Here is a, per­haps, telling quote from Mr Ahmadinejad.

He said: ‘The Amer­i­cans have per­haps decided to give us this spy plane. We now have con­trol of this plane.’

Based on this procla­ma­tion from the Pak­istani mil­i­tary the next downed drone might be in Pak­istan:

Pak­istan says U.S. drones in its air space will be shot down
By NBC News, msnbc.com staff and news ser­vice reports
12/10/2011

Updated at 8 p.m. EST

ISLAMABAD — Pak­istan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new direc­tives, a senior Pak­istani offi­cial told NBC News on Saturday.

Accord­ing to the new Pak­istani defense pol­icy, “Any object enter­ing into our air space, includ­ing U.S. drones, will be treated as hos­tile and be shot down,” a senior Pak­istani mil­i­tary offi­cial told NBC News.

The pol­icy change comes just weeks after a deadly NATO attack on Pak­istani mil­i­tary check­points acci­den­tally killed 24 Pak­istani sol­diers, prompt­ing Pak­istani offi­cials to order all U.S. per­son­nel out of a remote air­field in Pakistan.

Pak­istan told the U.S. to vacate Shamsi Air Base by Decem­ber 11.

...

Pak­istani author­i­ties started threat­en­ing U.S. per­son­nel with evic­tion from the Shamsi base in the wake of the raid last May in which U.S. com­man­dos killed Osama bin Laden at his hide-out near Islam­abad with­out noti­fy­ing Pak­istani offi­cials in advance.

And it might be NATO oper­ated:

DECEMBER 15, 2011

U.S. Pur­sues Sale of Armed Drones

By ADAM ENTOUS And JULIAN E. BARNES

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion has been qui­etly push­ing to sell armed drones to key allies, but it has run into resis­tance from U.S. law­mak­ers con­cerned about the pro­lif­er­a­tion of tech­nol­ogy and know-how.

The Pen­ta­gon wants more North Atlantic Treaty Orga­ni­za­tion mem­bers to have such pilot­less air­craft to ease the bur­den on the U.S. in Afghanistan and in future con­flicts like the alliance’s air cam­paign in Libya this year.

Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials recently began infor­mal con­sul­ta­tions with law­mak­ers about prospec­tive sales of armed drones and weapons sys­tems to NATO mem­bers Italy and Turkey, while sev­eral U.S. allies in the Per­sian Gulf have been press­ing Wash­ing­ton to autho­rize drone sales, offi­cials said.

The Pen­ta­gon also wants to sell Turkey up to two armed drones and four sur­veil­lance drones, accord­ing to offi­cials briefed on the dis­cus­sions. But they say the Turkey deal is unlikely to move for­ward if law­mak­ers refuse to sign off on the Ital­ian sale.

...

Turkey wants to use the drones against the out­lawed Kur­dis­tan Work­ers’ Party, or PKK. The Pen­ta­gon has been shar­ing with Turkey real-time intel­li­gence from U.S. drone mis­sions in north­ern Iraq and along the bor­der, help­ing Turkey’s air force pin­point PKK posi­tions for strikes, U.S. offi­cials say. Turkey wants to do the mis­sions itself, a shift sup­ported by the Pentagon.

...

Sev­eral of America’s allies in the Per­sian Gulf region are also push­ing to pur­chase armed drones. U.S. offi­cials say such requests could also prove con­tro­ver­sial in Con­gress because of law­mak­ers’ con­cerns about the poten­tial impact on Israel’s mil­i­tary edge in the region.

Law­mak­ers have told the admin­is­tra­tion they are con­cerned U.S. exports of armed drones could make it harder for Wash­ing­ton to make the case to Israel, a pio­neer in drone devel­op­ment, to limit its own for­eign sales of drones that could rival the U.S.‘s. Israel already sells drones to India and other countries.

...

You don’t say...:

July 19th, 2012
06:40 PM ET
CNN
Drones vul­ner­a­ble to being hacked, Con­gress told

By Todd Sperry

It wouldn’t take much effort to hijack a drone over U.S. air­space and use it to com­mit a crime or act of ter­ror­ism, an aero­space engi­neer­ing expert told a House sub­com­mit­tee Wednesday.

