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."

Comments

muhaha!

[wfmcwalter]

it's simply a matter of aiming a strong signal at the uplink transponder on the satellite

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...

But certainly not arms...

[El Camino SS]

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.

Re:But certainly not arms...

[zenyu]

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.

There is plenty reason to be hopeful too. There are only four democracies in the region Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Israel. They are all flawed, Turkey has a huge military industrial complex corrupting their politics and think of they Kurdish minority as subhuman. Lebanon is democrartic but most parts of the country are still occupied by Syria, a monarchy -- purportedly to protect them from another invasion by Israel which no one really thinks will attack again. Israel which refuse to give most of their Palestinian population the vote. And, Iran which has popular elections, but gives religious leaders a veto. Plus the religious leaders run most charities and schools, and have their own militia.

They all have some hope, the Turkish parliament recently rejected the military's approval of US transit rights. They needed 90% approval of their action from the populace, but it should build their backbone. Unfortunately I don't see the Kurdish situation improving. They really need to be given their own country, I've known Turks that were perfectly reasonable and intelligent human beings that seemed possessed with evil when the topic of Kurds came up. I don't think the desire to join the EU will overcome this hatred.

Lebanon's benefactor Syria got a moderate dictator by peaceful succession a few years ago that will probably leave Lebanon as soon as they get a peace treaty with Israel. Even without a peace treaty this may happen as the main opposition party in Lebanon wants to disinvite Syria and the current dictator there would likely accept that, if only grudginly.

Both sides in Israel's civil war want peace and accept each others terms pretty much except for some details like compensation for siezed property and water allocation. There are plenty of foreign donors willing to pay for all but symbolic portions of the bill. What really holds them back is that 70-90% on each side completely distrusts the other side. They have perfectly valid reasons seen close to the ground, but from any other vantage point these two semitic tribes have more common interests than anyone else in the middle east, and as soon as the old warriors like Sharon die (from natural causes) the very young population on both sides of the conflict will have every reason to make up.

Finally, Iran probably has the best hope of all. If you read their constitution you see it's pretty decent, it even guarantees representation for tiny minorities, Zoroastrians and Jews each get a seat each in parliment and three seats go to Christians, the biggest problem is the guardian council which can reject any law with a simple majority. But, half guardian council which interprets the constitutionality of laws, who usually reject laws from the currently liberal parliment, is appointed by the judiciary. They serve 6 year terms instead of the four that the parliment's members serve, and while right now it's packed with very conservative clerics that keep rejecting reformist laws, this will change because the generation that has just started voting was born after the revolution and have only known the excesses of the Iranian government and don't accept it just because it's better than the dictator that ruled thirty years ago. Really, the only thing that could screew things up is if we start mucking with their internal politics and the liberals get associated with the foreign interlopers. All that's needed is few years to rotate out older appointments and everything changes for the better. Even "The Leader" is elected from candidates selected by experts appointed by the guardians, but if the majority grows just a little bigger for reform the leader doesn't need to change because he won't dare do anything to get in the way of reform for fear of complete overthrow, sorta lik

Re:Cuba listening station bull puckey

[Phil-14]

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.

Re:Cuba / Guantanamo Bay listening stations

[f97tosc]

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

Phil-14's reactionary bull puckey - History lesson

[securitas]

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.