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Iranian state TV broadcast video Thursday of what it said was the high-tech U.S. drone that Tehran says its forces downed earlier this week, and lodged a diplomatic complaint over the violation of its airspace.
The more than two minutes of footage showed Iranian military officials inspecting what state TV identified as the RQ-170 Sentinel drone, and offered the first evidence that Tehran had captured the aircraft. The beige-colored drone appeared intact and undamaged.
Originally posted by LordOfArcadia
The RQ-170 is very old technology and the internal components could only generously be described as sparse. From what I understand of the computer system, it would be almost impossible to "hack" the drone to purposely engage in a controlled crash.
In addition, the altitude of the drone is beyond the range of AA fire. I have read reports that the most likely situation is that the Iranians got word that the drone was stationed at Base X and positioned their newly acquired Russian electronic intelligence and jamming system known as “Avtobaza" along the border. Then they simply need to have border sentries watch the skies and hope for the best. This would also explain the 5 day lag between the crash and Iran announcing they had the drone. It took them that long to actually locate it after it went down.
This is only speculation on my part, but I would not be surprised at all if the intelligence supplied to Iran about the drone being stationed at Base X was actually supplied by the CIA. The RQ-170 is considered expendable (the main reason it was also used in the Usama Bin Laden raid for pre-intelligence) and would be the ideal candidate to insert a very sneaky and hidden trojan.
Basically the ideal would be let the Iranians have the outdated craft with its minimal software package, knowing they would try to reverse-engineer the code, they would infect their own systems and open the possibility of a back door being unlocked.
If this is the case, it really would be very clever.
Just my two cents on this developing story.
According to international law, violation of a sovereign states airspace constitutes an act of war and can be referred to the UN Security Council.