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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.
Unless your talking about a really big fing bomb (which these terrorist generally don't use and if they had wouldn't need cellphones etc to use) the blast range is a few feet at best. Meaning it will receive the jamming long before there is anything interesting to blow up.
Security theater at its very best, folks... Only there may be an ulterior motive here. 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.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
They practically wanted to take over London when he visited. US agents were to be armed and given ridiculous powers (the we can shoot who we want and are not to be held accountable was particularly amusing). The usual visiting dignatary events were ignored and large portions of the city were closed to the public if Bush was anywhere near.
The heavy handed approach is a really good way to make a very poor impression with the citizens of nation you are visiting.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
If you are around US military helicopters much you quickly discover that our newer stuff is fairly stealthy.
Most of the heavy troop transports still sound like they do in movies about Vietnam, but the light ones and most of the attack helicopters are very quiet once they get up to speed. Presumably the one assigned to Bush will be flying high enough to keep the rotor wash from mussing his hair so I doubt the crowd will hear it at all.
It really is spooky to look over your shoulder and see an attack helicopter floating a couple hundred yards away when you had to idea it was even there.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Bruce Schneier has already commented on this and the effectiveness of such a measure. He's written about things like this before - it's interesting, once you start thinking about security related issues (especially if you read his blog, I guess :), you read an article like this and go "well, gee, I guess now The Evil Terrorists know this one particular method won't work, they can just cross it off their project plan for this particular event and focus on other more effective measures".
Also, hopefully noone has an actual emergency while this thing is going past. I'd hate for someone to have a heart attack or be trying to call in a fire or something and not be able to use their cell phone. Or dial for the police in case they see suspicious people near the motorcade. You know, like people with beards.
That should be obvious: Trigger the bomb by the jamming signal. As soon as the mobile phone doesn't find a network any more, the bomb is triggered. Additional call triggering can be used in case there just happens to be no jamming (in which case calling the phone would obviously work).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
More information can be found here. Of course, if they had some idea of when the event was going to happen, they could also schedule an alarm for the latest time they want the device to detonate. So they detonate manually if possible, and it falls back on the alarm if the signal is blocked. The article I referenced discusses many factors, such as timers, jamming, the lithium ion battery itself being part of the ignition source, and why law enforcement doesn't have access to jamming equipment (including the FCC sections prohibiting jamming).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
That said, doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of the complaints here seem to be along the lines of "why lock my car door when someone can steal my stereo by breaking the window anyway?"
There are at least two legitimate concerns:
1) Various fairly obvious terrorist responses to these counter-measures will greatly increase the danger to bystanders without materially reducing the risk to the President.
2) There is some suspicion that this has more to do with making it harder for legitimate democratic protesters to co-ordinate their actions than it does with preventing terrorism.
Whether either of those things is sufficient to trump the needs of presidential security is a matter for debate, unlike the nearly-zero-cost behaviour of locking your car doors to protect your stereo. There is a point where people are going to say, "Enough! We've had it with all the intrusions into our daily lives in the name of counter-terrorist activity. I come from a society that has always valued liberty over security, and this is more than I am willing to give up."
While the particular policy of jamming cell phones is relatively minor, it is symbolic of many other more significant intrusions.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.