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US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project
coondoggie writes "Looking to begin developing algorithms and other technology to automatically learn to jam certain new wireless transmissions that may threaten US military personnel, BAE Systems recently got about $8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) system. According to DARPA: As wireless communication devices become more adaptive and responsive to their environment by using technology such as Dynamic Spectrum Allocation, the effectiveness of fixed countermeasures may become severely degraded. The BLADE program will develop algorithms and techniques that will let our electronic warfare systems automatically learn to jam new RF threats in the field."
"I've lost the bleeps, I've lost the creeps, and I've lost the sweeps!"
(or watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXKOsajNZY4)
I am officially gone from
I wish they'd spend 8 million to get Cell phone jammers at theatres. If there is ONE place where reception should not be possible its half way into a great drama.
... Hedy Lamarr now that we really need her?
Have gnu, will travel.
to quote the summary: "$8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare..." This is likely a phase 1 or 2 porject were they have to show proof of concept. This is the DOD we are talking about, I am sure that before BLADE is done that the total cost will be in the 100's of millions.
insert inflammatory comment here!
I'm convinced that they come up with the acronym first and then backronym it into a phrase. The military acronyms usually have names that an 8-year old would think are pretty cool for some GI Joe toys.
The thing I still wonder about, though, is whether they first pick the acronym, then pick the phrase, then invent a need and a project to fit the phrase.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This technology has been around since the 60's and was used before the Vietnam war, as well as during the Vietnam War makes this non-news.
Do a little research and you will find out that during the Apollo moon mission that Army Intelligence at Ft Hood jammed a frequency outside of the listed bands. Apparently they were field testing high powered multi-frequency jammers before being deployed into Vietnam. The field manual was very light and they were instructed to avoid certain bands that were coded red. It turned out to be a private frequency for NASA, which caused a two minute loss of communication with the Apollo team. The reason they knew about the Apollo comm link was two truckloads of intelligence spooks arrive at the site of their outpost. They were interviewed and informed that they had inadvertently knocked Houston's comms down and caused a two minute panic because the primary frequency and the backup frequency were unavailable for communication with the Apollo astronauts.
VFW halls, best halls.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
Somewhere in my Garage is an old Amana RadarRange from the 70s. I think the old leaky magnetron in it will sufficiently wipe out all RF spectrum for a 5 mile radius. I'll sell it to the government for only $1M Dollars! All you have to add is a burrito and a 120V power source and you're done!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
If you are putting our self-sacrificing service men and women in harm's way, you damn well better be doing EVERYTHING you can to try to protect them. This is a trivial amount of money compared to what we are pissing away every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if the desired goal is something of a long shot.
Agreed. So how about spending some money to keep our promises to take care of them AFTER their service is completed. Funding for various VA programs is pathetic, and every jagoff who utters the phrase "...our self-sacrificing service men and women..." should be ashamed to do so without acknowledging that fact.
It's actually pretty complicated. I used to be a military communications officer, so I have some idea of what they're trying to do here. The way modern military radios work is they take an entire spectrum and jump frequencies around a hundred times a second (that's what the US radios do, I assume enemy technology to be on par) based on an algorithm, a frequency plan, and a randomly generated salt which is a shared secret between all the radios. Unless you have all three pieces or you can use something like this adaptive "smart jammer" they want to develop, you can't jam the radios without jamming the entire spectrum. That's possible of course, but a) it takes a lot of power and b) it typically jams your radios too.
The trick here is that you don't want to create a radio "dead space" you want to jam enemy communications while leaving your own untouched. Your friend created a broad spectrum jammer. It crudely killed anything in the immediate area that was trying to use any frequency close to the one he was broadcasting on. Since there's a fairly limited number of channels that wifi runs on, and they're published frequency ranges, it was fairly trivial to scan each channel (which a WAP is doing anyway) to jam the correct one, or just broadcast on all of them. Now imagine your trying to jam a device that can use any frequency in the VHF range, has a list of 10,000 freqs it may be using, is changing freqs once every .001 seconds, and is jumping in away that appears random without the algorithm and salt. You probably have the algorithm, but the salt is only stored on secure devices that self wipe after either a certain number of failed password attempts or any attempt to access the internals. On top of that, since the enemy is almost certainly using more than one channel to communicate, you have to sort which devices are one which channels. All of which are that complicated. Finally, you have to do all of this without impacting your own communication systems which are doing the same thing on the same freq band.
Still seem easy?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Maybe the "doctor" should get a phone that vibrates. With what he makes, I assume he could afford it.
Of all the times I've been disturbed by cell phones at the movies, symphony, opera or library, I very much doubt that any of the offending calls were of this "emergency" nature. Usually, it's just assholes being assholes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Agreed. So how about spending some money to keep our promises to take care of them AFTER their service is completed.
Why? They applied for a dangerous, dirty job and got paid for it. If you don't feel the existing pay and benefits are enough of an incentive to possibly be killed, DON'T JOIN THE MILITARY.
They should be treated like any other person who is permanently injured...apply for state and federal disability.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Bullshit, the theaters and nice restaraunts should put up some sort of faraday cage. Nobody HAS TO be on call 24/7/365; the surgeon and the fireman should be able to have a replacement ready when he's at the theater or sleeping.
There didn't used to be such things as pagers, and folks got along just fine. There is no excuse for a phone to ring in a theater or (worse) in church, PERIOD. If you absolutely, positively HAVE to have you goddamned phone on 24/7, stay the hell out of churches, theaters, and any restaraunt that has wait staff.
YOU ARE NOT THAT GODDAMNED IMPORTANT. Nobody is.
Free Martian Whores!
You have to understand that this kind of research is going on all the time. I was doing it back in the eighties for different kinds of communications. (Same issues though -- capture, analyze, counter, when the signal is encrypted and transmitting on multiple frequencies.) There's really nothing to see here.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Should have thought of that when they were building a supersonic VTOL stealth fighter, when they already had both transonic VTOL fighters and supersonic stealth fighters.
I guess you need both VTOL and stealth on your supersonic fighter jet for fighting some dudes hiding in caves.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yes.
Take an array of directional antennas, figure out where the target signal is coming from, and throw a missile at it.
Signal jammed.
Repeat until there are no more signals to jam.
That's the cost of having children. I had the same problem when I had small kids, but I didn't expect everyone else to be inconvinienced because I was a dad.
And in fact, if you're getting out once a year you're getting out a whole lot more than I was ever able to.
Free Martian Whores!
That's a choice they make themselves.
I shouldn't have to pay the price for them choosing a well-paid job with lots of inconveniences.