Slashdot Mirror
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."
How original. I hope someone doesn't try that on the internet.
See the story of Captain Midnight and HBO..
t m
http://www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.h
I know how to solve this problem... SANCTIONS! That'll show 'em.
--
RumorsDaily
This information can't leak out! We'll be subjected to Mystery Science Theatre 24/7! God save us all!
KappaStone
"And may God help you if that thing carried the Spice Channel."
-Moe Syzlak
Taco... fire michael, promote timothy, and then take a sabbatical and let someone else run the show for a while, until you get some passion for the job and stop hating the readers so much.
Thank you.
Regards,
Hank Kingsley
This could get very very dangerous. Imagine if some terrorists got ahold of a dish (not very hard these days) and knocked out some vital communication systems. Chaos! Our only hope is that since the instructions have been Slashdotted, the terrorists can't get through.
It's... News for Nerds! Stuff that Matters! La-de-da-de-da-DE-da!
How do you make this illegal? If they can beam their signal onto your house, why can't you beam yours at them?
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Funny, the other divisions of MS seem to think it's some kind of horrible, immoral, illegal thing when you describe how to hack hardware. What happened to "very committed to respect for others' intellectual property and we request the same respect applied to our innovations"?
In other news, DirecTV was knocked off the air permanently for unexplained reasons today.
Comcast, AOL/TW, and Cox all declined to comment.
Once you make it illegal, how do you stop people from simply doing it from Cuba (as the jammers in the article did)? Satellites, it doesn't really matter what country you're in if you want to contact them.. that's their strength, but..
"Not if we JAM IT!"
"Ah ha!"
"Down scope."
"Down scope!"
"Radar...about to be...JAMMED!"
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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 ##
such as using the transponders to carry your own signal . Most sat tv satelites are essnetially dumb transponders , which means (essentially) they receive a signal on one end and pump it out the other end . What is cool is that using DSS (direct sequencing spread spectrum) you can transmit your own data and people will think that it is background noise . I beleive correctly some russians were doing this awhile back and it went on for a couple of years before they got caught.
You need a huge knife and gallons of jam.
I work as a communications officer aboard a ship. We pulled into Cape Town on day 1 of the World Cricket Championships. One of the games was being broadcast nearby, until our active radar filled the air with distortion.
;)
;)
The second the gangway hit the deck, two sweaty, panicked cameramen came charging up, asking to speak to me. I was already at the gangway because I needed to meet a technician.
"You have to turn off your radar! We're broadcasting the World Cricket Chapmionships LIVE AND YOU KILLED OUR SIGNAL!"
Me: "Oh. Who's playing?"
Them: "Pakistan and Bangladesh."
Me: "Pakistan, eh? Yeah, I'll turn it off ASAP."
And 20 minutes later, I did
For any of you gusy that were watching that game, sorry.
Kinda
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
As has been pointed out, people have been jamming satellite uplinks since Capt Midnite & HBO. So why haven't the satellite folks gone to jam-resistant technology? (I know, it's because of the essential laziness of corporate culture -- geez, it was a rhetorical question.) Spread spectrum is essentially unjammable, if done right (i.e. with cryptographically generated spreading sequences or some such cryptogeek mumbojumbo.)
-Tom Duff
How to Jam a Worldwide Satellite TV Broadcast
... and do a sweep and find the transponder on the satellite you want to jam'."
"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
So who from Microsoft or General Electric is going to prison for this DMCA violation?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
C'mon, lets get creative, instead of blocking out boring TV, lets replace it with eppisodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or something.
Think creative!e
We were sailing off the coast of Spain once and the Spanish Navy was running military exercises nearby. They had a jammer that scrambled GPS signals, in this case by stripping out all the Westward coordinates.
:)
The navigational system that shows the ship superimposed on a map by using a GPS feed had us squarely in the center of the Sahara
The ex-Soviet republics are _THE_WORST_ for radar interference. I swear they think someone is going to launch an attack on them every minute of the day. NOTHING but an orgy of signal jamming/scrambling when you get near their coasts. C-Band, INMARSAT, GPS...all yolked.
