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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."
And why shouldn't they?
1. It isn't news because it's a story that's at least two weeks old.
I had a heated discussion with at least one sceptic who didn't believe it was at all possible just here on slashdot only last week.
Suffice to say that Twirlip of the Mists didn't believe that the US military would do anything to harm journalists going about their daily business of informing us about this war and that the journalists who first reported this story must have "misunderstood" what the Pentagon meant when they said that all independent transmissions were legitimate targets. Bless his cotton little socks.
2. It is news because not all journalists in Iraq are "embedded" with US or British units.
A journalists main objective (the bias of his or her parent organisation aside) is to get to the truth. It's pretty hard to do that if you only see what the US and British commanders on the ground want you to see. Just as you shouldn't trust everything that's broadcast by Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine on Iraqi TV, you also shouldn't trust everything that the mainstream press's embedded journalists report. To get a more accurate picture you have to do what the military themselves teach their commanders to do with their intelligence reports; look at lots of different news sources, filter out the garbage and actively search for the truth rather than just accept what's handed to you on a plate.
Accordingly, the less superficial news gathering services and agencies have a lot of journalists in Iraq that aren't embedded.
(Remember, CNN, NBC, CBS or whoever are commercial news broadcasters. It's in their interests to tell the American public what they believe the American public wants to hear. Nobody wants to eat their dinner whilst hearing about how a US patrol killed fleeing women and children, so the networks don't show them that side of the war.)
Sorry if this seems like a rant but the amount of ignorance that the general public has about this war (and, unfortunately, this is especially true of the average American) is frightening.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Or, they could just use Iridum (however you spell it) like the other journalists in the NPR piece.
someone mentironed the iraqis prolly don't have gps weapons - and that's irrelevant.
if you hand me your lat/lon within 100m, i can find you - maybe with a missile, maybe with a truck, maybe with a lot of stuff. and i can do it with a $100 gps, close enough to kill you. i don't want this happening to our troops so that some media diva can be avant garde.
truth is the npr story mentioned some whiney reporters having to use a plain old sat phone and dictate stories to a copy desk and pitching a fit. they need to understand they are just barely able to do this period, they do not have a god given right to be ther, and that there is a more than acceptable risk of becoming pink mist on no notice.
suck it up, do your job, and listen to the professional warriors.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Signal Ops with Hum Int is very powerful. In this case the Hum Int may be the bigger concern.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Maybe you should stop reading so much Chomsky and come back down to reality here. We all recognize the fallibility and bias inherent to any reporting, and that most commercial American media outlets are very cautious about specific images of dead people and blown up babies they are willing to put on the screen because of how the public would perceive it. But normal people don't see conspiracies to withold information from the American public around every corner - most journalists still have basic integrity and dedication to the truth, and try to police their own bias (sources like Fox News, who embrace their bias, excluded - but even then, at least you know it's there and can filter out all the gungho patriotic fervor stuff).
Ever since 9/11/01, the american media self-censors. And it has said that publically. Grandparent post isn't a 'commie', he's just telling it like it is...and if you accessed multiple news sources, you'd know that too.
/none!/ on CNN and was blasted all over the middle eastern press. In my estimate, the casualty rate was anywhere between the UK and the middle eastern estimates...but at least I know it happened, unlike many in the US.
One real good example is a friendly fire incident (yet another one, but this one was quite hefty) that happened three days ago. Got one mention on the BBC,
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
That was the initial estimate during the war. Afterwards, the number was found to be a couple of orders of magnitude lower. Iraqi units that were bombed had far fewer soldiers than had been estimated, and they were smart enough to mostly stay away from where the bombs were dropping.
It's like when MS talks about improving the user experience or whatnot. They always have ulterior motives. The end result may be an improved user experience, but in the process it may involve bundling something to kill a competitor.
Same deal with the government. Usually what they say is true prima facie, but there are usually many other things going on, and it's naive to assume otherwise.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.