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Bush Causes Cell Phone Ban
An anonymous reader writes "When President George Bush visits Sydney, Australia for the APEC Summit in September, all cell phone calls within the radius of a football field will be suppressed. The president's motorcade will be shadowed by a helicopter equipped with signal-jamming equipment. Terrorists have used mobile phones to detonate remote-controlled bombs in Iraq and elsewhere in the world." There are other ways to detonate explosives remotely. Doesn't seem like the smartest thing to let potential enemies know of such plans in advance.
Triggering Bombs by Remote Key Entry Devices
I regularly read articles about terrorists using cell phones to trigger bombs. The Thai government seems to be particularly worried about this; two years ago I blogged about a particularly bizarre movie-plot threat along these lines. And last year I blogged about the cell phone network being restricted after the Mumbai terrorist bombings.
Source
Infiltrated dot Net
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
It will blow up at a random time instead of the worst possible time which makes it possibly 10x less lethal.
The Seattle WTO riots were co-ordinated via cellphone. Someone has taken the lesson to heart. Oh well, it's back to walkie-talkies for the concerned activists.
Don't take the propaganda bait by lumping in legitmate activists with those who destroy property and incite riots.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
That this article solidly refuses the claim? (of course, you have to believe another politician from the Coalition of the Killing).
the crudest method is to trigger when some threshhold is reached, and the detonator is just a powerful transmitter. a better, but somewhat more complex method would be to detect a particular tone over x time, such as 120hz for 1 second.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
This is a perfect example of what Bruce Schneier calls "movie plot security" - looks good to have black helicopters flying around but doesn't really achieve much.
y
http://www.google.com/search?q=movie+plot+securit
PS: Yes, the Madrid bombers used cell phones to detonate the bombs, but they didn't do it by calling the 'phone. They used the alarm clock function.
PPS: How till this prevent suicide bombers, etc.?
No sig today...
Maybe even something a little more...errr...honest:
/. archives and see if there was a story about this back then.
Australian Security Bans Cell Phones For Bush Visit
I also have to question why this is even worthy of space on this site, especially since the linked story reminds us that this has been done before:
The technology was first used by the US president when Bush attended the APEC summit in Pusan, South Korea, in 2005.
Someone search the
By the way, this is probably a lot more routine than people realize. In October 2004, the President was making campaign stops around Florida in the days leading up to the election. He made an appearance at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville on a Saturday afternoon. At one point, Air Force One overflew the stadium on the way to Jacksonville International Airport. A few moments later, Secret Service and other security people began to appear on the field and near the tunnels. At one point, I took out my phone and tried to make a call, but had no signal.
This was in an open-air NFL stadium, surrounded by cell towers, on the edge of the downtown of a fairly large city. I also know that my service is always available, since I have Jaguars season tickets and have been in that building over 110 times since 1995. And my cell phone always worked, especially when the folks at my job called in the middle of a game to complain about server or internet outages.
Time to let this go, lefties.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
It's not that we want to blow the guy up; but give a nerd a problem...
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
It's 000 in Australia :P
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
They typically wire the detonator in place of the vibrator motor in the phone. The motor is (relatively) large, the leads are fairly easy to access, the power source is continuous DC (unlike speakers, which is an analog signal), and it almost certainly is provided the most amperage of any other component in the phone. They then set the phone on vibrate, attach the explosives, and call the phone when they want it to detonate.
Obviously the digital communication required to uniquely address the ESN of the phone, do the proper handshaking, and inform the phone that there is an incoming call is quite complex. The odds of a jamming signal being mistaken for the exact trunk-side communication required to indicate a call is infinitesimally small.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Typically? Where did you get the stats? :)
My phone provider sends me an SMS every now and then, and I get about one call a month by somebody who mistyped someone else's phone number. I wouldn't want to risk that while assembling or placing a bomb. The couple of cheap phones that I've owned don't have an option to switch the vibrator off for everything except calls from certain known phone numbers.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Ok, having dealt with the systems in question I'll explain a little how it works. Basically they hook one cell phone to the bomb via electronic leads soldered to the ringer or vibrating component of the phone which trip some mechanism inside to cause the bomb to go off. They are not usually set to the frequency since then any cell phone could set it off potentially. So they set it up to be keyed to a specific phone number in other words which gives them control of when the explosion will occur. The jamming system just blankets out the entire range of freqs and the call can't get through to the right number that way. So no it won't set off the bomb, pretty much it will never go off because once the opportunity has passed they won't want to set it off anymore. Now some of the others that replied with something to the effect of them wanting it to go off and cause a media event take off the tinfoil hat for a second and consider what I wrote since I have seen the Army Warlock system in action and can attest to its effectiveness in not letting the bomb go off at all.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
According to Australian news sources, there is NO plan to black out cell phones during the president's visit.
Was he a true conservative when he gave weapons to Iran?
Was he a true conservative when he stood by as Saddam gassed the Kurds in March of '88?
Stop the hero worship. He was an actor and a prop.
This depends on exactly what your signal strength meter is measuring.
For FM receivers, quieting and not RF signal strength is normally measured which is roughly analogous to demodulated signal to noise level or bit error rate. Using a non coherent jamming signal will lower any measured signal strength. You might notice that tuning an FM receiver to an empty channel returns large amounts of demodulated noise and an indication of zero signal strength.
For AM and SSB receivers, signal strength is taken from either the automatic gain control or directly from the signal level. A jamming signal will directly show up in the signal strength indicator just like it would with a spectrum analyser.
Cell phones of course using complex modulation encompassing both FM and AM could read signal strength in any number of ways. If I were designing a jamming system, I would rely on using a denial of service through the base stations with or without cooperation first, jamming the control frequencies second, and jamming the data channels third.
What newer stuff? UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache have been around since the early '80s. The Black Hawk is quieter than a Huey thanks to the four-blade main rotor and the Apache a little more so with the 55/125 offset tail rotor blades, but nothing in the Army inventory is really that new.
The most quiet helo in the US Army inventory would probably be the A/MH-6, but that's only in the SOAR TO&E.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.