The Israelis used a commercially-available encryption scheme, VideoCrypt, which was brute-forced (albeit slowly) as early as 1994. Then it's just a matter of intercepting the satellite signal from somewhere within its downlink footprint.
The article dates to 2010 and it sounded like the Israelis were switching to a better encryption scheme even back then, so I'd expect this information is strategically useless now. VideoCrypt was probably more of a "fences make good neighbors" thing to keep Hezbollah from seeing their drone feeds quite so easily.
Also on the "dates to 2010" thing, this is probably something that could be GPU-accelerated nowadays.
Do you have a source for this? Given the competency of the IDF in sigint and domestic math/crypto research done in Israel it just seems......unlikely? I could be wrong, it just sounds off to me that they would use something like that. IAI, mentioned in the article, is one of the most sophisticated arms companies in the world.
Basically they grab a frame from the video, then run it through AntiSky, no intermediate steps. AntiSky works against the VideoCrypt scheme, ergo that must be what they're using (or something so similar as to make no difference).
The other post discusses why they would use such a dated analogue system. I also think that off-the-shelf systems would have been pretty attractive as an interim fix. Most stronger encryption is going to need to go over a digital link with error correction, which is not something that's trivial to retrofit.
As for the "most sophisticated arms company" thing - do bear in mind that about half of the US's predator drones were still broadcasting unencrypted video feeds in 2012, despite the fact that we knew insurgents had been tapping into them for years. Israel is more responsive than most militaries, but it still does take time for equipment to go from lab to mass field utilization. Those timeframes are typically measured on the order of decade(s) especially if you're talking about deploying additional satcom capability or something like that. And during that timeframe they were actively switching to something else.
Everyone does, drones for the most part still use analogue video because latency matters and it also simplifies quite allot of things.
Encryption in military application has to take a second stance to availability this is why many tactical systems use obfuscation and signal intercept avoidance (e.g. spread spectrum frequency hopping which is highly effective especially when combined with differential signaling) rather than proper encryption since key exchange and management is still a big issue in real world applications.
Having strong encryption that will fail you when you need it and make you system unavailable is a much bigger risk in tactical military applications than some one intercepting and decrypting your communications (note tactical application, for strategic communications the playbook is completely different).
Military communication gear (and pretty much every other piece of electronics) is also quite out dated due to the sheer time scales involving adoption and it having to support integration with legacy systems that might be 30 years behind it.
With drones specifically bandwidth is also an issue especially if you aren't say the US and can launch nearly 20 dedicated satellites to support your drone fleet (and even US drones have the same issues, their communications were scrambled at all until 2009 and some probably still aren't).
Drones have limited bandwidth what you usually do is use encrypted digital signaling for the command and control channels and multiplex all of your sensors over analogue video which is then usually transmitted using standard TV broadcasting protocols (either terrestrial or satellite), if you can scramble your sensory signals sufficiently to prevent real time capture more power to you but it's not the main goal - making sure the signal gets back to you, that you do not lose imagery due to bandwidth limitations and that there is as little delay as possible is the key part, having a signal which can also be easily decoded is also important because if you cant propagate it to the forces that need to consume the feeds from the drone (and these aren't rear echelon guys those ones can wait, were talking on boots in the ground or in the cockpit) it cant serve its main mission.
Tactical information usually means that by the time it's intercepted, analyzed and disseminated on its self is have very little value.
For example if we are at war right now the chatter between various units on a local scale isn't that important any information you might gain from them will not be useful to you as it will be out of date before you can do anything with it.
However if you capture the same tactical information over a long period of time during "peace time" from the same units during various military exercises you might gain some insight in the long run.
I don't think the US has gotten any real intelligence out of this, they probably knew that Israeli drones are capable of carrying weapons and while Israeli still does not allow armed drones to be used in combat (at least within the confines of Israel/Gaze/West Bank) having proof that they do at least experiment with armed drones and being able to shove if into the face of some Israeli politician when the time comes might have some value.
The biggest value I can think of is that Israel is the largest exporter of drones in the world and while most of it's export is to NATO countries (over 80% of NATO's non-US drones are supplied by Israel), it also sells drones to China and now Russia (please note that after the "Falcon" affair there is a US congressional oversight over Israeli arms exports, this is the only country that needs "US" approval to sell arms under certain circumstances), so it gives them a fairly good opportunity to train under more or less real world conditions for when they'll have to do it to some one that might slightly more mind their presence like say China.
On the other hand It would also not surprise me if Israel didn't knew about this and was quite interested in seeing what the can the US actually intercept from their drones, because as far as real life goes while the NSA/GCHQ might have been extremely proud of their work and boasting about how it can improve their national security some one from the CIA/DIA/DOD or even US congress could've take that report walk down to the Israeli Intelligence Attache in Washington and handed it out to them directly.
The US wasn't any better at all... In 2012, "only 30 to 50 percent of America’s Predators and Reapers [were] using fully encrypted transmissions" - "the [original] Predators’ version of the CDL carrier signal (also known as a “waveform”) didn’t include an order to encrypt the signal."
The article dates to 2010 and it sounded like the Israelis were switching to a better encryption scheme even back then, so I'd expect this information is strategically useless now. VideoCrypt was probably more of a "fences make good neighbors" thing to keep Hezbollah from seeing their drone feeds quite so easily.
Also on the "dates to 2010" thing, this is probably something that could be GPU-accelerated nowadays.