Pentagon plays down security breach with US drones

On Thursday, military officials sought to play down security concerns after the Wall Street Journal revealed that militants in Iraq and Afghanistan had intercepted the unencrypted downlink between US drones and ground control.

"This is an old issue that's been addressed," a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters.

The problem had been taken care of, he said, without elaborating.

But on Friday, the Journal reported that the Pentagon began addressing the issue only this year, despite fears going back to 2004 that Russia or China might intercept and doctor video feeds from the unmanned US aircraft.

The Journal said Friday that members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the vulnerability posed by the lack of encryption in 2004 and 2005.

Citing two officers with knowledge of the talks, the newspaper said concerns focused on the possibility of interference by national militaries and officials assumed insurgents would not be able to exploit the flaw.

"The main concern was that the video feeds were being intercepted, manipulated and then fed to the commanders in the field," an officer told the paper.

But senior members of the Joint Staff dismissed those concerns.

The military did not begin addressing the flaw until video footage from a drone feed was discovered on the laptop of a captured Shiite Iraqi militant earlier this year.

Officials on Thursday confirmed Iranian-backed Shiite insurgents in Iraq had used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available online for 25.95 dollars (18 euros) -- to capture the live video footage from the drones.

Some sensitive video feeds from drones are routinely encrypted, another defense official, who asked not to be named, told AFP on Thursday. But the extent of the encryption remained unclear.