Even the Wall St Journal's reporters can fall for technical baffle gab. The enemy has been receiving video from our Predator drones for nearly a year. This is kinda serious, it essentially puts US drone reconnaissance at the disposal of the enemy. Damn near as good as having your own fleet of drones. The drone electronics broadcast their video in clear, not encrypted.
The obvious fix is to encrypt the video in the drone. Encryption at video rates (18 megabits/sec) could be done on a printed circuit board maybe 5 by 7 inches. There is room inside the drones for such a card. So why hasn't that been done?
"The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the US, Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes."
Journal reporters Siobhan Gorman, Yoichi J. Dreazen and August Cole printed this bit of malarkey in a front page WSJ story Thursday. They should have known better.
Networks move bits from place to place. They don't care what the bits are, what they say, whether they are encrypted or not. All the network does is move the bits from one place to another. Nothing in the network need be changed to move encrypted video. The unnamed officials are offering excuses and bad excuses at that.
And three clueless journalism school graduates fell for it. Even the best newspapers go brain dead occasionally.
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