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Dutch Radio Geek Tracking Libyan Airstrikes
jfruhlinger writes "The days when citizens could only learn about a distant war from the government or the institutional press are long over. A Dutch ex-military geek exemplifies the new way information comes out, tracking attack flights on Libya, and even tweeting messages to the US command responsible for the strikes."
Hitting his house in 3... 2... 1...
The US military wants to "talk" this guy for his "spying".
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Even worse... Copyright infringement.
I was amazed at how little detail there was in the article. Its just, like all magic and stuff because he's so smart and experienced. And we're only going to use one syllable words here, because you're... not. What a Pulitzer of modern journalism, almost worth catching a fish so I can wrap it.
Sounds a lot like a scanner guy with an ADS-B receiver, either homemade or purchased something like this:
http://www.radargadgets.com/.
Google for ADS-B and 1090 MHz and terms like that, you'll get the idea real quick of how he does it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I've been able to track a lot of aircraft movements on Shortwave/HF radio from Ireland - and it's surprising just how much information still goes out over unencrypted links. Friday night, there was a marked increase in French AWACS and support aircraft activity - and then on Saturday other frequencies came alive with a whole host of NATO aircraft; for instance RAF Transports, Tankers, Surveillance, Strike and Fighter aircraft. Some aircraft discussed the targets they'd hit, the ordinance they had used and their current bearings and distance from Benghazi. There have been some intriguing transmissions - for instance aircraft operating at altitudes which are beyond their published service ceilings and voices co-ordinating movements from countries whose governments voiced opposition to the NFZ. Over the years frequency hopping and encryption have reduced the number of military transmissions to be read and understood on HF, but clearly there's still interesting ones out there. On a tangent - an Israeli Numbers Station , designated E10 and famous for lending the title to a Wilco album amongst other things, stopped transmitting on March 1st of this year - given the recent events in Egypt, it's interesting timing.
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
@USAfricaCommand be advised, one of your WEASEL's F-16CJ from 23th FS Spangdahlem Germany has his transponder Mode-S on! NOT secure!
That means the F-16 in question was transmitting both its altitude and GPS position for all to see. Then again, if its truly a wild weasel platform, that may be entirely its intent.
Not sure where you get your own propaganda, but this latest involvement is extremely unpopular with the majority of people in the US.
Ironically, though, I actually back this operation where I did not believe Afghanistan and Iraq should have been engaged in. Why? Well, when a nation seeks to oust its leader and the leader responds with crimes against humanity, we are honor-bound to defend those civilians under attack by their own leadership. (Likewise, we should also take more aggressive actions against China and other countries for the same reasons)
I recognize the fact that the majority of the US are mindless. But even in this case, the mindless aren't fully in support of the current actions. But with that said, we don't (yet) have feet on the ground for this one. As far as I know, we are just launching fireworks at military hardware put in place by Libyan leadership to suppress and attack the people.
"Move and we'll immediately kill you," aka, "We're omnipresent and you're completely impotent - roll over and prepare to be conquered," is the asymptotic extreme of all propaganda, war or otherwise.
Some bastard could come along and accuse him of unauthorized "retransmission" of "illegally" intercepted signals
Extremely doubtful since the ATC frequencies he's listening to are specifically intended to be heard by public facilities. Anything heard on these frequencies are transmitted with the full intent and knowledge anyone and everyone can hear. Anything which is not intended for public consumption is transmitted over military frequencies and encrypted. The former is what he's listening to. The later would be completely unintelligible for anyone whos receivers have not been pre-programmed with the decryption keys. Programming with the proper keys is part of pre-flight procedures and handed out during the pre-mission briefing.
Absolutely nothing he's doing is secret or hard and is extremely unlikely to be illegal in any free country.
The US government effectively includes a set of permanent privatised contractors who are allowed to put Intellectual Property[tm] protections their work. Wouldn't apply here, of course.
Hope that was a joke, because the US gov't doesn't get to copyright anything -- it's all public domain.
Works by the US government are only non-copyrightable domestically. They can certainly hold foreign copyright on them, which would apply to a Dutch radio geek.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
why ALL aircraft transmissions (civilian or otherwise) aren't encrypted. ... we're only talking about a few hundred tons of metal flying through the air with thousands of gallons of jet fuel. What could possibly go wrong?
WHAT could go wrong? Let me tell you what could go wrong. There's a hundred tons of metal flying around. Its position is *secret* because some dumbfuck thought it would be better to encrypt all its transmissions.
Then comes uncle Bill in his Cessna. He doesn't know where the big passenger aircraft is, because its position is *secret*, since some dumbfuck though it necessary to encrypt all transmissions from the aircraft.
