U.S. DRONE HIJACKED BY COLLEGE KIDS

APPARENTLY, IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH TO HIJACK A U.S. DRONE, SO WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT THEIR SAFETY IN OUR AMERICAN SKIES, AND HOW MANY ARE "UP THERE" RIGHT NOW? 

I DIDN'T SEE THIS IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHEN IT HAPPENED, AND CAME ACROSS IT IN SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY.

REPORTED JUNE 29, 2012, IN THE WINNIPEG SUN:

"College students in Texas stunned officials when they hijacked a domestic drone with under $1,000 of gear that could be bought at Radio Shack.

With Department of Homeland Security officials watching, the small group of techies from the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory showed the security experts how to mimic a dummy GPS controller, aim it at the drone and start controlling it. It worked within minutes, and the students had control of the unmanned aircraft.

For a nation that has an exponentially increasing number of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles cruising its skies, the demonstration was sobering.

For privacy watchdogs, the fact that a domestic drone could so easily become a remote controlled missile is only one of myriad concerns over the use of the flying robots.

"This is a concern because they can be taken over, hacked into, what could happen if the controls were ceded?" said Micheal Vonn, policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

She warns that the technology is a very powerful tool for the U.S. to watch us.

"We know that surveillance is always introduced in the narrowest possible, most benign form." In Canada, the RCMP in B.C. are using the hovering video cameras to take pictures of car crashes, vowing they won't be used for surveillance, but privacy groups are urging Canadians to be vigilant about their terms of use because privacy laws can change.

Domestic drones are increasingly common in the U.S., and recently some countries and police departments that use them are considering adding tasers and tear gas to the unmanned, constantly watching aircraft.

Earlier this year in North Dakota, police used a predator drone to help storm Rodney Brossart's 3,000-acre farm and arrest him. Brossart allegedly refused to return six cows that had wandered on to his property and is accused of chasing police off of his property with a rifle. He is the first American citizen to be arrested with the help of a drone." 

THE HUFFINGTON POST DID QUOTE A RUSSIA TODAY ARTICLE ABOUT THIS, I FIND. 

NOW, MAYBE, RUSSIA TODAY CAN BE SEEN AS "ACCEPTABLE NEWS MEDIA"? 

The BBC notes that the same technique may have been employed by Iran when it captured a largely undamaged American drone last year. 

YES, IRAN HIJACKED AN AMERICAN DRONE.

"The report points to claims Iran made in September that it was able to "take control" of U.S. guided weapons or surveillance devices.  

Iranian Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told the Far News, "We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning 'deception' of the aggressive systems... we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination...all the movements of these [enemy drones are being watched]" and "obstructing" their work was "always on our agenda."

Fox News [AS ONLY FAUX NEWS CAN?] explains how "spoofing" a drone's GPS system works, as well as the advantages of this tactic over GPS-jammers: "While jammers can cause problems by muddling GPS signals, spoofers are a giant leap forward in technology; they can actually manipulate navigation computers with false information that looks real."

WELL, THAT SHOULD COMFORT US, YES?

NO.