Todd Humphreys showed mem­bers of a House home­land secu­rity sub­com­mit­tee how his research team was able to com­man­deer an $80,000 drone using store-bought global posi­tion­ing sys­tem (GPS) tech­nol­ogy.

Drones, includ­ing ones used by police agen­cies, are vul­ner­a­ble to hack­ing because they use unen­crypted GPS infor­ma­tion for nav­i­ga­tion.

“If you can con­vinc­ingly fake a GPS sig­nal, you can con­vince an (unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle) into track­ing your sig­nal instead of the authen­tic one, and at that point you can con­trol the UAV,” said Humphreys, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in orbital mechan­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas.

Humphreys said hack­ing and spoof­ing to take con­trol of a drone can be done from miles away.

The U.S. mil­i­tary uses encrypted GPS on drones fly­ing in war zones such as Afghanistan. To use sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy on all drones would increase costs dra­mat­i­cally, accord­ing to Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office (GAO) offi­cials who attended Thursday’s hear­ing on Capi­tol Hill.

GAO offi­cials have sug­gested that the Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment and the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion col­lab­o­rate in reg­u­lat­ing drones. But the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity has, up to this point, been unwill­ing to accept a role in reg­u­lat­ing drones, accord­ing to Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

DHS offi­cials were repeat­edly chas­tised by com­mit­tee mem­bers for fail­ing to show up for Thursday’s hearing.

...

Drones are cur­rently a growth indus­try in the avi­a­tion sec­tor, with scores of new com­pa­nies com­pet­ing for a slice of the mar­ket. And if they can clear hur­dles that cur­rently limit their deploy­ment in friendly air­space, pilot­less planes of all shapes will be tak­ing to the air on mis­sions to watch over us.

Just what sort of recon­nais­sance the drones will do and how such uses might infringe on civil lib­er­ties was a hot-button issue at Thursday’s hearing.

Pri­vacy advo­cates are seek­ing tighter reg­u­la­tion, argu­ing that any­one can pur­chase a drone and use it to peek into back­yards and places that typ­i­cally are private.

...

Unreg­u­lated, hack­able spy drones — pub­lic and pri­vate — fly­ing around the US. Smile for the cam­era folks! :D

At least the military’s drones appear to be using encr­pyted GPS so they’re not quite as hack­able as their civil­ian coun­ter­parts. Let’s all just hope that our future civil­ian spy drone fleets beam­ing back a con­strant stream of videa sur­rveil­lance don’t fol­low the military’s drone secu­rity pro­to­cols too closely. Granted, we could also sim­ply hope that we don’t end up fill­ing our sky with fleets of unreg­u­lated sur­rveil­lance drones beam­ing who-knows-what into to who-knows-who in who-knows-where(don’t we already have the inter­net for that?). But, you, we’re in a depres­sion and drones are a “hot” indus­try right now. So we really can’t afford to NOT build an even more giant sur­rveil­lance state. It’ll be good for the economy.

Well, it looks like the fun­da­men­tal­ists were right: porn really will destroy civ­i­liza­tion:

TPM
Let A Thou­sand Euphemisms Bloom
Josh Mar­shall August 1, 2012, 9:32 PM

Pentagon’s Mis­sile Defense Agency warns staffers to stop using the mis­sile defense com­puter net­work to down­load so much porn.

From Bloomberg …

The Pentagon’s Mis­sile Defense Agency warned its employ­ees and con­trac­tors last week to stop using their gov­ern­ment com­put­ers to surf the Inter­net for porno­graphic sites, accord­ing to the agency’s exec­u­tive director.

In a one-page memo, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor John James Jr. wrote that in recent months gov­ern­ment employ­ees and con­trac­tors were detected “engag­ing in inap­pro­pri­ate use of the MDA network.”

“Specif­i­cally, there have been instances of employ­ees and con­trac­tors access­ing web­sites, or trans­mit­ting mes­sages, con­tain­ing porno­graphic or sex­u­ally explicit images,” James wrote in the July 27 memo obtained by Bloomberg News.

This was the part that inter­ested me most …

A gov­ern­ment cyber­se­cu­rity spe­cial­ist, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymity because such work is clas­si­fied, said that many porno­graphic web­sites are infected and crim­i­nals and for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vices such as Russia’s use them to gain access to and har­vest data from gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate com­puter networks.

