elfismiles wrote:
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by MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 08, 2011 5:53 pm
[W]hat was on show on Iranian TV was an immaculate gleaming white drone that looked straight off the production line.
Which tends to back up the claim by Iran that its forces brought down the drone through electronic warfare, in other words that it electronically hijacked the plane and steered it to the ground.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16095823
by barracuda » Fri Dec 09, 2011 1:05 am
MacCruiskeen wrote:They brought it down intact:
by harry ashburn » Fri Dec 09, 2011 7:44 pm
by JackRiddler » Sat Dec 10, 2011 4:37 am
by elfismiles » Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:34 pm
Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front
Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance, raising questions that trouble privacy advocates.
By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau
December 10, 2011, 6:12 p.m.
Reporting from Washington—
Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.
Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.
He also called in a Predator B drone.
As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.
But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.
"We don't use [drones] on every call out," said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. "If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them."
The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.
Congress first authorized Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005. Officials in charge of the fleet cite broad authority to work with police from budget requests to Congress that cite "interior law enforcement support" as part of their mission.
In an interview, Michael C. Kostelnik, a retired Air Force general who heads the office that supervises the drones, said Predators are flown "in many areas around the country, not only for federal operators, but also for state and local law enforcement and emergency responders in times of crisis."
But former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who sat on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee at the time and served as its chairwoman from 2007 until early this year, said no one ever discussed using Predators to help local police serve warrants or do other basic work.
Using Predators for routine law enforcement without public debate or clear legal authority is a mistake, Harman said.
"There is no question that this could become something that people will regret," said Harman, who resigned from the House in February and now heads the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank.
In 2008 and 2010, Harman helped beat back efforts by Homeland Security officials to use imagery from military satellites to help domestic terrorism investigations. Congress blocked the proposal on grounds it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from taking a police role on U.S. soil.
Proponents say the high-resolution cameras, heat sensors and sophisticated radar on the border protection drones can help track criminal activity in the United States, just as the CIA uses Predators and other drones to spy on militants in Pakistan, nuclear sites in Iran and other targets around the globe.
For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.
Advocates say Predators are simply more effective than other planes. Flying out of earshot and out of sight, a Predator B can watch a target for 20 hours nonstop, far longer than any police helicopter or manned aircraft.
"I am for the use of drones," said Howard Safir, former head of operations for the U.S. Marshals Service and former New York City police commissioner. He said drones could help police in manhunts, hostage situations and other difficult cases.
But privacy advocates say drones help police snoop on citizens in ways that push current law to the breaking point.
"Any time you have a tool like that in the hands of law enforcement that makes it easier to do surveillance, they will do more of it," said Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.
"This could be a time when people are uncomfortable, and they want to place limits on that technology," he said. "It could make us question the doctrine that you do not have privacy in public."
In North Dakota, Janke learned about the Predators last spring after local law enforcement was invited to a briefing on how two Customs and Border Protection drones based at the Grand Forks air base could assist police. He immediately saw advantages.
"We don't have to go in guns blazing," the sheriff said in a telephone interview. "We can take our time and methodically plan out what our approach should be."
Macki, head of the regional SWAT team, decided drones were ideal for spotting suspects in the vast prairie, where grassy plains stretch to the horizon except for trees planted to stem erosion from the winds.
"Anything where we need an advantage, we try to give them a call," said Macki, who declined to specify how often or where he has used the Predators. "We are very fortunate to have them in our area willing to assist us."
The first known use was June 23 after Janke drove up to the Brossart farm with a search warrant for cattle that supposedly had strayed from a neighboring ranch. The sheriff says he was ordered off the property at gunpoint.
The six adult Brossarts allegedly belonged to the Sovereign Citizen Movement, an antigovernment group that the FBI considers extremist and violent. The family had repeated run-ins with local police, including the arrest of two family members earlier that day arising from their clash with a deputy over the cattle.
Janke requested help from the drone unit, explaining that an armed standoff was underway. A Predator was flying back from a routine 10-hour patrol along the Canadian border from North Dakota to Montana. It carried extra fuel, so a pilot sitting in a trailer in Grand Forks turned the aircraft south to fly over the farm, about 60 miles from the border.
For four hours, the Predator circled 10,000 feet above the farm. Parked on a nearby road, Janke and the other officers watched live drone video and thermal images of Alex, Thomas and Jacob Brossart — and their mother, Susan — on a hand-held device with a 4-inch screen.
