There are two facts in this matter are clear:
- The drone is completely intact.
- The president has no idea how to proceed.
The questions are also clear:
- Did Iran do this on their own?
- Who will end up with this technology besides Iran?
- What is being done so that this does not happen again?
- Is the drone that went down in the Seychelles part of this story?
David DeGerolamo
Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer
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.
The revelations about Iran’s apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran’s missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.
Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.
Has anyone wondered if the US purposely intended for the drone to be seized by Iran? Perhaps just to see what Iran would do with it, or to retrieve remote data with the drone? In other words, the drone is more or less a trojan horse that the Iranians believe they seized.
I believe Iran was able to exploit a known security flaw and overrride its GPS system. If Iran is technologically competent enough to manufacture 20% fissile uranium, they are competent enough to stop any further transmissions. And what kind of information would they get?