“There are great dan­gers in inter­act­ing with any site that has high-quality imagery, whether it’s porno­graphic or not, or a lot of links,” said Chase Cun­ning­ham, chief of cyber ana­lyt­ics at Ster­ling, Virginia-based Deci­sive Ana­lyt­ics Cor­po­ra­tion, in a tele­phone inter­view yesterday.

Appar­ently, for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vices know what our spooks want to see.

If you thought the recent rev­e­la­tion of the US government’s Judge Dredd Drone legal memo has a “through the look­ing glass” feel to it, keep read­ing...

One of the more inter­est­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing aspects of the future of drone war­fare is that it’s likely going to take on a sim­i­lar dynamic to the Anony­mous phe­nom­ena...once the micro­drone rev­o­lu­tion gets under­way not only will these things become dras­ti­cally more acces­si­ble and afford­able but you may even know it was there and you almost cer­tainly won’t know who sent it. The inevitable drone blow­back might be a lot smaller than folks expect:

Busi­ness Insider
The Future Of Micro Drones Could Get Down­right Scary
Robert John­son | Jun. 20, 2012, 11:49 AM

It’s been sev­eral years since the rumors and sight­ings of insect sized micro drones started pop­ping up around the world.

Vanessa Alar­con was a col­lege stu­dent when she attended a 2007 anti-war protest in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and heard some­one shout, “Oh my God, look at those.”

“I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’” she told The Wash­ing­ton Post. “They looked like drag­on­flies or lit­tle heli­copters. But I mean, those are not insects,” she continued.

A lawyer there at the time con­firmed they looked like drag­on­flies, but that they “def­i­nitely weren’t insects”.

And he’s prob­a­bly right.

In 2006 Flight Inter­na­tional reported that the CIA had been devel­op­ing micro UAVs as far back as the 1970s and had a mock-up in its Lan­g­ley head­quar­ters since 2003.

While we can go on list­ing roach­bots, swarm­ing nano drones, and syn­chro­nized MIT robots — pri­vate trader and for­mer soft­ware engi­neer Alan Love­joy points out that the future of nano drones could become even more unsettling.

Love­joy found this CGI mock up of a mos­quito drone equipped with the ‘abil­ity’ to take DNA sam­ples or pos­si­ble inject objects beneath the skin.

Accord­ing to Lovejoy:

Such a device could be con­trolled from a great dis­tance and is equipped with a cam­era, micro­phone. It could land on you and then use its nee­dle to take a DNA sam­ple with the pain of a mos­quito bite. Or it could inject a micro RFID track­ing device under your skin.

It could land on you and stay, so that you take it with you into your home. Or it could fly into a build­ing through a win­dow. There are well-funded research projects work­ing on such devices with such capabilities.

...

Oooooo...a mosquito-like micro­drone that can inject things into your body. The nan­odrone rev­o­lu­tion sure should be interesting.

Don’t blame us for bomb­ing your vil­lage, it was our fly­ing death­bot that thought it was a good idea:

Rolling Stone
’The Point of No Return’: Should Robots Be Able to Decide to Kill You On Their Own?
U.N. report calls for a mora­to­rium, but lethal autonomous robots could be a real­ity soon

By John Kne­fel
April 30, 2013 3:10 PM ET

A U.N. report released ear­lier this week called for a global mora­to­rium on devel­op­ing highly sophis­ti­cated robots that can select and kill tar­gets with­out a human being directly issu­ing a com­mand. These machines, known as Lethal Autonomous Robots (LARs), may sound like sci­ence fic­tion – but experts increas­ingly believe some ver­sion of them could be cre­ated in the near future. The report, released by Pro­fes­sor Chrisof Heyns, U.N. Spe­cial Rap­por­teur on extra­ju­di­cial, sum­mary or arbi­trary exe­cu­tions, also calls for the cre­ation of “a high level panel on LARs to artic­u­late a pol­icy for the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity on the issue.”

The U.S. Depart­ment of Defense issued a direc­tive on the sub­ject last year, which the U.N. report says “bans the devel­op­ment and field­ing of LARs unless cer­tain pro­ce­dures are fol­lowed” – although DoD offi­cials have called the direc­tive “flexible.”

