“Operational information that’s considered perishable has by and large been treated by the military as unclassified,” says David Kahn, CEO of Covia Labs, which sells software for encrypted communications among devices used in military and emergency response missions. Since the video is unclassified, no special clearance is required by personnel who access it to do their jobs, he says.

Drone video traffic was intercepted by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan from satellite broadcasts from the to the ground. The insurgents used commercial satellite intercept software sold over the Internet that is advertised to grab movies and other entertainment out of the air without benefit of service-providers’ gear or service contracts.

The military says it has taken care of the drone problem since it was discovered in July, but didn’t specify how.

Kahn says that the video information loses its value so rapidly that the military may have decided it wasn’t worth the effort to encrypt it. “Even if it were a feed off a drone with attack capabilities, and even if the bad guys saw that the drone was flying over where they were at that moment, they wouldn’t have the chance to respond before the missile was fired,” he says.