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Can somebody tell me how the source of such a jamming can be found? The satellite's receiver doesn't have a locator from which direction it is receiving something from, doesn't it? So how is it done? Thanks!
No problem. In any given twenty minutes of a cricket game, the chances that anything actually happened are pretty low.
I bet I can pinpoint the location in Cuba without the need of any telco equipment.
My other OS is the MCP!
Here's TLS's website. They talk about how they do it.
http://www.tls2000.com/Site/Equip.html
--PatWhat's really intriguing about this story is the Cuba/Iran link. For years we've been told that religious extremism in the Middle East was a close kin of religious conservatives (Jewish and Christian) in the US. Yet when Iraq's brutal dictator recently began to cloak himself in Islamic rhetoric, it was primarily the political left in the US and Europe, who wanted to see him left in power. Their old love affair with Stalin was turned on to the foul Saddam.
Now Iran, an Islamic theocracy, is having trouble with dissidents demanding democracy and who comes to its aid but virtually the only remaining Communist dictatorship in the world.
Very interesting. It seems that some groups simply want to see the great mass of people regimented and are indifferent to the ideology used to justify the regimentation. Religious or secular, Marxist or Facist, it is all the same to them. Mussolini was, after all, a communist before he was a facist and Nazism had people who were called "beefsteak Nazis"--brown on the outside and red inside. Then there is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Hitler may have intended to break it at the earliest opportunity, but Stalin seems to have been sincerely surprised when Hitler broke it.
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.
Bad day for NITV... first their satellite gets jammed, and then we slashdot their site.
That Iranian TV station is a station that has been used in lue of cell phones, and other communications within Iran, to organize protests against the current hard line religious government (because the same government shuts them down). These protests are likely to be precursors to the current member of the 'Axis of Evil' (and I don't mean that sarcastically at all) falling in a relatively peaceful means. Read: U.S. troops not having any intervention therein and the Iranian people freeing and regulating themselves.
The fact that the jamming signal has been found to be originating from Cuba should be telling of what kind of animal the Cuban government is:
Besides being telling of the nature of Communist it is also foolish of them.
While watching the Tinammen Square Massacare and then discussing it at MacHack in 1989, we discussed the fesability of not just taking Chinese television of the air, but actually taking control of it and getting the real message of what was happening out to the world.
After a few hours of discussion with some extremely bright folks, we came to the conclusion that 1) it could be done, 2) that it could be done easily, and 3) that we really didn't want the Chinese security services and the US Department of State and the FCC all coming after us.
What is surprising, is that this hasn't yet been done in any large scale way. The reality is that small forces of 2 and 3 people can wreck havoc in our increasingly connected world. I believe that what keeps this in check is the level of concerns that kept us in check. But what happens we you don't have those concerns? When you have nothing to lose? Then you have the cyber-equivalent of the Palestenian sucide bombers.
In addition to the U.S. military base and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, I seem to recall that there is an NSA/CIA/DIA electronic signals intercept and listening station at Guantanamo.
From the book ''The U.S. Intelligence Community''
At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are more than 100 members of the Guantanamo Naval Security Group Activity. Employing an AN/FRD-10 antenna system, the unit intercepts Cuban and Soviet military communications in and around Cuba and the Caribbean Basin.
It seems more likely that jamming an Iranian satellite signal would come from the American dishes at the Guantanamo installation than from Cubans.
The Soviets/Russians also had a major electronic signals listening station at Lourdes, Cuba (its largest foreign military base) that was aimed at intercepting American telephone calls and computer communications, but the Russians shut it down in 2002 after pressure and inducements from the USA. The base was set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Problem with maser:
1. at least half of your 500watt will be lost somewhere in the air (water vapour ect)
2. Maser/Laser arent "ideal", parallism is a tradeoff: you can use a large dish to widen the beam and limit dispersion, but you get a lower energy density in your beam.
