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by joeyh 5302 days ago
They're optionally encrypted and the grunts in the field don't use it for the same reason grunts in the field have "password" as their password.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12...

2 comments

The WP is a much more responsible and accurate article than Wired's sensational summary -- the salient points there are "Video is unencrypted", "Pentagon has tolerated this for years" and "Predator."

Getting back to the actual focus of my comment -- the original article leaps to "obviously, the Iranians have broken our encrypted controls" from an Iranian press release, without bothering to give even speculative support. I consider it far more plausible that something simpler has happened, such as dumb old software failure, or GPS spoofing.

That article only discusses the video feed, as the grandfather comment noted.