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While it's momentarily surprising that the video feeds aren't encrypted, remember that the lead time on this type of equipment is often measured in decades. The
by jordanb 17y ago
While it's momentarily surprising that the video feeds aren't encrypted, remember that the lead time on this type of equipment is often measured in decades. The drones deployed right now were probably designed in the early 90s, using early 90s computers.
No video feed back then was encrypted --- military or otherwise --- because the computers with the power even to digitize video in real time, let alone digitize it and then encrypt the digital stream, would have been huge.
It was a common selling point for satellite receivers back then that you could buy them and use them to watch the raw feed of just about everything being broadcast, because it was all analog streams being relayed in the clear. There's actually a pretty good movie floating around the internet called "Feed," [1] made by a guy recording satellite feeds of the 1992 election coverage.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104244/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104244/
- NateLawson 17y agoI disagree on the point that digital video is required for scrambling the feed. Commercial feeds such as HBO have been scrambled since 1986, albeit with analog schemes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher DVB-S came out in 1993 and was one of the first digital standards. It uses DES-based encryption. http://www.dvb.org/about_dvb/history/ http://www.dvb.org/about_dvb/history/ While it may have been difficult to fully-encrypt the video with airborne hardware in the early 1990's, they certainly could have made some effort to scramble it. And by now, it should have been updated to 2002-era webcam technology. Most of the surprise is people confusing the NSA with the military. While the NSA may have the latest and greatest tech, the military is always much farther behind.