500watt wont be enough.
btw: i doubt youll get a 2 inch beam at 40 meter distance, much less at 40000 km, which you need to reach the geo.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
And if I was in the military, you might have had a point.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
My mom wanted to install a 2 way satellite broadband connection in the motorhome. The DirecWay people said it was impossible to have a mobile dish, because if the uplink signal crosses over into someone elses (like a TV channel) bandwidth, DirecWay gets fined $10,000 per minute. The FCC requires the system to be installed by a professional, as a result. Off the subject now, but it can be done in a mobile situation, by using an expensive ($5000) computerized positioning system. Back to what's relevant, if you tried doing something like jamming a network's satellite signal, you'd be putting yourself at a pretty good financial risk.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Quite, but unlike regular applications of parabolic reflectors, we don't want to receive/emit collimated radiation - we want to use a (very) slightly nonparabolic reflector to bring our signal'o'doom to an approximate focus out there at 40000km. We want low energy density down here where the air is thick, and the highest possible up there at the warm end of the equation. Still (as throwaway's very astute comment points out) it's going to need to be a whopping dish on the ground to get this to work. I doubt my Radio Shack storecard will cover the cost...
Aside: man, this conversation is going to get us all sent to Guantanamo. We can hardly claim that we only intend to zap axis of evil comsats, as the most hi-tech weapon in the cuban arsenal is an asthmatic donkey with a straw hat.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
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
Didn't Mick Fleetwook and Dweezil Zappa do this in The Running Man? Remember the scene towards the end where Ben Richards discovers the dead bodies of the so-called winners of the Running Man game? It is at that time he is captured by the resistance (for lack of a better term). He then helps them capture the satellite. If I recall all they had was a bunch of machine guns and one clever geek who made that girl remember the uplink code.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
The main one being frequency liscencing. In the US at least, the radio spectrum is regulated by the government. There are some sections of it that are opened to public, unliscenced use, such as 2.4ghz and 5ghz, but even then devices must comply with regulations such as maximum power output. For the rest of it, you have to have a liscence. Like HAM radio, it is basically just a bunch of people talking to each other about a whole variety of things. It isn't used for any critical government work, or as a commercial broadcast. However, if you want to play, you have to get a HAM operators liscence. It's not difficult or expensive to get, but you need to have it and have your callsign if you want to legally use the HAM bands.
Then there is also the idea that you aren't supposed to deliberatly interfere with others' communications. Both you and I are welcome to operate devices in the 2.4ghz specturm without liscence. Perhaps I want to operate a phone, and you want to operate a wireless data link. However, if you make a device for the purpose of interfering with my phone signals, expect to get in trouble.
It seems to me that kind of a common hacker/cracker logical fallicy is that just because you have the ability to do something, means it should be ok to do it, that if the other side can't stop you technologically, it is ok for you to walk on their rights.
Well I like to compare breaking in to a system, even with no intent of doing damage, to breaking in to a house. See most residential locks are very easy for a trained locksmith to pick. With the right tools, a few minutes of work is all it takes them. Now, how would you feel if you come home and there is a locksmith poking around your place. You get mad and he tells you "You should have had a better lock." He'd have a point, the falws with your lock are well known and documented and you can get better locks with just a little effort. So you go and locate a Medeco dealer and get yourself a high security lock. These are much harder to pick because of their odd pin design. However harder does not mean impossable, and good locksmiths can still do it given time. So again the locksmith is back. Where do you go from here? There are solutions out there, you can get a system that not only requires a phusical lock to be unlocked, but a code to be entered to electronicly unlock a second lock. However that too has problems. And of course the real problem with these increasing solutions is that they are increasingly expensive. A Medeco deadbolt costs almost $200, all said and done. That's a hell of a lot more than an average lock. Most of the electronic locking systems are a good deal more than that, and are kind of difficult to track down as an ordinary person.
So just because you can hack past someone's computer security or just because you can override someone's satalite signal, doesn't give you the right to do so.
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.
