[ericgearhart]

What's the information security posture on these things like?

What I mean is, what was considered "secure" in 1977 (DES based encryption was state of the art back then, right?) would be considered laughable today... I wonder what precautions are taken by NASA to prevent someone from intercepting and decoding NASA's commands to the probe and then beaming their own commands to Voyager 2.

[conover]

From what I've read, the signals from these probes are so weak that you need large receivers coupled with extremely low temperature electronics to detect them. That puts it out of the reach of everyone except the extremely well funded. In the end, it would be a short list of suspects.

[mturmon]

Yes, you quite literally need one of these to communicate with Voyager:

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/images/browse/jpl9020ac.gif