The Associated Press interviewed Homeland Security Television's executive producer and cyber-terrorism expert Dan Verton on the latest revelations that Iraqi and Afghani insurgents have successfully tapped into the surveillance video feeds from the military's Predator unmanned aerial vehicles.

Dan Verton's commentary follows below.

Know Your Enemy - Commentary by Dan Verton

I had the unique opportunity as an intelligence officer to watch the first live broadcast from a Predator flight during the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. While I thought it was cool to be sitting in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in North Carolina watching an unmanned aircraft fly over a country half a world away, I recall having some serious questions about the usefulness of what I saw that day, but that's a different story altogether.

The real story today is that the data link was unencrypted then and remained unencrypted ever since. The real news here is not that Iraqi or Afghani insurgents were able to use a $30 commercial software tool to download Predator surveillance video. Rather, the news is that our military establishment has for the past 15 years considered the terrorist enemy a low-tech, knuckle-dragging enemy that would never in a million years of evolution consider the possibilities of taking such action and then actually pulling it off.

Well, their friends in the Iranian and Pakistani intelligence services -- those guys with the degrees in electrical engineering and money to throw at any project that holds the prospect of helping insurgents kill Americans -- figured it out and probably handed the knuckle-draggers the capability. Now more and more of those knuckle-dragging, AK-47-toting terrorists are also packing laptop computers with detailed knowledge of where our surveillance drones fly and when.

This reminds me of another story I helped break when I was a writer at Computerworld. Remember that little investigative story about wireless vulnerabilities at our nation's airports? Yeah, that one. That was the same investigative project during which I sat in a car across the street from the Pentagon's Global Network Operations Center and watch a trained white hat hacker jump onto the wireless network that conrolled all of the surveillance cameras around the perimiter of the facility. They were unencrypted too. What did I think then? If I were Osama bin Laden, I would buy the house across the street. Sooner or later, something would fall in my lap.