Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones | Hacker News Reader

Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones

defenseone.com

70 pointskushti74 comments

  The ShadowHawk uses military-grade encryption and changes
  GPS frequencies every half second, according to Buscher.

That doesn't sound true - the GPS satellites don't do frequency hopping, you get 1575.42MHz, 1227.60MHz and that's it. All the linked paper says is that you can use the precise time from a GPS receiver to start up a different radio system that needs precise timing.

I was wondering about this too... there's something fishy about this quote.

I'll second that. It makes no sense. Perhaps they change a DGPS signal every half second, but that won't help.

I've learned to not try to fix an absurd argument for the other person, so I'll stop speculating.

LOL "Military Grade". Anything that is labeled "Military Grade" means it has gone through a long, bureaucratic specification and procurement process. The spec is obsolete by the time it actually gets anywhere. With the pace of progress these days, "Military Grade" means "5 years old."

I'm starting to think the same of healthcare software, except we call it "Hospital Grade"

It sounds like bullshit salespeak, tbh. "Hey we are doing what we can at the price point you asked for. If you want more, it costs more."

The paper at the link isn't about any sort of countermeasures. It's about repeating GPS signals to the inside of shielded areas on the same frequencies.

> 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.

So we spent $360m (at least, probably more due to creative accounting cited in article) on spoofable, hackable, drones since 2005. Then, instead of waiting for an audit, Congress greenlights another $443 to purchase 14 more of the same 2% value added drones which were designed to carry out strike missions in Afghanistan.

Why?

Why do you think? Because that's what's on offer by the military contractors who have manufacturing plants in those senator's districts -- so that's what they buy.

Or, if you prefer the faith-in-humanity answer: career politicians don't have an understanding of statistics.

To add to my other, now un-editable response: inertia may also play a role -- the existing procurement processes for the drones have already been worked out; it's probably a lot easier to make an additional order for the same product.

There's plenty of aviation navigation methods aside from GPS, some of which will fit on a small processor. We've been doing optical/radar terrain map following for decades in cruise missiles for example. There's also inertial, celestial, VOR/NDB/TACAN, ADF and others. A smart navigator will use multiple methods; if one of its methods begins to disagree from the others, it can be downweighted.

  >> inertial, ...

A nice discussion of inertial navigation capability (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294):

    Consumer grade MEMS ...are not sufficient for intertial navigation, ... 

    At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can 
    provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. 

    Aviation grade IMUs ... maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km 
    in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up.

One uses inertial systems to cover for disruptions in service of the other systems.

"Harden against attack". You mean "correct defects in design". The phrasing here implies that the state the drones are in is an acceptable one for most situations, just not this one. But it's an unacceptable state for any drones to be spoofable at all.

Note that Iran captured a RQ-170 drone back in 2011, possibly using GPS spoofing, so obviously using the encrypted military GPS signal isn't a perfect solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

(How did they do it? Who knows. Maybe they jammed the encrypted channel, and spoofed the civilian channel, so when the drone fell back onto the unencrypted channel it was receiving bad navigation information)

What strange is, if you read the article, an Iranian engineer claimed that it was GPS spoofing, but the US claims it's primary means of navigation is an inertial navigation system (which seems highly believable given up sketchy GPS can sometimes be).

Plus the Iranians have a video of it smoothly landing at an Iranian airbase (which completely discredits the US's assertions that it crashed, and broke up).

IMUs are wildly expensive, and still have quite a lot of drift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294

Certainly the RQ-170 has an IMU, and I could believe it might use it as the primary means of navigation, but it's almost certainly corrected by GPS, which gives you a means of altering the drone's path by GPS spoofing.

I thought this was the one where they used that like $35 streaming software or whatever (I'm a finance guy, I know that probably sounds stupid) and were able to take over the controls, hence the landing?

There's also a good chance that drone simply crashed without any help from the Iranians.

