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U.S. Forces In Iraq Ban GPS Phones
Brian Enigma writes "According to a report last night on NPR and these two articles, Central Command has banned a particular satellite phone from reporters. It seems that it not only has a GPS--to help locate which satellite to use--but also (if activated) transmits the users location back to the phone company. Eavesdropping this signal is nontrivial, but still possible."
The satphones are effectively really high power transmitters, attempting to transmit a signal to an antenna hundreds of miles ahead. If it's possible to sniff the GPS signal, it's possible to triangulate the location of its emitter.
This ban makes it harder to track down the journalists, but not impossible. It does require three sensors in mutual contact, instead of one lone sniffer -- this is true.
I suspect there are signs they know where we are, and we're worried these phones are the reason why.
--Dan
A lot of times the reporters aren't allowed to reveal where they are and sometimes simply aren't told. I've listened to a lot of NPR reports where the journalists state that they can't reveal their locations
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
evidence ...
s to ry.jsp?story=392161
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/
The Times of London
5 8,00.html, currently doesn't work.
Sunday March 30, 2003
US Marines turn fire on civilians at the bridge of death
Mark Franchetti, Nasiriya
THE light was a strange yellowy grey and the wind was coming up, the
beginnings of a sandstorm. The silence felt almost eerie after a night of
shooting so intense it hurt the eardrums and shattered the nerves. My
footsteps felt heavy on the hot, dusty asphalt as I walked slowly towards
the bridge at Nasiriya. A horrific scene lay ahead.
Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the
road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned
into piles of black twisted metal. Others were still burning.
Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in
nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight,
probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy
artillery.
Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the
coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young
American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved.
One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked
away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes.
His savings, perhaps.
Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty
orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who
may have been her father. Half his head was missing.
Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi
woman - perhaps the girl's mother - was dead, slumped in the back seat. A
US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.
This was not the only family who had taken what they thought was a last
chance for safety. A father, baby girl and boy lay in a shallow grave. On
the bridge itself a dead Iraqi civilian lay next to the carcass of a
donkey.
As I walked away, Lieutenant Matt Martin, whose third child, Isabella, was
born while he was on board ship en route to the Gulf, appeared beside me.
"Did you see all that?" he asked, his eyes filled with tears. "Did you see
that little baby girl? I carried her body and buried it as best I could but
I had no time. It really gets to me to see children being killed like this,
but we had no choice."
Martin's distress was in contrast to the bitter satisfaction of some of his
fellow marines as they surveyed the scene. "The Iraqis are sick people and
we are the chemotherapy," said Corporal Ryan Dupre. "I am starting to hate
this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get
hold of one. I'll just kill him."
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-6282
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Reasons Canada is not in the war
1) we consider Afganistan more important
At the same time as Canada refused to join the war in Iraq we sent 2000 troops to Afganistan.
2) Canada cannot get involved in another operation.
At the same time as above Canada admitted it was over extended (I mean come on we have 31 million people we can't be everywhere)
I think this was the main reason, its just less embarassing to say no then to admit that we're weak. (coupled with three anyway)
3) Canada believes that this will further isolate the Arab nations from the west and incourage the Islamic fundamentalists to join terror organisations and to attack the allies of the US.
The friendly fire thing is not an issue, it happens and NATO is working on better coordination.
I think that the friendly fire thing was a stupid preventable mistake, but Canada is sticking by the US and helping as much as we can, we just arn't doing it in Iraq.
Of course they have self-censored to an extent that I personally find rediculous. For example, interrupting an Iraqi press conference because "of course the administration would disagree with what they have to say."
Why is it that I have to go outside this country for good news? Why is it that CNN's coverage improves the instant you leave the USA? Why is it that although there is more widespread support for this war in Israel than there is in the US, that Ha'aretz is far more ballanced than even the New York Times?
Why is it that when the American troups parachuted into Northern Iraq, the press portrays this as a glorious moment, rather than the result of a diplomatic failure (to get Turkey to let us use their land as a staging area for a northern front)?
Here are some links I suggest people look into (all in English):
http://www.haaretzdaily.com (a respected Israeli newspaper).
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly (an Egyptian weekly news magazine).
http://www.bbc.co.uk
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The webmaster of aeronautics.ru, Venik, is a well known loon.
Ask about him in rec.aviation.mil
Some of his past spewings have been "2 B-2's and 3 B-52's shot down in Bosnia."
Russian plasma stealth technology
Russian antigrav technology deployed on current aircraft.
Take everything he says with several large grains of salt.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Thuraya handsets are GSM phones which fallover to the Thuraya satellite system if one is outside the range of a ground-based GSM tower.
The satellite-to-phone protocol is a very slightly modified GSM that runs in L-Band. This was done for two reasons. A - if it ain't broke, don't fit it. B - why put in totally separate comm gear if you don't need to? C - everybody knows GSM inside fscking out. (yes, that's three reasons)
it also has a GPS receiver in it which provides the Thuraya satellite the information to decide which L-band spot beam(s) would be the correct beam to use (sometimes, you're in between beems, and if you are, and beam A is busier than beam B, then the Thuraya NOC will decide to put you on beam B)
it also provides a means for Thuraya Inc. to payback the countries their cut... much like the mass confusion which plagued the licensing schema for Iridium, Thuraya phone calls are not all alike... if you're in country A, then you'll be paying country A's tarrif + the base cost you pay to Thuraya. The easiest way to keep track of where one is was to put a GPS in the handset, then calculate the tarrif charges abse on the absolute location.
http://www.thuraya.com/tech/ will let you know some of this information. You'll also see there the increasingly missnamed "country code" for Thuraya calls, as well as the neeto tidbit that Thuraya was launched from Sea Launch - which is quite a sight to behold. Looking down the shaft of the laucher into the ocean 100+ feet down was quite a stomach-moving experience.
