Malaysia Air MH370: Possible Sabotage to Communications System, Explained
After the jet's transponder was disabled, the communications systems on Flight 370 were cut off by "deliberate action," said Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. U.S. officials are investigating whether a third system, on the plane's lower deck, was also compromised, The Wall Street Journal's Jason Bellini explains in this YouTube video.
- RELATED : Official : Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked (CBS News)
- RELATED : Search for Malaysian Jet Becomes Criminal Inquiry (The New York Times)
Flight 370 disappeared one week ago while carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, China.
- RELATED : If the transponders had not gone silent on 9/11, air traffic controllers would have quickly realized that two jetliners en route to Los Angeles had made dramatic course changes and were bound straight for Manhattan. (Out of Control : Why Does the FAA Allow Pilots To Turn Off Transponders ? * The New York Times)
As the investigation turns to identifying criminal responsibility for the missing flight, will the U.S. government focus on the spectacular intelligence failure that appears to allow airplanes to remain vulnerable to criminality over a decade since the Sept. 11 attacks and susceptible to going missing almost five years since the 2009 accident that befell Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean ?
- RELATED : The mystery of flight MH370 : How can we track smartphones anywhere on earth, but a giant plane can go missing ? (Updated) (Extreme Tech)
- RELATED : Black boxes, air safety, and the need to know what happened to MH370 (Al Jazeera America)
For the U.S. government, which is caught up in a controversy over the indiscriminate dragnet surveillance by the National Security Administration, the blind spots in aviation safety patterns recent blind spots in foreign policy risks, such as the Russian takeover of Crimea. These blind spots are proof that real threats are not being assessed while the N.S.A. is wholly consumed with the distraction of dragnet surveillance -- a dangerous situation about which civil libertarians and journalists had warned would happen as a result of the Obama administrations's faulty obsession with collecting Internet data.
