DHS: Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones .....

It appears this problem also was taking place in defense of the southern border. Clearly that would be a Security Issue and would fall on BO and his Team. What say ye?



The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems. We’re funding some advances so we can counter this,” said Timothy Bennett, a science-and-technology program manager at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP. Those bad guys aren’t ISIS, just traffickers, Bennett said on Dec. 16 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies “It’s more about trafficking drugs and people,” he told Defense One. “We know who’s over there. We can guess who’s doing it.”

Bennett said CBP has a rapid and growing need, especially for “small” unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. But unlike larger drones designed to military specifications, many small UAVs are far more vulnerable to hacking and location spoofing. Consider how easily Chinese cybersecurity researchers Lin Huang and Qing Yang with Qihoo 360 were able to disrupt the geofence on a DJI Phantom drone by spoofing GPS, which is illegal in the United States.

“It’s the spoofing that’s bad. That we’ve got to look into. They can make you think you are someone else,” Bennett said. “For small [UAVs], it’s a bigger deal. They can’t do the secure GPS. There are a lot of anti-jamming systems right now that can detect it but they’re big and heavy. So you’ve got something that weighs 25 pounds, you add five pounds, and it affects its payload or it affects its duration. So the big thing now is getting that [detection] capability on these small ones in a way that doesn’t add weight to it.”

DHS had taken delivery of 11 MQ-9 Reaper drones, unarmed but otherwise similar to the ones used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS anticipated that the cost per flight hour would be $2,468, far lower than the actual $12,225. The agency was using accounting tricks to move the costs of pilots, equipment, and overhead off the books. Even the actual flights hours — 5,102 — were a fraction of the promised 23,296. As a result, large areas and portions of the border were left undefended. More damning, CBP had little to show for the big price tag. UAVs helped in just 2 percent of apprehensions on the southwest border. The audit came out just as DHS was asking Congress to give it $443 million for another 14 Reapers, also called Predator Bs, which the agency received......snip~

http://www.defenseone.com/technolog...poofing-Border-Drones/124613/?oref=d-mostread

 

Btw, they know with the tech expanding quick like. Soon Mass Surveillance will be available.



The report also says that privacy concerns may curtail the use of drones over U.S. soil. “Already we’ve seen companies selling persistent surveillance, wide area surveillance solutions,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst from the American Civil Liberties Union, said at the CSIS event. “Mass surveillance by use of drones is both something very far away but also very near … The technology will move very quickly.....snip~ Same link.

 

Just another reminder that our southern border is anything but secure. Perhaps Trump is on to something.

I heard a few weeks ago that the Mexicans have counterfeit border patrol vehicles as well.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/13/border-patrol-catches-smuggler-using-fake-agency-vehicle.html

 

Not much of a confidence builder when talking about keeping the country and Americans.....Safe, huh?

 

Which is exactly why we will hear this mentioned precisely never in the MSM, or by this weak POTUS.

 

Yeah, and as you can see the left around here isn't so much up on things politically.

 

They never are, are they?

 

Well, I knew a few. Although, we all do come to a point in time where it gets old.

 

You're correct. As a New Yorker the number of CCTV cameras on the streets and privately owned businesses in NYC has become astronomical. I know because I was responsible for the security of four Buildings in Lake Success before I retired.