It would be pretty "funny" if all this military hardware coming home results in countermeasures being developed by drug traffickers that ends up back in Afghanistan. These guys probably have a freer hand and more funding to develop those sorts of tools.

Time to revive the old joke:

Q: How do you smuggle a nuke into America?

A: Hide it in a bale of mary jane.

> The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems

GPS jammer is under $50

A unit that can jam my cellphone within a few feet is; jamming an aircraft at altitude is an entirely different class of device (if only for power output reasons).

The use of General Atomics Predators on homeland security as been a complete Fiasco.

"The bad guys" ... An unfortunate choice of words. Who are the bad guys in this situation? The drug traffickers? The militarized police force? The politicians supporting prohibition? Probably all of them.

Definitely the guys who butcher people and leave them in 55 gallon drums. I'm hardly gonna blame the border patrol for doing their job which is guarding the border.

Guarding the border against an import industry that is worth billions of dollars and is illegal because our political system is beholden to retrograde moralizing.

Vote for politicians who aren't. Unfortunately drug lords aren't interested in votes.

>> "...beholden to retrograde moralizing."

I wish that was the only reason for the drug war, but moralizing is probably a relatively minor factor. I claim the bigger reasons are:

1) The prison-industrial complex is large and politically powerful, and it needs drug "criminals"

2) Many recreational drugs make the working populace less productive. They'd be blowing lines of coke and screwing each other all day or giggling at Spongebob after smoking a bowl instead of diligently churning out more boxes at the packing plant. Drugs that make you more productive are perfectly legal and widely prescribed (Adderall etc).

3) Many popular drugs are easily produced at home in quantities appropriate for individual use. You can trivially grow enough weed at home to support a serious habit. The man hates that and prefers drugs that are only amenable to production on a vast industrial scale, such that monopoly, taxation, and centralized control of production are easy. Tobacco and the aforementioned psychostimulants are the ne plus ultra industrial-only drugs; it's no cooincidence that they're quite legal.

I'm all for ending the horrible consequences of prohibition, but people often ignore or gloss over that a lot of the war on drugs was requested by poor communities who had to deal with the consequences of high levels of drug use. When you're poor and can't move elsewhere, you turn to the police to get the heroin junkies off your front lawn or out of your apartment complex hallways. Which is too bad because it is really a job for social workers.

So again, who are the bad guys because all three of those groups are responsible for such activities.

I'm as critical of my government as any, but please show some sources for a claim as ludicrous as this. The CBP does not go around mutilating corpses of those that they disagree with.

http://boingboing.net/2015/07/01/us-customs-and-border-prote...

Politicians continue to support a war effort which has murdered millions in the ME, they continue to turn a blind eye to torture, and hold the innocent in jails without trial.

So yeah, all three groups are about as bad as each other.

What the hell are you even talking about? How is the police force battling _illegal_ drug traffickers the bad guys here?

it's common knowledge that legalizing drugs would destroy incomes for gangs, who as we all know are the root of violent crimes. If the gangs don't exist, the violence drops.

Wow - that's quite a leap.

Legalize drugs, then the Cartels just say, "Oh, you guys legalized all the drugs were smuggling into your country? I guess we better quit our gang get day jobs now."

Just like we saw when marijuana was legalized here, the cartels simply diversified and started smuggling more heroin, coke and meth and less marijuana. Did their violence subside? Nope. Did it really have a huge impact on their business? Hardly.

The idea is to legalize and control all drugs. Where will the cartels get their money from?

Some drugs are still going to be cheaper from the illegal market. Criminal gangs don't pay tax; sometimes use slave labour; don't have the best quality control; etc.

See also the amount of counterfeit and smuggled cigarettes in the UK.

True but the effect is likely to be fairly small. It's probably better to compare legalization of most drugs to the end of prohibition. That saw a collapse in crime and incarceration rates back towards (although admittedly not all the way down to) pre-prohibition levels which only picked up again with the war on drugs.