Unlike groups like Human Rights Watch – which has called for an all-out ban on LARs – the U.N. report sug­gests a pause on their devel­op­ment and deploy­ment, while acknowl­edg­ing the uncer­tainty of future tech­nolo­gies. “The dan­ger is we are going to real­ize one day we have passed the point of no return,” Heyns tells Rolling Stone. “It is very dif­fi­cult to get states to aban­don weaponry once devel­oped, espe­cially when it is so sophis­ti­cated and offers so many mil­i­tary advan­tages. I am not nec­es­sar­ily say­ing LARs should never be used, but I think we need to under­stand it much bet­ter before we cross that thresh­old, and we must make sure that humans retain mean­ing­ful con­trol over life and death decisions.”

Oth­ers who fol­low the sub­ject echo these con­cerns. “I believe [LARs are] a par­a­digm shift because it fun­da­men­tally changes the require­ments for human respon­si­bil­ity in mak­ing deci­sions to kill,” says Peter Asaro, co-founder and vice chair of the Inter­na­tional Com­mit­tee for Robot Arms Con­trol. “As such, it threat­ens to cre­ate auto­mated sys­tems that could deny us of our basic human rights, with­out human super­vi­sion or oversight.”

What does it mean for a tech­nol­ogy to be autonomous? Missy Cum­mings, a tech­nol­o­gist at MIT, has defined this qual­ity as the abil­ity “to rea­son in the pres­ence of uncer­tainty.” But robot auton­omy is a spec­trum, not a switch, and one that for now will likely develop piece­meal. On one end of the spec­trum are machines with a human “in the loop” – that is, the human being, not the robot, makes the direct deci­sion to pull the trig­ger. (This is what we see in today’s drone tech­nol­ogy.) On the other end is full auton­omy, with humans “out of the loop,” in which LARs make the deci­sion to kill entirely on their own, accord­ing to how they have been pro­grammed. Since com­put­ers can process large amounts of data much faster than humans, pro­po­nents argue that LARs with humans “out of the loop” will pro­vide a tac­ti­cal advan­tage in bat­tle sit­u­a­tions where sec­onds could be the dif­fer­ence between life and death. Those who argue against LARs say the slow­down added by hav­ing a human “in the loop” vastly out­weighs the dan­ger­ous con­se­quences that could arise from unleash­ing this technology.

Because LARs don’t yet exist, the dis­cus­sion around them remains largely hypo­thet­i­cal. Could a robot dis­tin­guish between a civil­ian and an insur­gent? Could it do so bet­ter than a human sol­dier? Could a robot show mercy – that is, even if a tar­get were “legit­i­mate,” could it decide not to kill? Could a robot refuse an order? If a robot act­ing on its own kills the wrong per­son, who is held responsible?

Sup­port­ers argue that using LARs could have a human­i­tar­ian upside. Ronald Arkin, a roboti­cist and roboethi­cist at Geor­gia Tech who has received fund­ing from the Depart­ment of Defense, is in favor of the mora­to­rium, but is opti­mistic in the longterm. “Bot­tom line is that pro­tec­tion of civil­ian pop­u­la­tions is para­mount with the advent of these new sys­tems,” he says. “And it is my belief that if this tech­nol­ogy is done cor­rectly, it can poten­tially lead to a reduc­tion in non-combatant casu­al­ties when com­pared to tra­di­tional human war fighters.”

In a recent paper, law pro­fes­sors Ken­neth Ander­son and Matthew Wax­man sug­gest that robots would be free from “human-soldier fail­ings that are so often exac­er­bated by fear, panic, vengeance, or other emo­tions – not to men­tion the lim­its of human senses and cognition.”

Still, many con­cerns remain. These sys­tems, if used, would be required to con­form to inter­na­tional law. If LARs couldn’t fol­low rules of dis­tinc­tion and pro­por­tion­al­ity – that is, deter­mine cor­rect tar­gets and min­i­mize civil­ian casu­al­ties, among other require­ments – then the coun­try or group using them would be com­mit­ting war crimes. And even if these robots were pro­grammed to fol­low the law, it is entirely pos­si­ble that they could remain unde­sir­able for a host of other rea­sons. They could poten­tially lower the thresh­old for enter­ing into a con­flict. Their cre­ation could spark an arms race that – because of their advan­tages – would become a feed­back loop. The U.N. report describes the fear that “the increased pre­ci­sion and abil­ity to strike any­where in the world, even where no com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines exist, sug­gests that LARs will be very attrac­tive to those wish­ing to per­form tar­geted killing.”