The glowing green images showed people carrying what appeared to be long rifles moving behind farm equipment and other barriers. The sheriff feared they were preparing an ambush, and he decided to withdraw until daybreak. The Predator flew back to its hangar.
At 7 a.m. the next day, the Predator launched again and flew back to the farm. The drone crew was determined to help avoid a bloody confrontation. No one wanted another Ruby Ridge, the 1992 shootout between the FBI and a family in rural Idaho that killed a 14-year-old boy, a woman and a deputy U.S. marshal.
This time, Janke watched the live Predator feed from his office computer, using a password-protected government website called Big Pipe.
Around 10 a.m., the video showed the three Brossart brothers riding all-terrain vehicles toward a decommissioned Minuteman ballistic missile site at the edge of their property. The sensor operator in Grand Forks switched to thermal mode, and the image indicated the three men were unarmed.
Janke signaled the SWAT team to move in and make the arrests. No shots were fired.
A search of the property turned up four rifles, two shotguns, assorted bows and arrows and a samurai sword, according to court records. Police also found the six missing cows, valued at $6,000.
Rodney Brossart, his daughter Abby and his three sons face a total of 11 felony charges, including bail jumping and terrorizing a sheriff, as well as a misdemeanor count against Rodney involving the stray cattle. All have been released on bail. Calls to Rodney Brossart were not returned Saturday. The family is believed to be living on the farm.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... full.story
by Nordic » Tue Dec 13, 2011 5:50 am
The epicenter of global terrorism, and the CIA's highly classified drone war against extremist groups, is a black hole on the map -- a region of Pakistan off limits to outsiders, and especially Westerners. It’s an area so dangerous that even the Pakistani military avoids it. The CIA may have launched 70 drone strikes in tribal Pakistan in 2011 alone. But Americans, like the rest of the world, have no idea what the area looks like, or who lives there.
One resident of North Waziristan wants to expose the conflict. Noor Behram has spent years photographing the aftermath of drone strikes, often at personal risk. Working with Islamabad lawyer Shahzad Akbar and London-based human rights activist Clive Stafford Smith, who are helping get his photos to the outside world, Behram provided Danger Room with dozens of his images, none of which have ever been published in the United States.
What follows is a sample of some of the most arresting photos. Be advised: Many of these pictures are disturbing. Some of them show dead children.
Also be aware that our sources came to us with an agenda: discrediting the drone war. "I want to show taxpayers in the Western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part of the world: killing civilians, innocent victims, children," Behram says. Stafford Smith is threatening the U.S. embassy in Pakistan with a lawsuit over its complicity in civilian deaths from drone strikes. And anonymous U.S. officials have claimed that Akbar, whose clients are suing the CIA for wrongful deaths in the drone war, is acting at the behest of Pakistani intelligence -- something he denies.
Nevertheless, after careful consideration, we chose to publish some of these images because of the inherent journalistic value in depicting a largely unseen battlefield.
Before posting Behram's photos we took a number of measures to confirm as best we could what was being shown. We verified Behram’s bona fides with other news organizations. We sifted through the images, tossing out any pictures that couldn’t correlate with previously reported drone attacks. Then we grilled Behram in a series of lengthy Skype interviews from Pakistan, translated by Akbar, about the circumstances surrounding each of the images.
Still, we weren't at the events depicted. We don't know for sure if the destruction and casualties shown in the photos were caused by CIA drones or Pakistani militants. Even Behram, who drives at great personal risk to the scenes of the strikes, has little choice but to rely on the accounts of alleged eyewitnesses to learn what happened.
But we know for sure that these are rare photos from a war zone most Americans never see. "In North Waziristan, the bar for western journalists is very high because of the Taliban presence," says Peter Bergen, al-Qaida expert and author of The Longest War.
The CIA has shown no inclination to declassify its secret war. But transparency may come a different way. Akbar and Stafford Smith have recently begun giving cameras to North Waziristanis, so they can document the drone war themselves. Behram wants to publish a book of his hundreds of photographs. A black hole might soon become a floodlight.
Datta Khel, Oct. 13, 2010
Behram arrived in Datta Khel, a district not far from Mirin Shah -- North Waziristan’s main city -- after the funerals for the victims of this strike. He was told that six people died, but didn’t see the corpses. One of the dead was said to be a man in his thirties who was supposed to soon be married, the cousin of the teenager in the maroon shirt shown here.
