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How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an MSNBC article, 'it's simply a matter of aiming a strong signal at the uplink transponder on the satellite and overwhelming the...broadcaster's signals...You need a dish, some power, not too much. You put up a test pattern ... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam. It could even be smaller than the standard 6-meter dish. It could be a small dish with a lot of power.' This was apparently how an Iranian satellite television station was knocked off of Loral Skynet's TelStar-12 a few days ago. Loral contacted TLS, a company which specializes in satellite broadcast security, who quickly located the source of the jamming to Cuba."
They're megacorporations. They can do whatever the hell they want.
Worse, send a really powerful signal (read- military radar magnetron hooked up to mondo dish) and you can permanently fry that transponder, and do so with a burst so brief and directed that it's not terribly easy for anyone to figure out whonunnit. It's a great piece of asymetric information warfare - spend a couple of million dollars to knock out a few dozen civilian comsats, each tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth. Best of all, it's quite possibly not in breach of any international treaty !
Excuse me, I have to go now, my mechanical pirnahas are hungry...
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
The Iranian government must have sent the money to the Cubans, considering that the people in charge in Iran are the ones who generally seek to block access to outside news sources to their citizenry.
So I wouldn't call it 'Cubans vs. Iranians.' Just another example of Cuba exporting repression.
Nothing like an aircraft carrier and a jet carrying a HARM (High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile) to take care of that problem.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Sanctions, yes. Arms? Hell no.
Remember what happened the last time that we gave people in that regions unlimited resources and guns? Let's just go out of our way to make sure that we don't do that again.
Any winner in an armed conflict is rarely going to institute anything but Marshall Law, especially in that region. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (but with new politics), meaning they have to eliminate all of the old political opponents to make the system work... as quietly as possible.
Giving the opposing side rifles would sound a little like this to me:
"YOU WILL HAVE PUBLIC RULE HERE NOW OR I WILL SHOOT EVERYONE!" (Kalashnikov firing)
Good luck Tehran. Democracy didn't come overnight here, we can't send you guns and expect that you will have anything in charge of you other than a gun-toting government from that.
They have to do it themselves. We have to sit by and watch, there is nothing we should do other than that. The intense hatred of anything US backed would simply do what it has always done in that region... make the people we back look like flunkies for the infidels.
Anyway, much love to the Iranian people. We're rooting for you and your own future. Decided by you.
I don't think any of the jammers knew iranian. The US military makes mistaked like this all the time. Raiding the wrong house, dropping bombs on the wrong town, firing on journalist (well they probably meant to that one).
War is necrophilia.
Let me ask you this. Who in Cuba has easy access to the kind of technology required to do this, and has a motive? Go to Cuba and take a look around, the Cubans have nothing, and they have no reason to jam Iranian satellites.
I would guess that that signal came from the maniacs at Guantanamo Bay. It's not like they have a particularly good record to begin with: torture, holding prisonners illegally, surrounding themselves with the biggest minefield in the western hemisphere.
Well, it better be *really* big if you want it to be stable enough to allow you to point a heavy dish to a precise point in space ...
You know, it occured to me that the TV stations in question are broadcast from the United States, and that this jamming has happened at the exact same time that there has been major unrest in Iran by people revolting against the theocracy there. The US does not approve of the Iranian theocracy; remember the "axis of evil" speech? That the jamming happened when it did seems to indicate that it was intentional, and was to the benefit of our enemies. That you therefore conclude that it was done by the US says a lot more about you than it does the US.
I would instead direct your attention here, and here. If Iran and Cuba have been working together, this suggests that the Cuban government really was the source of the jamming. If you feel sympathies towards the Cuban government such that you're unwilling to believe that they'd support the Mullahs, I suggest you reconsider them.
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Let me ask you this. Who in Cuba has easy access to the kind of technology required to do this, and has a motive? Go to Cuba and take a look around, the Cubans have nothing, and they have no reason to jam Iranian satellites.
I would guess that that signal came from the maniacs at Guantanamo Bay. It's not like they have a particularly good record to begin with: torture, holding prisonners illegally, surrounding themselves with the biggest minefield in the western hemisphere.
Please RTFA. The satellite transmissions are pro-student, anti-iranian-government programs based in the USA. The US is publically and privately lauding these transmissions and voicing their support for the student movement.
You conspiracy theorists are really funny, but this really takes the cake. So the US decided to take out the anti-iranian broadcasts based on its own soil, and it did so by taking jammers to a remote prison camp.
If you had RTFA you would have also learned that the technology to do this is very simple - well within reach of the Cuban government.
No, my original point still holds. The few remaining extremely totalitarian states are holding each others hands - it is the only support they can find.
Tor
It seems more likely that jamming an Iranian satellite signal would come from the American dishes at the Guantanamo installation than from Cubans.
That's like saying that OK city bombing was done by the US military rather then Tim McVeigh because the military has better access to bombs. According to the article, jamming a sat isn't that hard. I'm sure someone in cuba is smart enough to do it, and if not, I'm certan that there are people in iran who could, and it would not be hard to ship those people to Cuba to do it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From the article:
three sources associated with the broadcast services confirmed that Loral Skynet, the operator of the Telstar-12 satellite used by the broadcasters, had determined the jamming was probably emanating from "the vicinity of Havana, Cuba."
