crashes and is burned by its fuel.
Under a third "plausible but remote" scenario, the drone's data stream was compromised or jammed. One US official emphasized there was "no evidence of jamming" or that "hostile fire took down the drone."
Iran has claimed to be unlocking the aircraft's software secrets, but US officials said the drone is "not a guaranteed gold mine for Iran," partly because the Islamic Republic may not have the "expertise" to exploit or reverse-engineer the craft.
Russian and Chinese cooperation could help the Iranians decipher the sophisticated software, but the extent to which international partners have broken into the code is "one of the big unknowns," one intelligence source said.
US officials are reluctant to describe the capabilities of the drone. It is understood that it can be used for video mapping of targets on the ground including buildings and tunnels as well as drawing samples of emissions.
Both the CIA and Defense Department declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the program.
Read more: FOX News
Source-Checkpoint Washington
YET ANOTHER DRONE LOSS???
One of the Air Force’s premier drones crashed Tuesday morning in the Seychelles, the Indian Ocean archipelago that serves as a base for anti-piracy operations, as well as U.S. surveillance missions over Somalia.
The crash of the MQ-9 Reaper comes roughly two weeks after a U.S. drone went down in Iran.
The Seychelles, where U.S. officials have worked closely with local officials to establish the drone base, is hardly enemy territory, and the drone that crashed Tuesday was operated by the Air Force, not the CIA, which operated the stealth RQ-170 that crashed in Iran.
Still, Tuesday’s crash once again illustrates the fallibility of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Air Force acknowledged the crash at the Seychelles airport, and a spokesman for the service said the crash happened as the drone was landing. No one was injured.
The Air Force said the cause of the crash — the first ever of a Reaper in the Seychelles — was under investigation. A statement from the civil aviation authority in the Seychelles attributed it to engine failure, saying that, after landing, the drone failed to stop before skidding into an outcropping of rocks at the end of the runway.
“It has been confirmed that this drone was unarmed and its failure was due to mechanical reasons,” the statement said. The Air Force confirmed that the MQ-9 was unarmed.
Photos of the Reaper show that it sustained heavy damage, with the nose of the drone carved off and one wing partially missing.
Gervais Henrie, editor of the local Le Seychellois Hebdo, who witnessed a crew lifting the remains of the drone with a crane after the crash, said it had burst into flames. Much of the Reaper appeared charred.
“Totally destroyed,” Henrie said in a phone interview.
The U.S. military is believed to have only a handful of Reapers in the Seychelles, based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport.
The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted the drones since September 2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have said the primary mission of the Reapers was to track pirates in regional waters, but they have also been used to conduct surveillance missions over Somalia.
The base in the Seychelles is part of a constellation of drone bases that the U.S. government has expanded in the region to monitor or attack al-Qaeda affiliates.
Hernie said Seychellois often see the Reapers flying overhead, and that they have come to accept them as a a routine part of living in the islands.
YET ANOTHER DRONE LOSS???
One of the Air Force’s premier drones crashed Tuesday morning in the Seychelles, the Indian Ocean archipelago that serves as a base for anti-piracy operations, as well as U.S. surveillance missions over Somalia.
The crash of the MQ-9 Reaper comes roughly two weeks after a U.S. drone went down in Iran.
The Seychelles, where U.S. officials have worked closely with local officials to establish the drone base, is hardly enemy territory, and the drone that crashed Tuesday was operated by the Air Force, not the CIA, which operated the stealth RQ-170 that crashed in Iran.
Still, Tuesday’s crash once again illustrates the fallibility of unmanned aerial vehicles.
The Air Force acknowledged the crash at the Seychelles airport, and a spokesman for the service said the crash happened as the drone was landing. No one was injured.
The Air Force said the cause of the crash — the first ever of a Reaper in the Seychelles — was under investigation. A statement from the civil aviation authority in the Seychelles attributed it to engine failure, saying that, after landing, the drone failed to stop before skidding into an outcropping of rocks at the end of the runway.