The teenager helped with the cleanup and rescue effort at the scene of his cousin's death. Along with some other local children, when he saw Behram taking photos, he ran over to Behram to express how angry he was. He gathered the children and they showed Behram fragments of the missile they recovered. Three U.S. ordnance experts examined Behrams' photos of these pieces, are concluded that they were Hellfires -- the missiles fired by U.S. drones and helicopters.
The teenager in the maroon shirt and his friend in the black, about the same age, were an emotional mixture of anger, grief and exhaustion. "They were pissed because he's one of these guys' cousin," Behram recalls, "but at the same time they were overworked in the rescue, so they were not saying much."
by Allegro » Sat Dec 17, 2011 12:39 am
Ann Garrison: Keith, welcome, and, do you think Predator Drones can stop genocide in Africa?
Keith Harmon Snow: Thanks, Ann. This “Predator Drones to stop genocide” narrative is a psychological operation. First, there’s the false narrative about genocide — who is committing it, and who isn’t. And second there’s the false narrative about the United States, Israel, and its allies being the “peacekeeping” policeman who, out of our moral necessity, we cannot allow “genocide” or quote “war crimes” on “our watch.” Well, in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan, the U.S. and its allies are the occupiers. We’re involved Keith Harmon Snowin covert wars, we’re responsible for creating genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in these places. These drones will contribute to war crimes committed with the backing of ordinary American citizens. Of course, they will be used, for example, to protect oil installations, to protect AFRICOM bases, to protect Coca Cola and Ben & Jerry’s gum arabic plantations in Darfur, and they’ll be used to support covert military operations that are happening everywhere.
Ann Garrison: Afrobeat listeners, and anyone who’s read the last 17 years of UN reports on mass atrocities in Rwanda and Congo—and I know that may not be that many people, but anyone who has read these reports—has an idea of what’s wrong with the Rwandan government’s official account of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, which is being put forth as an excuse for U.S. use of drones over Africa. Could you talk about the prevailing story of genocide in Darfur, which is the other excuse put forth in the WIRED editorial?
Keith Harmon Snow: So, Ann, what you’re talking about is this “political economy of genocide” — where the term “genocide” is used as a tool for conquest. The false “genocide in Rwanda” narrative has been used to punish the victims and exonerate the killers, and the killers are in power today, and they’re widely celebrated as quote “survivors of genocide.” In South Sudan and Darfur, the US/UK/Canada/NATO and Israel and other allies have been involved in genocide and war crimes — and we use the standard definitions of these terms — and this is since at least 1990. We backed the invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to 1994, and we won. And we backed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’s covert war in South Sudan, and we won. And we back the “rebels” in Darfur today, and this remains highly contested and up for grabs. What we really want in Sudan, in Darfur, is regime change in Khartoum, and to control the resources in Darfur, and that would be oil, uranium, copper, and the gum arabic plantations, to mention a few.
Ann Garrison: We both know that drones are already engaged in surveillance, above the African continent, and that they’ve dropped bombs in Yemen and now in Libya. What more do you think they’re likely to do because of this latest lobbying, or, one might say, General Atomics’ marketing campaign launched in WIRED Magazine?
Keith Harmon Snow: Well, remember that what we’re seeing in WIRED is this cusp of this development and there’s 20 years of research and development that we haven’t seen anything about, that’s more sophisticated, so what they’re trying to do is reconfigure and use up the old drones, and we have no idea what some of these technologies are capable of. But they’re being deployed in the sizes of little drones the size of hummingbirds, and gigantic drones that carry these huge military payloads. They’re being deployed under the sea in Unmanned Undersea Vehicles. And in outer space, in Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles. And the whole technology is C4ISTR — and that is military jargon for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. And they’re being used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Niger — off California, and on the Mexican border today. So the “drones to stop genocide” campaign is the latest advance of this western corporate fascism.
Who makes these things? Our mothers and fathers, the people we know who work at universities and research outfits, corporations employing millions of Americans. And the killing of innocent people in other places is happening out of sight and out of mind. And we can all say, “my hands and my conscience are clean.” And we can all say, “I did my part to prevent genocide.” Never Again, and all that nonsense, you know.
