rq-170 video decoded and shown off by iran
 

look what i just saw

Iran exhibits evidence of US drone decoding — RT - YouTube *tossed it on youtube until rt uploads it there*

Iran exhibits evidence of US drone decoding — RT

maybe they didnt make their f-313 out of styrofoam after all.. this is fantastic footage from the drone. I wonder how much more will be released...

video is near the bottom of the page. i will ask a colleague to get you guys a transcript of the voice over if you're interested.

cheers
plas

So in your mind all the criticism piled on that toy aircraft on the other thread can be called into question because of this video?

How significant is this really? So they managed to find the right CODEC... we can't even be sure if the data was encrypted to begin with.

well , Iran also mass produce Scan eagle and show it film as well ... and they observing some of USA warship and french with it as well .....

I'm fairly sure the data link isn't (or wasn't) usually encrypted so I wonder if the buffer (and this is presumably a data buffer they've snagged) was encrypted anyway ?

Congrats, the Iranians are now proud owners of some footage of what I assume is their own territory. I'm guessing they're already familiar with what it looks like.

This definitely doesn't translate into "wow, the F-333 really flies".

And maybe those 44 gallon oil drums that were so famously displayed, really were S-300 missiles and TEL's...

;)

F313 or Drums (yes those did look like oil drums not S300 containers) - I didnt post this link to start a flame war. The reference to the F313 is a joke to poke a little fun yes.. however...

What I am trying to point out here is despite "IRAN is all Talk" they clearly have produced data from a sophisticated aircraft. What led the data to be decrypted... a codec, a lapse of security on the part of the CIA/Pentagon (whoever was in charge of the RQ), or some good old fashion decryption it shows that the data and video recorder was intact in one form or another, which also suggests that further technology onboard the drone may be in as good as or better shape.

The footage not only shows the Kandahar airbase but Pakistan and Iran overflights, as for encryption of the data stream.. this was compromised and pointed out in 2009, surprisingly in 2 years then the US government has not done anything to encrypt and secure the data.

Yep, and now they've got a nice video of what sights are interesting in it.

That does have immense strategic value, you know.

They have a subset of what will be a much greater chunk of data, and it's entirely possible the drone got tagged before it recorded much other than an ingress route.

I'd agree that if they've had a look at it and realised the drone over flew or imaged something sensitive like a training camp or some weapons production facility then it'll give them the opportunity to move things around but it's probably a small chunk of a number of flights, which in themselves consist of a much larger pool of intel gathered by various means.

all that shows is that on that particular asset they were not using the platform as a streaming waypoint - ie they were concurrently storing data on it - earlier platforms didn't have encrypted streams for a variety of reasons, one of which was that even if the data stream was intercepted, carrying it off was seen as minimal risk and that the data itself was of limited strategic value - ie they're filming iranian assets - not coalition assets

it's also not indicative of UAS conops re data management as I can tell you that not every asset is storing for forwarding, some systems literally do act as hoppers.

thats also common knowledge and if people know where to look they'll find it in the public domain (ie its not OPSEC), some of the claims made about US security breaches are just enthusiastic wishful thinking because the comments are made in the absence of understanding how they manage some of this material anyway. but on the surface its not a good look and does cause them (the US) not to be so cavalier

accepting iranian claims about what they've done and then trying to translate it to a major breach is a bit silly

its about context

It isn't all or nothing. Iran has plenty of capable people, & have proved it. For example, they got their Phoenix missiles working much more quickly than the Pentagon expected. But that doesn't make a crude fibreglass mock-up with some low-end commercial instruments into a real aircraft. As well as the clever people working on real, effective, military programmes, there are stupid publicity stunts for the uneducated & unsophisticated. The thing is not to mix them up. Don't assume that because A is rubbish, everything they do is, or that because B is rather clever, A isn't actually rubbish, but is real.

It's interesting to see that the iraniens actualy make progress on understanding / getting access to the software on the RQ.

It has been over one year since the RQ got down and even though one has to concider the fact that the iranien regime might not immediately have published the footage once it was gathered from the drone it seems to fit their agenda to do so at least in a timely manner which suggest that it took them at least several month to get this far.

My interpretation of that would be that it was either hard to gain access to the footage due to encryption (or a general lack of knowledge of the software of the drone) or that the hardware had been damaged and needed to be restored.

Either of this options would mean that the iraniens have made some progress in the understanding of the software / hardware which extends "finding a codec".

besides that I unfortunatly lack any further knowledge on this topic and can't realy evaluate how much of a progress was made, but I would be delighted to get some insight from the members of this board who have a better understanding of the topic (gf0012-aust, I'm looking in your direction).


In addition I hope this thread would not get derailed any further because of the F313 reference since OP clearly stated it was intended to be a joke (now I'm looking in your direction swerve):

well, my prev was not intended to trivialise the Iranian effort - their engineers have done some pretty stellar things in the past to maintain equipment under embargo - but there is a need IMO to draw a distinction between Govt announcements and actual capability

bear in mind that the bulk of UAS developments by the US have come under the mantra of COTS, so any prev protection generated by milspec MOTS reqs has thinned considerably - thats the price of trying to save defence dollars by lowering development costs. - so if the Iranians took a year to crack a commercial codec then alarm bells would have to be going off...

the safest thing is to ignore govt flag waving announcements and just look for production results

there is copying - and there is "copying"

I was speaking to my father who is ex USAF and current DOD employee, mind you he has no actual knowledge of the RQ or any drone design/mission, but he had an interesting take I had not considered.

Is it possible the recording is indeed from the captured RQ, but not from the high res imaging package carried in the belly, but instead video from a lower res camera mounted at the base of the nose landing gear for landing and taxiing the RQ through the airfield and into the proper hangar.

The camera viewoint in the video looks to be located in the front of the aircraft and doesn't appear to be very high reslolution. The video I have seen seems to be in the are of the airfield after the landing gear would have been deployed.

On the flip side I don't know why a camera for a remote user would be stored on a hard drive inside the RQ. I don't see any reason the recordings from the sensor suite would be stored either, just sent to Sat and recorded at the destination site.

I'm kind of skeptical on a number of fronts
on board recording is usually only done on long persistent missions
most of the developments for imaging in ISR in recent years have been about codecs that are optimised for streaming back in real time, not storing on board as its extra unnecessary weight - even if they're using SSD's