Israeli Drone Hacked By Five Eyes Intelligence
IAI Heron, an unmanned aerial vehicle developed by the Malat (UAV) division of Israel Aerospace Industries
British and American spies collected live video from Israeli drones as part of a classified program code-named “Anarchist,” which operated from a mountaintop listening post on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
Among the files provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden are a series of “snapshots” from Israeli drone feeds, which offer a rare glimpse at the closely guarded secret of Israel’s drone fleet.
The images show several different types of unmanned planes, including what appear to be rare public images of Israeli drones carrying missiles. Although Israeli drone strikes have been widely reported, officially the government refuses to confirm the use of armed drones.
These and other images from Anarchist will be on view as part of Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras’ solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
On January 28, 2010, GCHQ analysts on Cyprus captured six minutes of video from what appears to be a Heron TP, a giant drone manufactured by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
In a snapshot still from the video, a large missile-shaped object is clearly visible on the left side. A GCHQ report mentions “regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons” in 2009. A very similar image, likely from the same intercept, is named Heron_TP_Payload.
“It certainly looks like the missile-shaped objects are weapons,” said Bill Sweetman, an editor at Aviation Week. “The bodies appear to have cruciform tail fins. The distortion makes it a bit to hard to tell size but — assuming they are bombs — these are definitely less than 500-pound class.”
He added that because the Heron-TP is an Israeli strategic intelligence system, the objects could be decoys, used to “force a response from Iran’s air defenses, while the UAV orbits and hoovers up signals.”