“It has been confirmed that this drone was unarmed and its failure was due to mechanical reasons,” the statement said. The Air Force confirmed that the MQ-9 was unarmed.
Photos of the Reaper show that it sustained heavy damage, with the nose of the drone carved off and one wing partially missing.
Gervais Henrie, editor of the local Le Seychellois Hebdo, who witnessed a crew lifting the remains of the drone with a crane after the crash, said it had burst into flames. Much of the Reaper appeared charred.
“Totally destroyed,” Henrie said in a phone interview.
The U.S. military is believed to have only a handful of Reapers in the Seychelles, based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport.
The island nation of 85,000 people has hosted the drones since September 2009. U.S. and Seychellois officials have said the primary mission of the Reapers was to track pirates in regional waters, but they have also been used to conduct surveillance missions over Somalia.
The base in the Seychelles is part of a constellation of drone bases that the U.S. government has expanded in the region to monitor or attack al-Qaeda affiliates.
Hernie said Seychellois often see the Reapers flying overhead, and that they have come to accept them as a a routine part of living in the islands.
Well gee, you don't think it could possibly be related to "Israeli Spies" do you???
U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations Part 2
Creech Air Force Base Indian Springs Nevada
Creech Air Force Base (IATA: INS, ICAO: KINS, FAA LID: INS), formerly known as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field, is a United States Air Force base located one mile (2 km) north of the central business district of Indian Springs, in Clark County, Nevada, United States. It is about 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Las Vegas and 45 miles (72 km) northwest of Nellis Air Force Base. It is named in honor of General Wilbur L. “Bill” Creech, known as the "Father of the Thunderbirds".
The host unit is the 432d Wing, which has six operational squadrons, one maintenance squadron, and MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predators.
Along with being the aerial demonstration training site for the Thunderbirds, the base plays a major role in the ongoing War on Terror. The base is home to the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle which is used regularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The base is also home to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab.
Creech Air Force Base (IATA: INS, ICAO: KINS, FAA LID: INS), formerly known as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field, is a United States Air Force base located one mile (2 km) north of the central business district of Indian Springs, in Clark County, Nevada, United States. It is about 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Las Vegas and 45 miles (72 km) northwest of Nellis Air Force Base. It is named in honor of General Wilbur L. “Bill” Creech, known as the "Father of the Thunderbirds".
The host unit is the 432d Wing, which has six operational squadrons, one maintenance squadron, and MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predators.
Along with being the aerial demonstration training site for the Thunderbirds, the base plays a major role in the ongoing War on Terror. The base is home to the MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle which is used regularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The base is also home to the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab.
Source-Wired.com: United States Predator and Reaper drones infected with computer virus
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.”
U.S Air Force Cover-Up can be read here
The U.S. Air Force revealed new details Wednesday about the virus that’s been infecting the remote cockpits of its drone fleet — and insisted, despite reports from their own personnel, that the infection was properly and easily contained.
In a statement — the military’s first official, on-the-record acknowledgement of the virus — the Air Force insisted that the malware was “more of a nuisance than an operational threat.” The ability of drone pilots to remotely fly the aircraft from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada “remained secure throughout the incident.”
The armed drone has become America’s weapon and surveillance tool of choice in warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. So when Danger Room reported on Friday that Creech security specialists had spent the last two weeks fighting off an infection in the drones’ remote cockpits, there was an almost instantaneous media uproar.
It also caught off guard the 24th Air Force, the unit that’s supposed to be in charge of the air service’s cybersecurity, multiple sources involved with Air Force network operations told Danger Room. “When your article came out,” one of those sources said. “it was like, ‘What is this?’”
In its Wednesday statement (.docx), the Air Force said that was flat wrong — that the 24th knew all along.
