The NSA is already known to have tapped into the fiber optic lines at an AT&T datacenter back in the early 2000’s. That sort of tap would generate absolutely massive amounts of data.
If they did something like that 20+ years ago then the volume & analysis isn’t the issue. It’s whether or not they decide they need to perform mass surveillance of mobile devices.
No, but if somebody like the NSA comes along with a request to intercept a specific package, or even a bunch of packages then customs will gladly turn them over. As was posted elsewhere in this thread, NSA has been known to do this in targeted cases and installed software into routers etc. before returning them to customs for delivery.
So it truly depends on whether an organization like the NSA has you on their radar.
First it was murder hornets, now regular bees are after us as well…
There’s likely a lot of reusable parts in each one of those. And even if none of them fully survive the fall it’s very likely you could build one working drone out of pieces of 3 or 4 that are recovered.
Russia is reportedly moving most of their remaining bombers to eastern Siberia. How amazing would it be if Ukraine already anticipated such a move and has an attack there ready to go?
It’s supposed to make it more difficult for autonomous targeting systems to recognize the aircraft:
American military swarms Perl Harbor for over an hour as Japan attacks with over 350 aircraft using bombs, torpedoes, and machine guns.
Russian military hides in bunkers for the 10 minutes that 100 or so highly targeted drones blow up their aircraft.
Enough said.
They’d need to cover a lot more of the aircraft to protect against shrapnel. They’d probably have better odds playing the lottery for funding to build replacement aircraft.
Edit: US military analysts do agree it’s to confuse image recognition in munitions.
Is it just me or is there a surprising lack of Russian response in all these videos? I don’t think I’ve seen a single person in all the videos that have been posted. Given the daylight I’d expect to maybe see maintenance crews, etc. Even if the whole attack lasted just a couple minutes I’d expect to see people running to put out the fires, trying to prevent drones from hitting other aircraft, and so on.
All those poor defenseless tires…
Seriously though. Do the Russians really think that helps in any meaningful way? Even the most basic image recognition software would recognize the shapes of the aircraft under all those tires…
There are recent reports that Ukraine attacked a naval base in Vladivostok as well. Not only is that further away than Mongolia, but it’s tucked far around the Russian border with China, very close to North Korea.
There’s a lot of speculation that their nuclear capabilities are severely diminished as well, but I think it’s all just speculation.
For example, any weapons based on tritium have to be replenished fairly often since tritium has a shelf life of only 12 years.
Then there are the explosives used to initiate the nuclear reaction. The nuclear material is surrounded by a high explosive like RDX, which compresses the nuclear material into a critical mass, triggering the nuclear reaction. But explosives like RDX also have a short shelf life measured in a handful of years.
So maintaining nuclear weapons is a time consuming and complex process. Given the poor economy of Russia, the known corruption at all levels of the military, the fact that the Russian army has had to round up weapons, vehicles, etc. that are 50+ years old to fight Ukraine, etc. it makes people wonder if they still have the ability to maintain their nuclear weapons.
In the flyover about a minute into the video it looks like a couple of the bombers had tires laid out along their wings. I think both of those planes were burning.
Didn’t Russia try this tactic months ago to try to defeat image recognition on autonomous drones? It certainly appears that idea still isn’t worth a hill of beans…
There’s mention elsewhere that these drones made use of Russias telephone network, which could have easily been used to feed this video back to Ukraine.
Drone jammers would be targeting the radio frequencies used to control the drones, which operate at a very different frequency. If the video was indeed fed back via a cellular network then any jammers would have to be jamming that, which would impact all cell usage in the area, not just the drones.
And I’m guessing Russia doesn’t have much of a supply of usable spare parts for all these aircraft.
FTA:
The StratForce approach has a reusable GOGOL-M mothership delivering two FPV-type attack drones to hit precision targets up to 300 kilometers away.
So the mothership likely returns home as it’s described as reusable. It could likely bring video back with it.
Furthermore:
Andrii says they cannot yet release imagery of the attacks which cannot be verified.
That indicates that there is imagery available. It just hasn’t been released (yet).
It sure would be nice if somebody could post confirmation of the extent of the damage…
I am very impressed with the quality of Ukrainian intelligence. It seems like every week (or more) there’s publicity about yet another factory, warehouse, etc. somewhere in Russia that they have struck in one way or another.
The 3 day special operation is proceeding just as planned.