Thursday, December 15, 2011

Iran Claims their GPS Spoofing downed Drone in Iran

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.
Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.
Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.
"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer. end quote from: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1215/Exclusive-Iran-hijacked-US-drone-says-Iranian-engineer

See related blog with quotes:China considers Naval and Military Presence in Sey...


If you understand how the artificial intelligence works within a drone its programming basically would be something like "As long as a human is in control defer to that. If contact with human pilot somewhere on earth is broken then navigate using GPS to find your home airport." If contact was broken with the pilot on the ground and then the Iranians made the drone artificial intelligence first blind and then forced a new set of co-ordinates into the drone it is possible that the Iranians did what they said and tricked the drone to land at a new site. Since another one landed in the Seychelles and since Chinese Naval ships are now headed there likely this was done to the U.S. drone that landed or crashed at the seychelles too. Whether the Iranians actually did this or not it IS technologically plausible.

Also, in regard to literally all weapons of war, "If something is too good to be true it usually is!" What this means is one country's "perfect weapon" soon becomes all country's "perfect weapon". I wrote about this in another blog where I said something like, "How would Americans like to have their leaders hit with Hellfire missiles?" This is the problem of all weapons. Eventually, they are all used on everyone worldwide by some or all countries. So, whenever a "perfect weapon" is built or used expect others to have it too very shortly. And then what?

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