I’ve seen a few articles now that US fighter jets have kill switches in them, so the US could just render them useless for anyone they’ve sold them to.
Is this true? It sounds insane to me, I’ve always assumed that countries that buy these jets have full control over them. It’s a gaping hole in your defence if you don’t.
If a country doesn’t produce their own fighter jets (which only ~20 countries do) but needs to buy some, they don’t have a lot of options. And while it’s private companies that manufacture and sell the jets, the government of the manufacturing country isn’t going to let a business sell weapons of war to just anyone. The US doesn’t want to sell jets that might later get used against the US. So any weapons sales have to be approved by the US government first. Just like they don’t want to sell to an enemy, they don’t want the weapons they agree to sell to get stolen by an enemy. So they include technology (kill switch) than can prevent that from becoming a problem.
Can it not be removed? Or cracked?
Because encryption is a weapon of war (according to the US government, seriously look up why encryption tech cannot be exported even as open source to us enemies), breaking their encryption and trying to install your own software would be an act of war.
Yes. Until pretty recently Java didn’t contain unlimited strength encryption algorithms by default because of this/not getting around to updating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Cryptography_Extension
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-7024850?focusedId=11988280&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-11988280
I’m not gonna dig deeper, but it seems like the actual policy change was as late as 2011 based on the comment, but they didn’t get around to changing it for another few years.
Once more into the breach, dear friends.
Kill switches also prevents sales of said tech. France?(?) Is rethinking their purchase of 35 f35s.
The kill switches are fine so long as the seller remains stable and predictable.
Ok. Kill switches should be in the hands of the buyers though and disabled from the seller.