The Wall Street Journal reports that insurgents in Iraq were able to “intercept live video feeds” from US reconnaissance drones. According to WSJ, “senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents” acquired the feed via an “unprotected communications link” in some remotely piloted aircraft. That does not mean, noted the officials, that they could control the RPVs, but they could see what US forces were seeing. Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance head on the Air Staff, told defense reporters in Washington Wednesday that there’s always the potential for eavesdropping or attempts to disrupt signals when using wireless communication links. He added, “One of the ways we deal with that is by encrypting signals.”
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.