Are you sure? Pakistan and Bangladesh never played in the world cup (They were in different pools)
Hello there, I would like to clear some things up and shed some light on the matter. (excuse the bad English) Firstly, a satellite related history about Iran:
... anyways). Since the channels mostly show boring old films or even more boring documentaries, most pople have digital satellite receivers and just watch show and Iranian channels.
We have 6 channels. One is news, one is sport and the other four are mixed channels, showing anything from soccer to documentaries to dubbed American films and series (yeah, death to america baby!!) to English films in original language to japanese samurai black and white films to cartoons etc.. you name it. Ofcourse the news biased towards the evils of America and the poor Palestinians getting killed and so on (one interesting thing is that when 5 Palestinians get killed, they are Martyred (and if there are any kids / women in between the killed, they are mentioned loudly, but if a school bus of Jew kids are killed, then "20 zionists were killed"
Satellite Receivers and Dishes are 'illegal' in Iran and every now and then the media's attention is focused on the matter and so the local police bitches about and raids a few houses, taking away their equipment and fining them... then gives up. This has become the norm. Since Tehran (the capital city) has over 14 million in population, going round every house and taking away their equipments was not a feasable task. I have written (at the end of this post) what they have done NOW to get the channels jammed and it seems to be working... 90 cm dishes are the norm here. They're big enough to do the job and yet small enough to be concealed easily. 60 cm versions are also available but you need a *really* good LNB (such as Nokia) to get a good signal. Now on to the NITV matter:
The National Iranian TV station (NITV) is a station based in USA and it mostly broadcasts talk shows and documentaries AGAINST the current regime in Iran so they are America's friend and Iranian government's enemy. Currently, there are 6 or 7 Iranian language satellite channels that can be received in Iran. All are transmitted from "TelStar 12" satellite. About two years ago, the only Iranian satellite channels were NITV and another one I can't remember. Both used to be broadcasted from Hotbird satellite. That
was until their signals were jammed multiple times (after a few months of broadcasting) and at the end they made the decision of moving to TelStar 12. I remember they issued a statement that Hotbird has received jamming signal FROM IRAN that has worked against the Iranian channels and so on... the funny thing is that the Iranian gov. broadcasts 4 or 5 propaganda channels to the very same "hotbird" satellite and they continued to broadcast their programmes even after Hotbird had found about their dirty trick. Don't you think those hotbird guys should have stopped broadcasting their programmes as a result ?
Since then, everyone has had to either add a new satellite dish or just add another LNB to their dish (which is set to Hotbird to get those music shows) and receive the Iranian channels as well. Recently there was a lot of talk in the "Majles" which is parliament about jamming signals being broadcast locally to stop people receive the
channels. And there was debate on whether these signals could be cancerous or not. At the end, they started to send jamming signals while the case remained open in the parliament.
At first, I laughed at the idea because a satellite dish works by concentrating bounced microwaves to a point where the LNB receives them and converts them to electrical signal. But if the government broadcasts signals locally, then the point of concentration would not be at the LNB part and so it shouldn't really matter huh ? Well, I am wrong and they have been successful (up to a certain level) to annoy the hell out of people and in some areas people can't get a signal. The jamming they are using is sweep based. From what I experienced at a friend's house, the sweep signal was on *any* channel
Once upon a time, the announcer would announce, "This is the end of our broadcast day. Please rejoin WWWW at 6AM." Perhaps this announcement followed an inspirational moment from the Reverent Billy Bob Cross, or the Navy Hymn, or the Star-Spangled Banner, complete with fly-over. If one were lucky, one had just seen the Late Movie, or the Late-Late Movie. Now, it Infomercials as far as the eye can see.
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.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I Sail on a rather small boat with sat comms using a gyro stabalised dish in a little dome. If you take the dome off it is some fun to watch the thing stay pointed while the boat pitches and rolls every which way (as long as you do not suffer from seasickness*). It does a fantastic job of keeping a (two way) signal even in rather rough weather.
* Watching the dish track is not the problem, getting the bloody dome on and off in bad weather is sure to send you for the leeward rail
Maybe you live in interesting times