“On 15 September, 24th AF first detected and subsequently notified Creech AFB regarding the malware,” the service said. “The Air Force then began a forensic process to track the origin of the malware and clean the infected systems.”
The Air Force didn’t say whether the clean-up process had been completed; insiders report that the infection has been particularly difficult to remove, requiring hard drives to be erased and rebuilt.
But the Air Force did provide a few details about the malware. They said it was first noticed on “a stand-alone mission support network using a Windows-based operating system.” And they called it “a credential stealer,” transmitted by portable hard drives. (Security specialists had previously identified it as a program that logged pilots’ keystrokes.) “Our tools and processes detect this type of malware as soon as it appears on the system, preventing further reach,” the Air Force added.
The malware “is routinely used to steal log-in and password data from people who gamble or play games like Mafia Wars online,” noted the Associated Press, relying on the word of an anonymous defense official. That official did not explain why drone crews were playing Mafia Wars or similar games during their overseas missions.
“It’s standard policy not to discuss the operational status of our forces,” Colonel Kathleen Cook, spokesperson for Air Force Space Command, said in the statement. “However, we felt it important to declassify portions of the information associated with this event to ensure the public understands that the detected and quarantined virus posed no threat to our operational mission and that control of our remotely piloted aircraft was never in question.”
“We continue to strengthen our cyber defenses,” she added, “using the latest anti-virus software and other methods to protect Air Force resources and assure our ability to execute Air Force missions.”
Photo: USAF
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.”
U.S Air Force Cover-Up can be read here
The U.S. Air Force revealed new details Wednesday about the virus that’s been infecting the remote cockpits of its drone fleet — and insisted, despite reports from their own personnel, that the infection was properly and easily contained.
In a statement — the military’s first official, on-the-record acknowledgement of the virus — the Air Force insisted that the malware was “more of a nuisance than an operational threat.” The ability of drone pilots to remotely fly the aircraft from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada “remained secure throughout the incident.”
The armed drone has become America’s weapon and surveillance tool of choice in warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. So when Danger Room reported on Friday that Creech security specialists had spent the last two weeks fighting off an infection in the drones’ remote cockpits, there was an almost instantaneous media uproar.
It also caught off guard the 24th Air Force, the unit that’s supposed to be in charge of the air service’s cybersecurity, multiple sources involved with Air Force network operations told Danger Room. “When your article came out,” one of those sources said. “it was like, ‘What is this?’”
In its Wednesday statement (.docx), the Air Force said that was flat wrong — that the 24th knew all along.
“On 15 September, 24th AF first detected and subsequently notified Creech AFB regarding the malware,” the service said. “The Air Force then began a forensic process to track the origin of the malware and clean the infected systems.”
The Air Force didn’t say whether the clean-up process had been completed; insiders report that the infection has been particularly difficult to remove, requiring hard drives to be erased and rebuilt.
But the Air Force did provide a few details about the malware. They said it was first noticed on “a stand-alone mission support network using a Windows-based operating system.” And they called it “a credential stealer,” transmitted by portable hard drives. (Security specialists had previously identified it as a program that logged pilots’ keystrokes.) “Our tools and processes detect this type of malware as soon as it appears on the system, preventing further reach,” the Air Force added.
The malware “is routinely used to steal log-in and password data from people who gamble or play games like Mafia Wars online,” noted the Associated Press, relying on the word of an anonymous defense official. That official did not explain why drone crews were playing Mafia Wars or similar games during their overseas missions.
“It’s standard policy not to discuss the operational status of our forces,” Colonel Kathleen Cook, spokesperson for Air Force Space Command, said in the statement. “However, we felt it important to declassify portions of the information associated with this event to ensure the public understands that the detected and quarantined virus posed no threat to our operational mission and that control of our remotely piloted aircraft was never in question.”
“We continue to strengthen our cyber defenses,” she added, “using the latest anti-virus software and other methods to protect Air Force resources and assure our ability to execute Air Force missions.”
Photo: USAF
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