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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.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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.
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.
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.