Do you begin to see now why aircraft transmissions *cannot* be encrypted?!!!
OK, I know your next argument; Imagine all aircraft transmissions are encrypted and all aircraft must have a receiver able to decode those transmissions. Only registered aircraft owners have access to the receivers, so what could possibly go wrong?
Think of the thousands of small airfields all over the world. Climb a fence, cut a padlock at night, pick a receiver. Or buy it from a salvage firm, grease some hands, whatever. It wouldn't stay secret very long (ask Sony about that).
Define "honor-bound", please. I appreciate the good sentiment, but it sounds like a term which can be used to excuse anything. If the nation was seeking to oust its leader, there would be no leader. What's happening is that some of the nation is seeking to oust its leader - something which could be said of every nation on the earth. And almost all leaders, freedom-loving or dictatorial (but I repeat myself), crush such rebellions. Why are we caring so much about Libya? (why did we care so much about Iraq and Afghanistan?)
While everyone was looking at Japan, and while our countries (UK, France, USA) have so much shit to sort out at home, the bastards just managed to engage us in another offensive war.
Doesn't matter. Southwest doesn't fly there and I refuse to use any other carrier, even to get to a carrier.
Well, when a nation seeks to oust its leader and the leader responds with crimes against humanity, we are honor-bound to defend those civilians under attack by their own leadership.
Does this honor-binding apply to all revolutionaries attempting to overthrow the existing civil government, or only those whose actions you agree with? One man's revolutionary is another man's freedom fighter, so to speak. Would you feel honor-bound to defend, e.g., Timothy McVeigh had he made it to a remote hide-away and ATF and FBI were conducting a full-scale assault to capture him? What about one of the militias in Idaho if they start trying to "oust [their nation's] leader"? Would you have moved to South Carolina to help the Confederates "oust [their] leader"?
but this latest involvement is extremely unpopular with the majority of people in the US.
I recognize the fact that the majority of the US are mindless.
Such insults are usually levied against those who supported the UN sanctions and US participation in Iraq. It is refreshing to see them applied to those who knee-jerk oppose all military action anywhere.
In any case, your claim requires citation. When did we vote and measure the popularity?
But even in this case, the mindless aren't fully in support of the current actions.
Yep, that's how the insult is usually applied.
You have to face it. The same man who promised he'd get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan and close Gitmo "on day one" of his administration is now getting us involved in yet ANOTHER war trying to depose the leader of yet another sovereign country.
The news media wasn't particularly helpful with geographic details either before the airstrikes or after. Their maps are very generalized and sometimes erroneous or omit important sites. The media would say "battles in Ras Lanuf in eastern Libya", and there was a poor sense of where exactly that was or how far it was from Benghazi (how long would it take Ghaddafi's forces to drive from there to Benghazi, for example?). And where exactly are the airfields and military bases that were either the source of Ghaddafi's attacks or the places being attacked by the local people?
So, in frustration, I spent a weekend finding all the visible airfields, military bases, surface-to-air missile, oil pipeline/storage tank/refinery/oil port infrastructure, etc. that I could spot in the Google Earth imagery. The Google Earth program is best for hunting, but Google Maps can show some of the results. For example, here's a SAM site to the south of Tripoli airport, here's a SAM site in Tripoli itself. These seem to be two different types of missile setups, with missiles visible on the second one, but hidden in sheds in the first picture. Here's Mitiga air base in Tripoli. If you look in the SE corner you can see MIGs parked on the ground. There are also some helicopters, including some big, twin-blade Chinooks. Here's a big ammo/weapons dump in the SE of the city. Here's the ammo/weapons dump south of Adjdabiya that the Ghaddafi forces bombed a few times to try to prevent the rebels from getting the stores there. Notice the difference in color of the ground -- the security fences keep the grazing wildlife out, so there are more plants inside the fence == darker. An easy way to spot the secure fenced-in areas even if you can't see the fence itself. Practically every major city has military bases of some size (usually high security fences with guard towers) where you can see APCs parked, or occasionally tanks and tank transporters and other heavy weapons. Even if you can't see them out in the open air you can often recognize the warehouses that have this sort of equipment because of the security fences and the very WIDE turns in the roads around the buildings. The various military airbases around the country (at least 8 or 10 of them) often have the planes hidden in earth-covered bunkers, but this centrally-located base near Hun has plenty of visible aircraft, including ones recognizable as Tu-22 bombers and MiG-25 fighters. This large airbase south of Sirte has quite a few small fighters visible in addition to transport aircraft on the big tarmacs.