If you don't trust that comparison, how about looking at the actual real world effects seen recently in Western countries such as Holland and Portugal that have tried this.

Yes, but it's still a problem.

UK customs agents seize about 1m cigarettes per day. There are about 10m smokers in the UK, so if they smoke about 20 a day that's about 200m cigarettes per day. 1m isn't much compared to that. But it's still there.

(But I do strongly support legalisation of drugs. I just think there's some stuff to be learnt from UK)

The black market is a natural limit on the "effectiveness" of sales taxes. High enough taxes constitute de facto prohibition, especially for poorer segments of the market. Thus a high enough tax can't really be justified by the goals of collecting funds or discouraging vice. The criminal activity is the point; how else could they justify employing so many more police than a rational system of laws would require?

So wait, were the cartels sitting around ignoring heroin/coke/meth as long as marijuana was illegal? That makes no sense.

Not every cartel will go out of business immediately, but if you cut off a big source of illegal funds it absolutely will mean less illegal activity.

They weren't, but like all big corporations, they diversified their product lines:

- Losing marijuana business, Mexican cartels push heroin and meth -https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/losing-mar...

- Marijuana Legalization Sparks Heroin, Meth Trade Increase with Mexican Cartels - https://www.thefix.com/content/marijuana-legalization-sparks...

- Drug Cartels Turning to Meth, Heroin After Pot Legalization in U.S. - http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/05/19/drug-cartels-turning-m...

- Have Changing Marijuana Laws Led to an Increase in Heroin & Meth Smuggling? - http://lighthouserecoveryinstitute.com/have-changing-marijua...

Also, marijuana was never much money for the cartels, the real money has always been in heroin and meth. It's much cheaper to produce and the profit margins are much better than weed.

If you want to cut off their biggest sources of illegal activity, you're not only going to have to legalize some pretty serious drugs, you're also going to have to legalize kidnapping, murder, blackmail and racketeering. The idea that the only way cartels make money is on drugs is terribly myopic.

I'm not saying we should legalise all profitable things. But when the profit:social harm ratio is large, making them illegal may do more harm than good. Every extra product line helps the cartels - if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't be doing it. Kidnapping and racketeering are expensive and dangerous; drugs are not their only source of income but they are a big one.

It's the same logical leap as legalizing alcohol during the prohibition era reduced violence [1]. See Figure 4 - Homicide Rate (1910 - 1944).

[1]: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html

It's not all black/white good guy vs. bad guy stuff.

This thing is so big, it creates problems of its own.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/americas-dirtie...

It's pretty much proven we can't control the flow of drugs. The cost of attempting to do so is too high. We should just stop.

I think the idea that most law enforcement agencies try to paint everyone that they are taking action against as the "bad guys" is a dangerous road. This is how you end up using SWAT teams to serve warrants to unpaid parking tickets. It attempts to make the law some sort of "good vs. bad" moral struggle. I'm sure that there are many laws in other countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia) that we would disagree make someone "bad" for breaking them.

That said, painting the Mexican cartels as some sort of group of "freedom fighters" trying to bring drugs to the impoverished, oppressed masses is hopelessly naive.

Drug overdose kills more people in the U.S. than car accidents: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Drugs/drug-deaths-exceed-traffi.... But the politicians supporting drug control are the bad guys. Right.

Treating drug addiction as a disease instead of a crime would go a long way towards reducing overdoses and keep otherwise potentially productive members of society out of prison. At the very least, amnesty should be offered for addicts that want treatment.

But we're talking about drug traffickers, not drug users. Should that be a disease?

Actually, according to your comment above, we're talking about "the politicians supporting drug control". Those same politicians support treating drug addiction as a crime, rather than a disease, thereby placing a stigma on addicts who want to get help. Some addicts that go without the help they need due to this unnecessary stigma are the ones that end up contributing to the overdose statistic that you mentioned.

