On Poorly-Reasoned Media Articles

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I don’t know if you’ve been following the whole WikiLeaks story, of how some 90,000+ classified documents concerning the war in Afghanastan were leaked, or whether you think it’s a good thing for democracy or not. I’m not about to answer that question, but I did have a few thoughts, in light of the latest article in the series: Shortcomings of US Drones, and in light of my current reading, The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organisations (TQR, from here out).

Taken in light of what I’ve been reading in TQR, I’d have to say that there was a proper procedure which probably wasn’t followed prior to leaking this information (whistleblowing in the military is protected, the same as whistleblowing by civil servants). So, the person doing this … well, certainly didn’t follow procedure. I don’t know how I feel about that, particularly, but I must say that there’s a definite agenda on the part of WikiLeaks, and I’m not entirely certain that I can fathom it. Nor do I wish to, particularly. I am fairly amazed, though, that nobody’s asking questions about the motivation and procedural correctness surrounding this leak. I read lots about WikiLeaks in general, but nothing about how any grievance could have been addressed within the military rather than dumping masses of data into the public domain.

Woodlands 4

The latest article, in which der Spiegel paints a grim picture of unsecured, military databases being carried off when military drones crash … well, that bothers me just a bit, because I’d like to think that somebody bright enough to design a remote-controlled weapons platform would at least know how to secure the thing from having its data stripped out by an opponent. I mean, 5 minutes of thought says to me:

  1. Encrypt the hard-drive using strong encryption,
  2. Require an external key be provided to even launch the operating system (on a USB stick, or something of the like),
  3. Load in some encrypted keystores onto each of the onboard missiles when the platform is initialized, such that they are required for boot in the event of radio-loss
  4. Continually update the encryption requirements as those missiles are spent (so that, when the device reestablishes radio communication, you’d be able to remotely boot the system, or could provide a missing key),
  5. Design the system to go into a safe shut-down in the event of a certain number of minutes of radio silence, or upon a signal provided by an impact-sensor.

Now, that probably sounds like a lot of gibberish … but, basically, it would require a monetary expenditure which far outstrips the value of data supposedly “lost to insurgents.” Does anybody believe that, in addition to the “remote-controlled ‘zero-out’ procedure,” the manufacturers didn’t include an extra $100 worth of hardware (and free software) to make these things less vulnerable? When their per-unit price is supposedly around $4.5 million each? Please.

This is not a political rant, this is merely a rant against stupidity.

-D

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