Besides military assets, there are other types of infrastructure that are important, such as this large storage tank area to the SW of the Ras Lanuf oil port/refinery, where several pipelines converge. There are several storage/port areas like this at coastal points along the southern end of the Bay of Sirte. The oil fields them
Propaganda doesn't have to have an ulterior anything - if its dissemination is intended to influence someone's view of their position ("OK, I'm helpless") with a selective account of facts then it is propaganda.
Now neither of us have any evidence that the announcement is "in essence, 100% true". To state "you will be attacked" rather than "you may be attacked without warning" seems to be a choice made for psychological effect rather than an accurate statement of omnipresence and omniscience.
To state that the announcement was to benefit those innocent captains whose vessels would otherwise be killed trying to escape is spin - it may or may not be one of many reasons for making the announcement.
Some people's brains shut down the moment their tribe goes to war against the evil subhumans from the tribe across the hill. I think that that basically explains that vein of criticism.
Libya's air defense systems have a strong 'Red and Retro' flavor to them; but they have a reasonable number of airbases and SAM sites. Unless the ongoing fighting has left those in total shambles, they almost certainly have listening capabilities superior to the hobbyist level(if only because autocratic armed forces tend to encounter less hassle with neighbors and zoning when putting up antennas) and probably some active radar as well. It isn't clear that they have the capability to hit much of the more modern force attacking them; but they aren't exactly cowering in primitive awe because they don't know what a radio receiver is.
Whole different ballgame. In fact, you're talking about two different ballgames, while trying to infer something into yet another ballgame.
1. Manning is a US citizen, who was sworn to secrecy, and sworn to obey various and sundry orders, general orders, rules, regulations, etc ad nauseum.
2. Assange is a foreign national, who is not in any way subject to US military law, and should not be subject to the various laws that our politicos are trying to subject him to. The man released classified information - but he didn't steal it, intercept it, or anything of that nature. The information was given to him, for the purpose of wide dissemination. In short, he is a new type of reporter who was doing his job.
3. Our Dutch geek freind, on the other hand, is yet another foreign national who is intercepting military radio messages, and seems to be seeking to aid the allies.
So you see, none of the three have very much in common with the others.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The only exception that I could think of(though I don't know if Libya has tried it) might be the use of RF decoys to draw the (extremely expensive) firepower of the attacking air forces away from more valuable targets.
If you skip all the sophistication required to make any use of the return signal, and just focus on pumping out the microwaves, you could probably knock something together that looks enough like an actual radar system(particularly a mobile one, since the adversary couldn't discount it based on satellite data, as they could a static installation) to require an airstrike at low cost and with minimal technical sophistication.
As noted, I haven't heard of Libya doing this; but it might be a reasonably sensible strategy for somebody in their position, where they just don't have the anti-aircraft capacity to engage the attacking aircraft in any serious way: the fakes would help absorb some percentage of the damage at very low cost, and help keep enemy aircraft flying around in locations where dumb AA fire and/or short-range-guidance-only SAMs might hit some with sufficient luck... Anything that they actually care about, though, is presumably going to stay very quiet and pretend that it isn't home.
This IP was first published in Libya -- US copyright law doesn't apply.
And yes, I know I'm taking the joke too far.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Ah, Yugoslavia had plenty of retro pinko hardware. NATO bombed them for 78 days, and all they managed to hit was (deserted) bases, civilians, civilian factories, schools, airstrips, TV transmitters and stations, bridges, etc. Despite claims of decimating the yugo forces, they only really hit strategic dual use facilites at best, and as far as tactical it was limited to around a dozen rusting T-55s, maybe a dozen MiG-29's that were pretty much in disrepair, and probably a few dozen parked / decoy rusty MiG-21s... An airstrike on the Chinese embassy was a pretty big fuckup too.
I think almost all of the mobile AA radars, guns, SAMs, etc came out pretty much unscathed from the ordeal. I presume fixed installations got wiped out, but I'm not sure.
The Serbs even managed to knock out a F-117 with some 60's soviet hardware, so there is more to it than just hardware. I'd say Gadhaffi is a touch more hardass / total war than Milosevic too. Serbia could have kept going, the army was fine, but civilians can only handle no bridges or power and smoking factories for so long...
I also heard of the Serbs running microwaves out in the sticks with their doors off, which I suppose looks like centimetric pulse radar or so (suppose it's not pulsed, but unsure if the anti-radar bits are smart enough to figure that out). So a $25 microwave pulls in a $100k missile.
argh, I guess this is more of a reply to the replies to your post, but i'll put it here anyhow.
Sent from my PDP-11