Apparently the drones that the US has been using in Iraq and Afghanistan have no encrypted their video feeds, and pentagon officials have revealed that insurgents have been eavesdropping on the video transmissions. According to the WSJ:

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

Think that’s astounding? Wait till you see this:

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

They’ve known about this for nearly two decades and haven’t done anything? C’mon guys – encryption isn’t exactly a new technology. As for assuming that insurgents wouldn’t know how to take advantage of the flaw, don’t even get me started. You should never underestimate your adversary, especially in war. In the modern information age knowledge is easy to come by, so assuming any large group of people will not have certain knowledge is a perilous assumption.