Where i got the rest of this info is an exercise left to the reader to guess.
As cool as computers will ever be, space shit is far cooler, y'all. Sorry.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Note that The Times is actually a pro-war paper in its editorial line. It's owned by an American, Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News and is rarely described as a liberal.
A pro-war, American-owned paper has reason to make up stories about Americans killing civilians or print Iraqi propaganda.
Here is another article found using Google News that confirms the story:
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=3789220
That is a damn shame for sure. But I wouldn't go out driving around in vehicles in the middle of a war zone in the dead of night...
GPS (Global Position System) is not necessary for locate phone. At least on Finland certain phone company provides location service which can locate GSM phone with just by receiving phone's signal via several link. Resolution is not as good as GPS, but is able to tell location better than on which "cell" user is. On towns resolution is quite good, on coutry side error is much larger.
Actually the more accurate figure was around 200,000. And of course that says nothing about the many who died after as a result of sanctions (the figure often heard is at least 500,000 Iraqi children alone, that according to the UN) or those who died after the war as a result of the intentional bombing of Iraqi water supplies.
So is this Saudi news site not good enough?
http://www.arabnews.com
This series from a reporter that managed to get inside of Iraq is pretty interesting. That link is to part 2 of the daily series. Notice that no matter how critical that guy is about the US, when the bullets start flying, there is no doubt in his mind who the good guys and the bad guys are.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Americans are still bombing allies as usual. This one seems even more stupid than the plethora of those before him:
BBC Article
The Independent (newspaper) article
Sorry, I couldn't find any references to this article in the US media... I wonder why...
I quote:
I mean, loads of people in all countries all joke about Americans firing on their own and on their allies, but this is getting ridiculous. American's even supplied aids to the British to put on their vehicles "so you don't get shot" but they're still shooting at us.
I think I'm right in saying that more British soldiers have died as a result of US friendly fire than they have by being shot by Iraqis.
I quote from an article on canada.com:
Isn't there anything someone can do to improve on this situation? It seems the US pilots have aids to prevent this, but they're too trigger happy to actually use them.
If you mod this as flamebait, then you haven't read the linked articles and haven't realised that this is a genuine problem and not some kind of war propaganda.
A lot of people here seem to think this is a good thing, that iraqi troops can monitor GPS signals and this is giving them an advantage.
Rubbish.
Isn't it more likely that the US army don't want the outside world to hear any news from Iraq that they haven't filtered?
Try news.co.nz for news not CNN, you get a better view of world events.
Look at this from the solders point of view. How _do_ you discriminate between friendly signals and signals from hostiles? US ground forces can detect and localize satellite cell phone signals; however, in general the intercepts are side lobe spill of digitized and compressed signal from a mostly directional antenna. Most of the time you know someone is talking and where they are but you can't listen in real time from the ground. Can't the Iraqi's use cell phones to relay information from scouts back to artillery units or headquarters? Guess what they all ready do. Any signal not from an imbedded journalist could be someone getting ready to kill you and your buddies. So warning the non-imbedded journalists that they may draw fire by using a technology known to be in enemy hands is somehow the wrong thing to do?
According to Ms. Adie, who twelve years ago covered the last Gulf War, the Pentagon attitude is: "entirely hostile to the free spread of information."
Ms. Adie thinks that she _should_ be able to report the exact location of the 3ID's headquarters and offsets the from those coordinates for the main briefing area and the exact time of the next command staff meeting. Should the people in that briefing let her? Should they feel hostile to someone whose actions may result in their death or dismemberment?
WHAT? Do you watch the news at all?? We're getting more "on the spot reporting" during this war than any conflict in history. Much of this is a DIRECT RESULT of the administration. The administration specifically requested that networks embed reporters, because it helps keep reporting honest. You can't say that the army is committing all of these horrible atrocities when we've got reporters watching every single move of the military. There's no room for the left to keep making up all of the idiotic stories that they love to tell about american soldiers slaughtering innocents.
Social Engineering Expert: Because there is no patch for stupidity.
The United States has moved a force to within 50-60 miles of Bagdhad and lost a platoon worth of combat soldiers in fighting.
When the 173rd airborne can appear out of no where and take important airfields without anyone thinking that was possible is a sign of a well organized and carried out operation.
You're quoting the resolution, but you're not understanding it (not that it's for you to determine what "serious consequences" means anyway; the language of diplomacy is a world away from /. babble). The resolution did not authorise automaticity of force, however much you would like it to be the case. The cororally to that : if the resolution had contained such language, it would never have been passed in the first place.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the current action is in breach of the UN Charter and is therefore "illegal". What remains to be seen (and I think it will be 5, 10 years maybe more before we can truly know) is whether this action is the right thing to do.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush