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Washington (CNN)American and British spies have secretly
monitored Israeli military drones, according to the latest
investigative report by The Intercept.

Until now, Israel has kept its drone program secret -- refusing
to even acknowledge that it uses them in warfare.

But now there's photo evidence from the drones themselves.

The images come from classified material in documents exposed by
former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

CNN has reviewed the documents published by The Intercept, but
the NSA, following agency policy, does not verify the
authenticity of its exposed files.

The American and British spying are part of regular, ongoing
international espionage. The United States and Israel, although
allies, regularly peek in on each other's military projects,
according to several former U.S. national security officials.

To operate by remote control, large military drones send a
signal to satellites in space. Spies at the NSA and the British
Government Communications Headquarters managed to capture those
signals and decode them, according to these documents.

GCHQ would not acknowledge the documents. Instead, it provided
its standard statement assuring its actions are legal, reviewed
by officials, and abide by human rights laws.

Neither the NSA nor the Israeli Embassy provided a comment for
this story.

"It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on
intelligence matters," the agency told CNN.

As far back as 2009, spies were able to track the locations of
Israeli drones, see video feeds from them and even watch what
the drones were targeting, according to the documents.

For a six-month period sometime before 2012, American spies
monitored "regular" flying missions of an Israeli-made Heron TP,
a large twin tail drone that was "carrying weapons," according
to the NSA documents.

American and British spies did not hack the drones or hijack
their controls. Instead, spies simply captured the signal
between the drone and satellite. But they did have to hack to
decode the signal, documents show.

Hacking turned the scrambled signal from fuzzy gray screen into
a clear picture of a drone's wing, or landing gear, or even the
buildings and people targeted miles below.

Israel uses its military drone program to target Islamic
militants in the Gaza Strip, similar to U.S. drone strikes on
suspected terrorists. Watchdog groups such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch have expressed concerns
about collateral damage, investigating dozens of Israeli drone
strikes in 2008 and 2009 that killed up to 87 civilians in Gaza
during wars between Israel and Hamas.

According to one document, hackers at NSA and GCHQ were able to
decode the videos using publicly-available software. This shows
that Israeli drones are not using a robust system to encrypt
these signals.

But getting real-time, immediate video feeds from Israeli drones
is a difficult feat, the documents stated.

Documents indicate that spies were able to capture the Israeli
drone signals from a British military outpost in the island of
Cyprus.

Israeli drones weren't the only things that were spied on. In at
least one instance, American spies were able to tap into the
video feed of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet, documents show.

They were also able to spy on an Iranian-made drone that was
being launched from a Syrian Air Force base in early 2012, just
as President Bashar Al-Assad's government escalated its attacks
on protesting civilians as the Syrian civil war intensified.

The NSA documents say there was "presidential level interest in
further video samples," indicating that the White House wanted
to closely watch Assad's military campaign against his own
citizens.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/29/politics/us-uk-israel-drones/

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