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Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

csmonitor.com

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Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#101

Post by lostlogin »

coderdude wrote: post #88
grecy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that Iran is being made out to be the "bad guy" because they've taken something important and supposedly secret that belongs to the USA and won't give it back. I don't think a country is the bad guy when they are simply trying to stop another country from spying on them.

I'd be interested to know who, other than Iranians, considers Iran the "good guys."

America certainly isn't the good guy in the middle east. If there is a measure that puts America ahead I'd like to hear it. This is not, however, a defense of Iran. Can everyone involved be the bad guy?

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#102

Post by lostlogin »

daenz wrote: post #13

Just throwing this out there, maybe the drone was intended to be caught as part of another kind of intelligence gathering operation. It's easy to blame this on incompetence, but the other angle is that the drone being caught was made to look like an accident in order to collect intelligence (gps, audio, etc) from wherever the Iranians took it, and this data could be offloaded to someone that could gain access to the…

Given that the NYT is reporting that top secret documents were just left in a trailor in Iraq by the ton, I suspect that it's more likely the drone was landed in Iran by accident.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#103

Post by rdtsc »

dekz wrote: post #77
gk1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people on Reddit != All of Reddit. Reddit != America.

The OP was clearly describing the hive-mind of reddit, which does in fact follow American ideologies due to the overwhelming number of Americans who do use it.

However at the same time a lot of them claim to be critical of US govt's policies on war, drones, extra-judicial killings and so on. All that taken into account is surprising that they as a group would rush to discredit Iranians' capability and ridicule this situation.

It is interesting that they are essentially playing along to the US govt. propaganda. The govt. knew what had happened but lied, telling the media a malfunction occurred, and the drone 'drifted' randomly into Iranian territory. I expected them to lie and make shit up. That's fine. But is is interesting that groups liberals are also doing that, without being coerced or forced to do so. It illustrates an interesting process that happens were supposedly fairly liberal individuals still end up White House lapdogs without even realizing it.

It is also funny how after more evidence comes out, neither the media, nor say, Redditors, go back and admit their previous mistake, instead the strategy moves to "ridicule".

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#104

Post by mikescar »

> “We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

The thought of this leads to some conspiratorial thoughts: from various sources, we might know where a missile originated from, but who knows what might happen to it during flight?

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#106

Post by trotsky »

rdtsc wrote: post #103
dekz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP was clearly describing the hive-mind of reddit, which does in fact follow American ideologies due to the overwhelming number of Americans who do use it.

However at the same time a lot of them claim to be critical of US govt's policies on war, drones, extra-judicial killings and so on. All that taken into account is surprising that they as a group would rush to discredit Iranians' capability and ridicule this situation. It is interesting that they are essentially playing along to the US govt. propaganda. The govt. knew what had happened but lied, telling the media a m…

It is interesting that they are essentially playing along to the US govt. propaganda. [...] It is also funny how after more evidence comes out, neither the media, nor say, Redditors, go back and admit their previous mistake, instead the strategy moves to "ridicule".

You shouldn't under-estimate how much propaganda being done by a variety of states is being done online through the use of sock puppets. While I'm not trying to claim it's happening on reddit specifically I wouldn't be shocked to find out it was. This is one of the (afaik) stated main purposes for the "persona management stations" that various US military & intelligence services have been procuring and using. I've only heard it framed as foreign language propaganda targeted at conflict areas, but it isn't hard to see the temptation to target US based sites of International appeal.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#107

Post by Jach »

einhverfr wrote: post #82
guelo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.

Here's a contrarian view. I would argue that mutual spying in general is a good thing and that it generally has the potential, properly managed, to prevent war. The problem has to do with leadership and less to do with spying itself. During the cold war, both the US and USSR had extensive satellites deployed that would provide an early warning for the launch of ICBM's. As Lt. Robert Bowman pointed out in "Star Wars:…

Did Bowman also point out Petrov Day and the dangers of these systems malfunctioning? ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/ )

I mostly agree with your comment; the CIA has been relatively benign compared to other agencies and the military at large. My own take on the moral implications of spying is that if you already have a Palantir, you might as well use it since more information is advantageous in the zero-sum games countries play. But I wouldn't go out of my way to find/build one--I think the resources could be spent to greater effect elsewhere in such a case.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#108

Post by GHFigs »

DrCatbox wrote: post #38

It is suprising that many americans, for the lack of a better term, seem to be "butthurt" over this event. Look at this news on reddit for example, first it was ridiculed, and speculation was high that it might have been a crash or accident, that the Iranians had luck, and that it in fact never happened, just propaganda. Then the Iranians showed it, and many comments said "its old tech any way". Why the butthurtness?…

tl;dr - I don't think it's "butthurt" so much as people making it up as they go along.

There is sometimes a cultural or sub-cultural imperative to have and express an opinion on something even when there isn't enough information to go on.

I'm not sure how much of that is being American and how much of that is being on the Internet[0], but essentially it's not enough to just read the news anymore. If you don't have an opinion or belief (preferably a strong one) many people will regard you as ignorant, even if you're working from the same set of facts as they are.

When there's not enough information, it seems that people look first to familiar memes or established narratives. When it comes to US-Iranian relations, it's usually either the idea of American military supremacy (so it must have been an accident or Iranian bluffing) or the idea that the US intends to go to invade Iran any day now (so it's somehow an American ploy to start a war). There is a grain of truth in each which surely plays into the whole truth, but there are far too many unknowns for anybody commenting on the Internet to say with the kind of confident certainty that we so often do.

A site like Reddit (or HN, or anything with a comment box) amplifies this, because people like posting comments, and how can you comment on a story if you haven't decided what your opinion is about it? So people skim the article or just read the headline[1], draw conclusions which may be highly speculative, and then post whatever they think based on at most a few minutes of thought. And they might do this a dozen times a day, for years. So it becomes really natural for people to dash off whatever the easiest thing they can think to say is given the context, even as the context changes and the story evolves. On a popular story you might get dozens or hundreds of people saying the same handful of things.

[0] Or how much of it is what some call "Male Answer Syndome". [1] Check out the length of headlines on /r/politics/.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#109

Post by guelo »

trotsky wrote: post #90
guelo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.

That spying on people is wrong and you don't believe it should be done is a laudable moral position and quite reasonable to expect out of the vast majority of the world's population. That doesn't change the fact that it'd be an absolutely disastrous approach to running a county.

why do we need to spy on other governments unless we're going to war with somebody? The US has overthrown 50 governments since wwii. How about we srop doing that?

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#110

Post by moo »

trotsky wrote: post #90
guelo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.

That spying on people is wrong and you don't believe it should be done is a laudable moral position and quite reasonable to expect out of the vast majority of the world's population. That doesn't change the fact that it'd be an absolutely disastrous approach to running a county.

U.S. invading Iranian airspace is not as benign as you are pretending especially given it is not an isolated incident. It is one thing to have the neighborhood peeping tom looking in your window, another thing to have a serial killer rapist snooping inside your house. The U.S. government has aggressively worked to overthrow the Iranian government by setting U.S. public opinion against the Iranian government for possible military action. The U.S. has also installed sanctions, the 2007 congress funding of covert operations inside Iran, Iranian scientist assassinations, and the recent dubious Saudi assassination plot.
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