The report also warns that “on the domes­tic front, LARs could be used by States to sup­press domes­tic ene­mies and to ter­ror­ize the pop­u­la­tion at large.” Beyond that, the report warns LARs could exac­er­bate the prob­lems asso­ci­ated with the posi­tion that the entire world is a bat­tle­field, one that – though the report doesn’t say so explic­itly – the United States has held since 9/11. “If cur­rent U.S. drone strike prac­tices and poli­cies are any exam­ple, unless reforms are intro­duced into domes­tic and inter­na­tional legal sys­tems, the devel­op­ment and use of autonomous weapons is likely to lack the nec­es­sary trans­parency and account­abil­ity,” says Sarah Knuckey, a human rights lawyer at New York University’s law school who hosted an expert con­sul­ta­tion for the U.N. report.

...

And you thought the sticker-shock was bad:

Pen­ta­gon down­plays com­ment on F-35 fighter jet cyber threat

By Andrea Shalal-Esa

WASHINGTON | Thu Apr 25, 2013 7:17pm EDT

(Reuters) — The Pen­ta­gon on Thurs­day down­played a com­ment by one of its offi­cials that he is not totally con­fi­dent in the abil­ity of the $396 bil­lion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by Lock­heed Mar­tin Corp, to sur­vive a cyber attack.

The Pentagon’s F-35 pro­gram office issued a state­ment that the Depart­ment of Defense was “fully aware of evolv­ing cyber threats and is tak­ing spe­cific action to counter them for all fielded sys­tems, includ­ing F-35.”

“The F-35 is no more or less vul­ner­a­ble to known cyber threats than legacy air­craft were dur­ing their ini­tial devel­op­ment and early pro­duc­tion,” spokesman Joe DellaVe­dova said when asked about a com­ment by Christo­pher Bodgan, the F-35 pro­gram man­ager, to law­mak­ers on Wednesday.

Bog­dan, an Air Force Lieu­tenant Gen­eral, told a Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices sub­com­mit­tee that he was “not that con­fi­dent” about secu­rity imple­mented by the com­pa­nies that build the plane.

Bog­dan said the Pen­ta­gon and the inter­na­tional part­ners rec­og­nized the respon­si­bil­ity they had for safe­guard­ing tech­nol­ogy on the fifth-generation stealth fighter.

He then added, “I’m a lit­tle less con­fi­dent about indus­try part­ners to be quite hon­est with you ... I would tell you I’m not that con­fi­dent out­side the department.”

U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cials and indus­try exec­u­tives said on Thurs­day that gov­ern­ment and defense indus­try net­works get probed and attacked each day, but they were unaware of any spe­cific, recent inci­dent involv­ing the loss of data on the F-35 pro­gram that could have prompted Bogdan’s remark.

Dur­ing Wednesday’s hear­ing, Lieu­tenant Gen­eral Charles Davis, the top uni­formed Air Force acqui­si­tion offi­cial, cited China’s recent unveil­ing of two new fighter planes over a period of 22 months as cause for concern.

Pressed for details by com­mit­tee mem­bers, he said China may have used data from U.S. com­puter net­works to design and build the planes, although he said the Chi­nese planes’ capa­bil­i­ties would prob­a­bly not mea­sure up to those of the F-35 and the F-22 fighter, also built by Lockheed.

...

Pratt & Whit­ney, a unit of United Tech­nolo­gies Corp that builds the engine for the new single-engine, single-seat fighter, also refuted Bogdan’s remark.

“We do not dis­cuss details of our cyber secu­rity ini­tia­tives, but we have a well estab­lished strat­egy in place to pro­tect our intel­lec­tual prop­erty and com­pany pri­vate data, as well as our customer’s infor­ma­tion, against cyber threats,” said spokesman Matthew Bates.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see if the chi­nese knockoff-version of the F35 con­tains the hack­ing vuler­a­bil­ity too. And you have to love Pratt & Whitney’s asser­tions about the “well estab­lished strat­egy” for pro­tect­ing their clients’ intel­lec­tual prop­erty. Yep, it’s quite a strat­egy!