The United States has been working with the United Kingdom to hack Israeli drones and spy on them for nearly two decades, according to documents released this week, under a classified program called “Anarchist,” according to a report.
“Anarchist operated from a Royal Air Force installation in the Troodos Mountains, near Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus,” The Intercept reported on Thursday. It has long been known that the base has strategic value in conducting surveillance in North Africa, Turkey and the Levant.
Working together, the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters and the U.S. National Security Agency have been hacking the drones in order to watch for potential strikes against Iran and Gaza, as well as to monitor the evolving capacity of Israeli drone technology. The country has never acknowledged possessing weaponized drone systems.
“Due to the political situation of the region there is a requirement for Israeli UAV operations in certain areas to be intercepted and exploited so that assessments can be made on what possible actions maybe [sic] taking place,” read one GCHQ memo on the program dated July 29, 2008.
Though Israel has a highly advanced drone program, it evidently did little in the way of cybersecurity. The report states that video feeds on the drones were scrambled using a method similar to the one used to protect subscription television channels. As a result, intelligence agencies able to hack them using an open-source code “freely available on the internet.”
Documents detailing the program, which began in 1998, were obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. However, they were not made public until this week. The GCHQ, NSA, and Israel Defense Forces have all declined to comment on the revelation.
It is the second disclosure in as many months of Western spying on Israel. In December, it was reported that the Obama administration had spied on communications by Israeli officials during the Iranian nuclear negotiations last year, a policy that swept up some communications by members of Congress. Congress is still investigating that incident.
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Though the hacking was commonplace up until Snowden left the agency, it is unclear how successfully it takes place today. Several incidents in recent years have prompted the U.S. and Israel to enhance drone security by encrypting video footage that they record, a practice that should inoculate the data from at least some methods of hacking.
