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U.S. Forces In Iraq Ban GPS Phones

Posted by timothy on from the but-gps-will-be-mandatory dept.

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."

2 of 339 comments (clear)

  1. Re:In related news... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Intelligence problem by rjamestaylor · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The problem, if you think about it, is not merely that the conversation could be non-trivially intercepted by Iraqis, but something more insidious. These phones hunt for the closest processing center via GPS and every so often broadcast their position to that center. For the Iraqi desert, the closest center is in United Arab Emerates (sp?), which is a colalition ally but susceptable to intelligence inflitration. So, it's not just the US being paranoid that the waky Iraqis can intercept and interpret the code its that there very well could be a sympathetic listener in the UAE, or elsewhere that GPS position is recorded.

    Signal Ops with Hum Int is very powerful. In this case the Hum Int may be the bigger concern.

    --
    -- @rjamestaylor on Ello