F-35 Fighters Found Spying on their Operators and Sending Sensitive Data Back to the U.S.

In the latest in a long series of scandals involving the F-35, the fighter has been found to spy on U.S. allies which operate the platform and send sensitive data back to the United States. This was first discovered in Norway, where defense officials found some of the 40 fighters they had purchased from Lockheed Martin for $8.4 billion doing so. While the fighters were described by the Norwegian military as being crucial to the continued modernization of our armed forces and our ability to preserve Norwegian and allied security and interests," they also automatically transmitted sensitive data to Lockheed Martin's servers in Fort Worth, Texas, after each flight. This was a function which potential customers for the F-35 were not initially made aware of, and according to the Norwegian military such leaks could potentially compromise pilots' security. Norway has as a result sought to develop a means of filtering the information that is sent back to the United States - though due to the complexity of the fighter and the frequent changes to its operational systems this may well prove difficult.

Operators of the F-35 are set to have severely restricted independence from the United States in how their fighters can be used, not only because of the fighters' constant coordination with the U.S. mainland but also because of its need for codes from America to even be operable. While for most NATO member states, which operate with goals almost identical to those of the U.S. military regardless, this may have relatively little impact for states such as Israel, Turkey or even South Korea which show some form of independence in their foreign policies, and which may seek to use the F-35 in a way that contradict US interests, reliance on the F-35 may well prove to be a critical inhibition. While the United States has long sought to regulate the use of its weapons by controlling the flow of spare parts, something previously used against Iran and Indoensia to keep much of their respective F-14 and F-16 fleets grounded, the F-35 allows the U.S. to exert new levels of centralized control over its operators. Should for example Turkey or Israel see it as being in their best interests to strike U.S. backed insurgents in the Middle East or align their foreign policies more closely with Russia or other parties, they may well find their F-35 fleets both inoperable and working to collect data for the U.S. military. The F-35 facilitated an unprecedented level of U.S. control over the military actions of its military clients, and it is for this reason that it may see only limited use worldwide compared to the F-16 and that states such as Israel and Turkey will attempt to minimize their reliance on the platform - the former by investment in the more reliable F-15 and indigenous avionics and the latter by developing its indigenous TF-X indigenous fifth generation fighter program.