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Libya SIGINT Jamming Satellites, Towers
h00manist writes "Libya's Gaddafi apparently loves radio hacking. Signal jamming is being used to disable Thuraya satellite phones. Also being jammed is satellite TV network provider Arabsat, affecting vast areas in the Middle East, Gulf, Africa and Europe. Cellphone and internet transmissions are working only intermittently. Soldiers are confiscating electronics, too. This has gone on for days, allowing killing to be carried out largely hidden from the rest of the world, quite different from what happened in Egypt. The locations of the jamming signals are known to company executives — around the capital, Tripoli — but nobody can do anything. Only POTS is available, and it is monitored. Technically speaking, could this happen everywhere? Alternatives?"
They could be going with SIGKILL. Of course, SIGQUIT would be a nice improvement.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Clearly Qadafi is going to do the full Tiananmen Square on his people, and yet Europe is not doing anything because 9-10% of their oil was coming from Libya.
It's ridiculous, Libya's own ambassadors are resigning to protest him, and the Libyan UN delegation broke from Qadafi and is publicly demanding from New York that the UN step in and do something. Will anyone at least do something now that he's jamming regional TV and phone?
Your reports count less than a thousend dead, but we also know that he is using big boats to shell and bombers to attack the people or, as it is sometimes depicted, "soft targets" or "personel".... so no, you are not getting the full picture.
I've mentioned bombings in my original post. And yes, ship bombardments were in the news, too. We might not be getting the casualty figures, but it doesn't take much imagination to picture what ship artillery can do to heavily populated residential areas. So the overall picture may be lacking details, but you don't really need those to see how bleak it is (and I don't think extra details would change it much).
A NATO stealth bomber strike to take them out with missiles intended for that (i understand some ordinance can fry electronics). Enough is enough. Fuck Gaddafi!
You mean an American stealth bomber. We're the only ones who have them. Of course it will be done, under the auspices of NATO or the UN. Some ordinance can indeed fry electronics, but I doubt we're going to go full EMP-burst on them. HARM works well enough and has the added bonus of not being a weapon of mass destruction. It's going to happen, by the way. Just a matter of the weather in Tripoli.
If I were there right now
Either you'd be:
1. Shitting in your pants hiding in the basement, praying not to get blown up
or
2. At the port, begging for a ride on a ferry out.
Sadly, our western, basement dwelling nerdiosity doesn't begin to comprehend the potential of violence in such a situation.
Look, people die, that's horrible. But Libya's problems are their own internal problem. It's ultimately a healthy thing that Libyans are revolting against their dictator. This is democracy at its finest. If all goes well, this is going to be their 1776.
If the West were to intervene, that would kill all of the legitimacy that this movement has. The West is pro-Kadaffi, just Google a bit and you will find pictures of Kadaffi shaking hands the hands of smiling people like Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi. The West doesn't give a flying fuck about Libyans as long as their own citizens can buy cheap oil and that is why the West is so embarrassed when a regime they support falls. That is what happened in Egypt, Tunisia and now, possibly, in Libya. That is what happened in a dozen Latin American countries two decades ago. The West is part of the problem here, not the solution. Leave them alone. This could be the blood bath that will end all future blood baths.
Funny, this. When Saddam killed Kurds, people cried out for western intervention. Then the west invades to dispose and it isn'y right either. Somalia erupts and again the same people cry out for intervention, but then complain when some war mongers get killed. Same with Afghanistan. Women get stoned, intervene! Intervention happens: GET OUT!
So, are you pro Iraq invasion? Pro-war? Pro-increased military budgets? Pro-conscription? Then what exactly do you mean with intervention.
The simple fact is that the real world is a hellishly difficult place and western governments are dealing with an electorate incapable of keeping a coherent train of thought in a single sentence. How can you make policy of any kind when one moment people want peace and war the next? When we should leave other nations alone but also stop them from doing anything we disagree with?
And do the Libyans even want intervention? By who? The reports coming from Libya are far from reliable. One thing that has been noted is that foreigners who have gotten out speak of plenty of HEARED violence and even some theft but not a single sign of the hardcore violence reported. Covering their tracks? Violence happens elsewhere or maybe the violence is over stated? Who knows for sure and you wish western officials to commit to what might turn into an extended decades long war based on this?
And if you start intervening, how soon? Intervene at any protest where people die at the hand of the police? That would have seen the US invaded by the west to stop its police killing protestors pretty much throughout its history. What of the many race riots, intervention?
Intervention is rarely used, it is just to drastic a tool.
And of course it would play right into the dictators hand, see, the rioters are lead by foreigners seeking to re-establish their colonies. You are away that Libya used to be a colony of, I believe, France? Send in the Foreign legion? Yeah, that would go over well.
No, the cries for intervention are best ignored by a politician because the exact same kids will be protesting ten seconds after you intervene about that as well. Best to ignore them.