The politicians supporting prohibition are the bad guys, for this and other reasons, such as continuing to waste taxpayer dollars on a failed drug war. The same drug war that feeds the pockets of the drug traffickers. The same drug traffickers that require militarized police forces to fight against. The same militarized police forces that require tax payer dollars to pay for. The same tax payer dollars that could be used to treat addicts and reduce the overdose statistics.

Probably. Many of the low-level dealers make below minimum wage; it would be pretty easy to give them a better options.

> Drug overdose kills more people in the U.S. than car accidents [...]

> But the politicians supporting drug control are the bad guys.

How's that drug war working? Drugs are very illegal, yet there are many people dying from overdose. The US imprisons millions of people, yet drugs are still easily available and very cheap.

Also, the article you link talks about prescription drug deaths - many of these are legally prescribed, legally owned, not being abused, meds that the owner accidentally overdoses on.

"There has been a dramatic increase in use of prescription drugs as physicians have become more liberal in prescribing them," said Paulozzi, adding that the bulk of drug-related deaths stems from accidental opioid painkiller overdoses. "

How are speed limits and licensing requirements working? It's illegal to speed and illegal to drive without a license, yet there are tens of thousands of traffic deaths every year. How is gun control working? It's illegal to own high-powered weapons, but there are tens of thousands of gun-related murders each year. Does that mean we should get rid of traffic laws and gun control laws?

And while prescription drug abuse constitutes about half of overdose deaths,[1] that leaves over 20,000 deaths a year from non-prescription drugs, and many of those deaths from prescription drugs would not have happened if those drugs were used as prescribed.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html.

The US doesn't really have "gun control". Here in the UK, gun control is working very well, thanks for asking. That doesn't mean that guns are completely unavailable in the UK, but the murder rate here is a fraction of what it is in the US.

How many drug overdoses are caused because of bad quality control that would be eliminated (or mostly eliminated) by legalization and regulation.

IOW, how many people overdose because they get a batch of 90% pure heroin when they are used to 25% pure? This probably would be solved if they were not getting the drugs illegally.

The drug cartels, who also traffic people, child sex slaves, engage in wide-scale murder, and any other form of fear and misery they can convert into $$$.

When the drug landscape changes they will continue in all their other endeavors.

I read the other week they were even fighting over the rent mining companies pay Mexican towns to mine "conflict free gold".

> traffic people, child sex slaves

Mostly the result of outdated laws preventing legal prostitution.

By no means do I intend to defend cartels, but if you remove their financial incentive to exist, they will shrink or disappear altogether.

Legalizing prostitution won't disempower them anymore than legalizing drugs will - they will prey on some other group, or the same group, or sell sex slaves alongside legal enterprise, or anything else they think of that can unfairly extract money from society. We could never legalize the full extent of their activities either - murder, extortion, kidnapping, slavery etc.

We've had legal brothels in my city (Brisbane, Australia) for decades and Wikipedia's estimating 90% of prostitution there is unregulated or illegal. It just co-exists alongside a legal market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Australia#Quee...

Actually it will, you are wrong.

Regulating something so that you may as well make it illegal isn't really the same as decriminalizing the activity. Countries with reasonable prostitution laws are tremendously safer for those turning tricks.

Countries with reasonable prostitution laws are safer for the people working within that legal framework, not the ones coerced into working outside it - I live in Costa Rica where it is also legal but there are still enslaved adults and children coerced into selling sex, Amsterdam has illegal prostitution coexisting alongside women in windows too. That's examples of illicit sex industries alongside legal ones on three different continents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherland...

But let's say you are right. Prostitution globally is completely legalized and somehow there is no illicit demand for boys and girls, cheaper rates etc. How does that stop the cartels from making money in hundreds of other ways? It is just one line of business, they have plenty more and can always invent new ones.

"military-grade encryption" lol

This is silly.

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