Ann Garrison: Yeah. . .OK. . . WIRED Magazine is essentially a PR agency for venture capitalists packaged as a hip, trendy techno lifestyle publication. The campaign to re-purpose the Predator Drones to, quote, “stop genocide” appeared as the U.S. Air Force was phasing them out and making the Reaper Drones its lead combat aircraft. So, from out here, the home of WIRED Magazine, this looks like venture capital defining military strategy even though WIRED presented it as the Pentagon’s latest, greatest idea—it’s humanitarian idea. General Atomics, which manufactures both the Predator and the Reaper, was the leading funder of Congressional trips from 2000 to 2005, according to the San Diego Tribune, and most of those trips were organized to promote the Predators. So, is military industrial profit the leading motive behind this Predator Drones to stop genocide campaign?
Keith Harmon Snow: Well, Ann, most people who talk about genocide in mainstream culture have no idea what they’re talking about, because most of the discourse is coming out of places like WIRED and the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker Magazine and even the Nation Magazine — and we’re talking about, like you say, private profit in parallel with “full spectrum military dominance,” meaning Empire.
Hollywood plays a huge role in this, working with the Pentagon, including George Clooney and Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck, and going back to the Star Wars films, where Luke Skywalker indoctrinated the public mind with all of these technologies that we’re seeing operating today and that was in the 1980s.
The “drones to stop genocide” idea comes out of the liberal extremist establishment, the Center for American Progress and ENOUGH and STAND, Invisible Children, and Raise Hope for Congo and Save Darfur — and these all depend on the new “social networking media” like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Buzz, the Omidyar network, to advance mass murder under the disguise of humanitarianism and philanthropy. Of course, behind all of these are non-profit organizations, and think tanks and foundations. So just follow the money and it leads straight to genocide and war crimes supported by ordinary Americans.
Ann Garrison: Keith Harmon Snow, thanks for speaking to AfrobeatRadio. The U.S. Air Force now uses more drones than any other combat aircraft and has more drone pilots than cockpit pilots in training, so I’m sure we’ll be speaking to you about this again.
Keith Harmon Snow: Thanks so much, Ann. Take care.
Ann Garrison: You too. For Pacifica, and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison.
by RobinDaHood » Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:55 pm
By Scott Peterson and Payam Faramarzi*
updated 12/15/2011 1:58:10 PM ET
ISTANBUL, Turkey — 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."
More world news from the Christian Science Monitor
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.
Rock Center: Iran's growing influence in Iraq
Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.
"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”
In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.
Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted over its nuclear program.
Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.
Downed US drone: How Iran caught the 'beast'
“We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”
Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were being watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”
That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language website. And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack, which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the electronic warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.
Iran's growing electronic capabilities
Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a "great epic" and claim to be "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.
US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but so far can't explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”
A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: "There are a lot of human resources in Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."
“Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.
Iran: Obama should apologize for drone 'spying'
According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took place sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”
More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says the engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were made accessible by hackers. The targeted company said "circumstantial evidence" pointed to a "state-driven attack" coming from Iran, meant to snoop on users.
Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more difficult, asserts the engineer.
US knew of GPS systems' vulnerability
Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.
Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."Perhaps as easily exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the modern military depends.
"GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services," Andrew Dempster, a professor from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in Australia.
"This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS," he says.
Unmanned drone attacks and shape-shifting robots: War's remote-control future
The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to the GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos National Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were easily overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.
“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”
The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago communications security conference in October laid out parameters for successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a "seamless takeover" of drones or other targets.
To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in late September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a "navigation warfare" system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to the Defense Update website.
Official US data on GPS describes "the ongoing GPS modernization program" for the Air Force, which "will enhance the jam resistance of the military GPS service, making it more robust."
Why the drone's underbelly was damaged
Iran's drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer, and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that the RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then state-of-the-art surveillance systems.
In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.
In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two years of close observation.
Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the left wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American banners.
The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."
Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month, Iran’s electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often dismissed.
"We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer. "Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold." When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware it might be rigged to self-destruct, but they "were so excited they could not stay away."
* Scott Peterson, the Monitor's Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an Iranian journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot be further identified for security reasons.
by Weather Balloons » Tue Dec 20, 2011 3:10 am
An Art Installation Sculpted by a Team of Swarming Autonomous Flying Robots
Regular readers of PopSci are no strangers to robotic quadcopters, or even to quadcopters that work together to build things. But now, the quadcopters are out of the lab. A new art installation opening this weekend at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France, will be built entirely by quadcopter robots, marking the first time such an exhibition has been constructed by flying robots.