Let the Libyans choose their own destiny. When they win, it will have been their own freedom they have won on their own terms. Imposed freedom will never taste as sweet as freedom you won yourself.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Alternatively, someone may have painted the graffiti on the wall after the bullet holes had been made.
It is easy to malign random strangers. Not everybody here is still a child who has done nothing dangerous in their lives.
Of *course* it is dangerous to resist an autocracy. But ensuring good information flow is a vital part of any mass political effort, why would we not follow the same spectrum of committment that the people who are actually there do?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
The best tweet: "I hope programmers worldwide will join me in calling for M[ou]'?am+[ae]r .*([AEae]l[- ])? [GKQ]h?[aeu]+([dtz][dhz]?)+af[iy] to step down."
Well, on second look it's all a bit pixely... Maybe I'm seeing something that isn't there. It sure looks as though it could have been composited, but I shouldn't have been so quick to judge.
China is vetoing action.
They're worried that they'll be next in 3-6 months, and they've already had at least four cities launch Net-instilled protests for freedom.
NATO could act alone, but won't due to the oil dependency of the EU players.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm sure Doc Brown is still around somewhere, haven't talked to him in a while since he got married and had a couple kids.
Everybody is running around talking about military intervention, but you're forgetting a basic point: This is an internal matter of a sovereign nation. We might not like what's happening, but going into Libya with guns blazing is just as illegal as doing it to Iraq. There is a long list of people who complain about america running around invading countries for their oil, and yet they will happily stand there and say that the americans should rush into this country and do the same. If you want your opinions and morals to be respected you have to be consistent in them. The people of Libya haven't asked for outside aid.
If I transmit through a directional antenna at the satellite your phone uses with 1000x your power the satellite will only see my signal not yours. I don't have to jam -you- to block your phone, only one end of the call.
Zoom in on a JPEG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpg and find what ever the hell you want to find. Compression routines can generate all kinds of random artefacts and defects. What to see how really badly jpeg can futz things up, get any highly detailed black and white vector drawing and then run it through JPEG compression and see what you end up with.
The real problem here is cross international boundary signal jamming by Libya, that is bordering upon an act of war, really, really dangerous stuff. Definitely stop or the jamming sources will be targeted stuff.
If you have problems within your borders, you are responsible for keeping it within your borders, failure to do so, means they neighbouring countries are eligible to seek resolution to those now external problems.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Or make a stand, right now. KILL a US arms dealer whose weapons are RIGHT now being used to kill civilians. Yes, the US didn't know how fast to sell weapons once it lifted its own embargo.
Yea, that damn US making all those AK-47's, RPD's, T-72 tanks and Mig fighters and then selling them to Libya in the 70s and 80s. Though if you're going to turn Soviet Union into an acronym shouldn't the 'S' come first?
In the days of print images, every image was "manipulated" in as far as color and contrast go. Color filters were used to print the negative, papers of appropriate contrast were selected. In the modern age, the question becomes, "Did the photographer feel he could better select the colors than the camera's algorithm could?" Color and contrast should be adjusted for most images, including journalistic ones.
Your understanding of color as a person, and the reality of color seen by a machine are two very different things. That's why a person needs to adjust.
SIG: HUP
When it comes to the Kurds, the problem is that the US was so bloody inconsistent. When Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988, the US tried to frame Iran for it, and sent Rumsfeld in to reassure Saddam that the war was going well and he had the US backing (remember that famous video of them shaking hands?). In 2002-2003 Bush and his ilk kept bringing it up as a justification to invade (as if suddenly noticing it 14 years later) , but when they finally arrest him, they decline to charge him in court with neither the gas attack nor the invasion of Kuwait.
Doing nothing, and practically decimating a country are two extremes I don't support. There's so much that the world can do to help the Libyan people short of actually going into the country with soldiers and guns. Qaddafi relies on external support from friendly allies and lots of money. Target those, and maybe he'll stop some of the madness. It's being said that he's importing mercenaries from neighboring countries and has Venezuela planned as his escape route. Those are both trivially easy to disrupt, among other things.
A bad idea and started on a shitty pretext, but legal. For one, nations do have a right to make war against each other. There are consequences of that, but war itself has not been outlawed among nations. There is no world government tot do so and treaties do not forbid it.
However that didn't matter because a de-facto state of war already existed between the US and Iraq. There was no peace treaty after the first Gulf War. The allied forces just stopped kicking Iraq's ass. No treaty was signed, relations were not normalized, etc. What's more, Iraq shot at planes enforcing the no-fly zone all the time. The didn't hit them, but they shot at them.
So a state of war continued to exist, it was just that hostilities had scaled back to small stuff, they'd shoot at planes the planes would blow up the SAM site. All the US did was decide to make it a full on war again. There didn't even need to be a redeclaration or anything.
Also the UN never passed any resolution against it, they couldn't since the US is a permanent security council member and thus can veto it.
No matter how you slice it, the war was legal. An extremely bad idea, but legal. Conflicts are not illegal just because you don't approve of them.