UPDATE! A person who uses our little forum here to try and educate some of the folks out there on the Drone issue sent me the following link to a "news" article on the "AboveTopSecret" forums
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread907094/pg1#pid15512409
Seems the folks at "InfoWars" decided to organize a "Drone Mob" day and someone went there and apparently managed to "hack" the drones and render them useless with a simple, and commonly available downloadable software and a WiFi laptop.
Horrors!
Of course a quick read of the thread first of all shows that the only "reference" to the Drone-Mob day is a written "review" of an article without links. But it's not hard to find out more about the "Drone-Mob"with a simple Google search:
http://www.infowars.com/texans-protest-spy-drones/
http://www.infowars.com/infowars-drone-mob-video-contest-official-rules/
http://www.infowars.com/drone-hacked-over-austin/
Which unsurprisingly (to me at least) shows that the "drones" that were actually Remote Control aircraft. Then it isn't hard to understand that the "hacking" that took place was simple radio-frequency jamming/hi-jacking which can't OCCUR in a "real" drone aircraft in the first place. I NOTE that no one on the thread even touches this issue
Since there appears to be no attempt to have any actual "drones" at the Drone-Mob-Day I really fail to see the "issue" that spawned the thread at ATS in the first place. Of course having looked back into several of the "cited" articles on the subject at InfoWars I highly doubt that "information"or "facts" was in fact part of the planned outcome of the event in the first place
But I also note that the InfoWars site references both the "hacking" of the US drone, (
of which the source article here: http://rt.com/usa/news/hacked-cia-drone-iran-029/ makes some pretty "iffy" claims from the get-go I think the most "damming" being quoting "Presidential Contender" Paul Ryan from the Republican Presidential debate held "last night" with the article dated December 17, 2012... Or did I miss something ) and the "hacking and taking control" of a Drone in front of Department of Homeland security officials with "less than $1,000 dollars" worth of electronic equipment. (See:
http://rt.com/usa/news/texas-1000-us-government-906/)
Something to note though is at the bottom of the article which states that in correction of the original article, "This story has been modified to clarify that the drone used in the U-of-T experiment was not a government drone but an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle owned by the University. Another point in the article is that in order to "spoof" the GPS of the drone the experimenters had to develop and use the "most advanced" spoofer ever built. More to the point though is the admission that the effort managed to "hack" the CIVILIAN GPS signal which is un-encrypted I might add and would not work against a military or government owned drone. Which also isn't pointed out in the ATS or InfoWars articles for the obvious reasons of not supporting their arguments
This would of course be simply "amusing" if it weren't for fact that the "dis-information" provided is being used to fuel the entire "argument" in circular path and with enough repeating getting to the actual "truth" of the matter becomes more and more difficult while simply accepting the story at 'face-value' along with the inaccurate conclusions.
Anyway I thought I'd put this out there for folks
Randy
(Note: I edited the post to remove my "issue" with the one article because I miss-read the date and the article was actually dated from December 12.
2011 rather than 2012 as my eyes mis-informed me the first time. Still the article has a number of issues with that one being only the one that "caught" my attention first. YMMV as they say!
)
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