“Flight Assembled Architecture” aims to inspire new ways of thinking about architecture and the process of building things. It also aims to be very, very cool. The robots will swarm together to collaboratively assemble a nearly 20-foot-high tower made of polystyrene foam blocks. It will be built in a roughly 33-by-33-by-33 foot airspace loaded with motion capture sensors that can track up to 50 robots simultaneously (though it’s unclear exactly how many will be working at the same time for this exhibition).
Each quadcopter is programmed to interact with the others via commands issued from a control module, and the motion capture sensors will ensure that everything goes according to plan. A precision fleet management program will take control of the ‘copters should they come too close to one another, helping to avoid collisions and keep the work from bottlenecking.
Of course, the adage says that art imitates life and to some extent that’s what’s happening here. While autonomous robo-construction is a nascent form of engineering, its certainly not one that’s unexplored. The DoD has previously looked into (and presumably is still exploring) swarm technologies and automated robotic fabrication, ostensibly with the idea that future forward operating bases or disaster relief shelters and the like could be assembled--at least to some degree--by unmanned systems before humans ever arrive at a destination.
So while “Flight Assembled Architecture” is something of a whimsical look at that current state of the art of automated aerial robotic systems, it is also a window to the future. Catch a preview to the preview below.
by Ben D » Tue Dec 20, 2011 5:32 am
Overstretched U.S. drone pilots face stress risk
By Phil Stewart | Reuters – Mon, Dec 19, 2011
AFP News - 31 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Flying drone aircraft over Afghanistan from the comfort of a military base in the United States is much more stressful than it might seem, even for pilots spared the sacrifice of overseas deployment and separation from family and friends.
America's insatiable demand for drone technology is taking a heavy toll on Air Force crews, with just under a third of active duty pilots of drones like the Predator reporting symptoms of burnout and 17 percent showing signs of "clinical distress."
That's when stress starts undermining their performance at work and their family lives. "Clinical distress takes it to a different level," said Dr. Wayne Chappelle, who co-authored the study, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. In comparison, about 28 percent of returning U.S. soldiers from Iraq were diagnosed with "clinical distress," the Air Force said.
The Air Force study also turned up a surprise for some top brass - the main source of stress for crews manning the Air Force's drone fleet wasn't firing Hellfire missiles or taking out targets on the battlefield. Although a small number of pilots were seen at high risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, the biggest factor wearing down drone crews were things like long hours and inadequate staffing, which have pushed the Air Force's 350-odd drone pilots and the crews supporting them to their limits.
"We've kind of been in a surge mode with our remotely piloted aircraft since 2007 in terms of crew ratios that aren't as good as we would like them to be," said Lieutenant General Larry James, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
In 2007, the Air Force was flying just 10 to 15 combat air patrols, known as CAPS in military-speak. That means that at any time there were up to 15 drones in the air peering down at different parts of world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That compares to more than 60 CAPS at any given time the Air Force flew this past summer, a temporary surge which the Air Force rolled back to 57 to help relieve some of the stress, James said.
MORE EYES IN THE SKY
Although the United States formally ended the war in Iraq last week and is gradually drawing down in Afghanistan, that doesn't mean demand for drones will decline. Indeed, the opposite appears likely."As you lose eyes on the ground, you may want more eyes in the air," James said.
Although combat was not reported to be one of the main "stressers" for any of those surveyed, it had affected some drone crews -- who witnessed, and maybe even participated in, some of the most grizzly aspects of war from afar. The bulk of what drone crews do is surveillance, monitoring suspects or compounds. But they also sometimes take out targets. That means pressing a button that can lead to someone's death half a world away, then ending your shift to meet family at, say, a child's soccer practice. The transition can be difficult for soldiers at places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
"We try to select people who are well-adjusted." We select family people. People of good moral standing, background, integrity", said Lieutenant Colonel Kent McDonald, who was also involved with the study
"And when they have to kill someone, and when they're involved with missions when they're observing people over long periods of time, and then they either kill them or see them killed, it does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome."
Among the most alarming aspects of the study were the results of one particular category of drone crew - sensor operators for Global Hawk drones. Thirty-four percent of them reported burnout and 25 percent showed clinical distress, the study found. But Air Force officials blamed this partly on experiences from actual combat in previous, manned missions.
"Unfortunately there were members from the Global Hawk center operator community who were deployed in another capacity and they did experience combat," McDonald said of the survey group. "There were a couple of members lost they were very close to."
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