One of the sources said that Loral, working with transmitter location expert TLS Inc. of Chantilly, Va., had further fixed the location as "20 miles outside of Havana." Cuba's main electronic eavesdropping base, at Bejucal, is about 20 miles outside of the Cuban capital. The base, built for Cuba by the Russians in the early 1990's, monitors and intercepts satellite communications.
5, Interesting, eh? More like 0, Stupid. The broadcasts are done by regime-critical expatriots in the US. Why would the US jam anti-iraninan broadcasts based on its own soil?
Tor
Nice troll, asshat. I don't know any liberals (I tend toward the right myself, but I've always opposed this war) who liked Saddam -- they just didn't want to see Iraqi civilians and US troops dying for the wrong reasons. Jesus Christ you're a fucking moron.
The fact that you decided to resort to a personal attack and innuendoes says far more about you than anything else you had to say. Instead of behaving like a reactionary, McCarthyist zealot and making claims about all sorts of conclusions that I supposedly reached, try reading a little closer.
I said it seems more likely that a signal would have come from Guantanamo. Considering the massive signals operation there, that's perfectly reasonable.
Someone else mentioned in the thread that it's possible that it was an accidental jam if it was the USA because mistakes like that have been known to happen. A more cynical view would be that it was intentionally done to manufacture an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin hoax that was eventually used to justify the Johnson administration's massive expansion of the war in Vietnam. The final possibility that is mentioned in the article is the Russian-built Cuban station. It seems strange that the Russians would have two stations that were only seven miles apart (before the closure of Lourdes), but that is also entirely possible.
The fact is that neither you nor I have any concrete proof of who was responsible for the jamming. Everything else is speculation.
The CNN Los Angeles bureau reported in June that the backers of the U.S.-based Iranian dissident satellite television stations are Shah-ists, showing the portraits of the Shah plastered all over the studios. We now know that a 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA, helped overthrow the short-lived, democratically elected Mossadegh government and snuffed out budding democracy in Iran. The U.S. then installed the Shah and trained his notoriously brutal SAVAK internal security forces. The Shah went on to become one of the most savage dictators of the 20th century until the Iranian revolution in 1979.
To get back in bed with the Shah's supporters today is directly counter to the stated goal of fostering a democratic, free society in Iran which might have thrived if not for the U.S.-backed coup 50 years ago.
To Phil-14: The last time I checked I have the right to free speech. It seems you would prefer that we live in a Stalinist, Communist regime that would put an end to anyone who didn't agree with your narrow point of view.
The MSNBC report may be 100% correct. An open mind will at least acknowledge that there are other possibilities.
Thus, it has to be the Cuban government itself. Their motive can be explained by the fact that they are in a cash-crunch right now, with a debt of $12G, exceeding GDP. A default is inevitable even if they want to pay it back.
Their recent executions and jailings HINT at the remote possibility that constructive engagement might not bring true reform, making a respectable source of new credit (subsidy) that much harder to find. To continue to prop up the regime without hard cash, their style is to make barter agreements with oil states: doctors, in exchange for oil. Iraq is gone, so they need to expand their agreements with Venezuela and Iran. Venezuela reportedly is willing, but I suspect Iran will not need as many specialists. What other non-monetary resource could be bartered? Hmmm.
The simplest explanation is that the Cuban government is sponsoring the jamming as a service in return for more oil from the Iranian government. Now, who wants to give their gas tank for them to jam the CCC satellite? :)
Hmm. You accuse me of wanting to restrict your speech. This is an ad-hominem attack; at no point did I say you should be arrested and jailed for what you believe. The bit about the TV stations being supporters of the Shah... it's unproven, and it sounds like you're trying to change the subject. First it was, "only the evil Americans would jam the TV station," and now it's "you know, we really shouldn't be cooperating with that TV station."
CNN are the people who admitted to censoring various news broadcasts out of Iraq in the days when Saddam was still in charge there, so he wouldn't kick them out. I wouldn't be suprised if they'd do the same for other middle eastern dictators they needed to "keep access to."
I don't know if you've been following the news, but also, this week, student protests against the regime, by people who want democracy, and not the Shah back in power, were brutally suppressed by the government and what the press has been calling "pro-government vigilantes," which are not vigilantes but in reality Syrians and other Arabs hired by the government as enforcers, because they don't even trust their own people in the security apparatus anymore.
Given that set of events, the same week, and the fact that the signals came from Havana, I think we can rule Guantanamo out for now.
I wouldn't be suprised if future jamming came from the Cuban side of the border between Cuba proper and Guantanamo; it would be a nice way of utilizing all the useful idiots in the west.
It's suprising that everyone's so suprised to find that the Cuban and Iranian governments have been cooperating already for years. What's one more instance of cooperation in this case?
I would suggest that in your rush to blame everything on the United States, and not even believe that one dictatorial regime (Cuba) would support another (Iran) you actually share characteristics with some of the anticommunists of the 50's, who in their rush to combat communism wound up in bed with people like the Shah, or Ferdinand Marcos.
I mean, look at your use of the term "McCarthyite." It's functional use is for any conservative that argues back against a progressive. It's a stick the liberals have been using against the conservatives for the past forty years. By pontificating on behalf of the Cuban and Iranian regimes (and the "it must have been the US doing the jamming" counts as that, I think) you run the risk of making all the same mistakes, and winding up with the same fate: forty years from now the word "Progressive" may be similarly devoid of meaning, except as a stick to beat people with.
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