NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS

judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"

Comments

Lads, they've taken our GPS...get 'em

[syousef]

"I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free man you are! What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?” Two thousand against ten?” – the veteran shouted. No! We will run – and live!” Yes!” Wallace shouted back. Fight and you may die. Run and you will live WITHOUT GPS at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young men and GET A SATELLITE LOCK? Tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our GPS SIGNAL!”

fake it

[Anonymous Coward]

why not fake it?
just turn off the red teams GPS's when their with in 20mi of a warship, problem solved.

Re:fake it

[digitalchinky]

Not at all. The effect jamming has on GPS is already well established and can be reliably reproduced in a lab/classroom environment - the receivers mostly just cease to work. Also nothing screams "I am exactly right here" quite like a jammer does, any half decent rack of ELINT gear will locate it within a very short space of time.

The parent is correct.

Re:fake it

[shutdown -p now]

Did you see his sig?

Re:fake it

[wvmarle]

A major military exercise... and they do not close those waters for the week or two these drills last?

Civilian ships should stay the hell out of there. Stay well away from those war ships, they're in exercise, and may perform unpredictable maneuvers. There may be small craft out there. Projectiles flying around.

If a ship comes within GPS jammed range then they're way too close to begin with I'd say. Yes this may cause some inconvenience to some fishermen or other seamen, but the ocean is big. Plenty of other places to sail to.

Re:fake it

[icebike]

So if your ships can readily navigate without GPS , then you can be pretty sure that all other military vessels will be able to do the same.

So this is not a military exercise in the normal sense, this exercise is obviously targeted at military actions against civilian populations, where GPS jamming comes into play,

What a load of rubbish.

Near-fleet GPS jamming has nothing to do with ship navigation. Navies have been navigating ships without GPS for several hundred years. GPS jamming is to decoy incoming missiles which use GPS as ONE OF the methods of target location.

Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.

The GPS bands are no where near satellite TV bands.

GPS satellites broadcast at the same two frequencies, 1.57542 GHz (L1 signal) and 1.2276 GHz (L2 signal).
Satellite TV uses the C-band frequencies of 5.4 GHz band (5.15 to 5.35 GHz, or 5.47 to 5.725 GHz, or 5.725 to 5.875 GHz, depending on the region of the world).

Therefore it seems highly unlikely GPS jamming is the cause of any significant TV reception problems.
G-Band (aka C-Band Radar) sits right in the middle of the Satellite TV band, and that is the likely source of any TV interference.

Re:fake it

[icebike]

Exactly what I was thinking.

What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?

Re:fake it

[rtfa-troll]

Some reasons I can think of;

a) Lots of soldiers have civilian gear as well. E.g. iPhones. You don't want them to have the opportunity to cheat. You do want them to use the gear in the way that they might without GPS so they have the feel for how it would be.

b) Lots of systems are doing automated switch over; it may not be possible to properly activate that mode in the presence of GPS. E.g. if you have a system which does GPS navigation normally and then switches over to inertial navigation, you want to act as if there was a real GPS jamming.

To be frank, anybody, military or otherwise who's operating GPS gear without a working fallback is irresponsible. What they should do is introduce safety regulations which say so and then give a very large fine to fishermen who complain next time. That will reduce the discussion.

Re:fake it

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume that the military exercise actually benefit society more than those fishermen.
Thing is that all of that exercise is funded by tax money and those fishermen pay that tax.
I am willing to fund the military to ensure that I will have my freedom. If the own military starts to restrict my freedom then I don't care if it is the military that I pay taxes to that causes this or if it is a foreign military force, the end result is the same.

So yes, unless you live in a military fascist state (This is not hte case here.) then you should expect the military to exersice without disrupting the ordinary civilian life because the only reason they get funding is because civilians don't want their ordinary life to be disrupted, if they can't do that then they are not doing their job.

Yes this may cause some inconvenience to the military, but the ocean is big. Plenty of other places to sail to.

Re:fake it

[Asic Eng]

[...]the ocean is big.

So one option should be to have GPS-jamming exercises somewhere else, someplace where you don't have lots of civilian fishermen around.

Re:fake it

[Anonymous Coward]

No, _this_ story is about the dangerous Scottish coastal waters.

Any mid-range ship-to-shore radio gear you buy these days hooks up to GPS. When mummy and daddy both go down below to fight the engine room fire and they don't come back, little Katie just presses the big red "somebody come help" button like she was taught. The radio transmits the correct identity for the boat, including its description, and its current co-ordinates, with the distress signal and there's a fair chance somebody will come rescue Katie before the fire that consumed her parents sinks the boat and her with it.

GPS is an important safety net. Disabling it isn't just an inconvenience, it's potentially a matter of life and death.

Re:fake it

[beelsebob]

Civilians, on the other hand have no critical dependency on GPS. Its largely a toy for the day to day user and a convenient (but non critical) aid for the traveler.

Once upon a time this may have been true, but when there's 1) people out in fishing trawlers/recreational vessels 2) people up on top of mountains 3) aircraft trying to fly about the place it's not really so true. Sure, most of these people could default to navigating the old fashioned ways, but you can bet heavily that one or two of them will not have a compass/sextant/etc with them, and that every so often it *will* cost lives. I'd call that a critical dependency.

Re:fake it

[sciencewhiz]

You're describing the way the system should act, ignoring the way it does act. In 2007, a Navy jamming exercise that jammed GPS disrupted cell phone service (and several other services) in San Diego. http://www.gpsworld.com/defense/gps-insights-april-2007-8428

Re:The best part

[wagnerrp]

Play nice... don't HARM the jammers!

Re:What?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on the GPS system. It's one of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, it could go down some time. What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

Surely these people shouldn't be staking their lives on mechanical navigation equipment. They're some of our most reliable machines (the most reliable I know of), but even still, charts can be inaccurate, sextants can rust, and compasses can break. What happened to dead reckoning, estimating your position by the taste of the water, keeping an eye out for towns on shore, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

Re:The best part

[koan]

Just in case no one else gets it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

The innumerable shipwrecks dotting the shores of the British Isles over the centuries suggest that GPS navigation might be a bit more foolproof than those methods.

Re:What?

[GumphMaster]

What happened to being able to read a chart, keeping a sextant on-board, triangulating your position with a compass, and all the other skills people used to be taught?

They still are taught (certainly to military navigators), but these techniques are only useful for relatively coarse navigation. Fine to get your boat home to port, but not very useful to accurately locate a particular crab pot, trawl a particular area while avoiding no-go zones or known obstructions, hold station over an dive site, oil or gas well head etc.

But

[Dunbal]

Will it jam GLONASS?

Weird?

[SlayerofGods]

Why do we need an exercise to jam our own satellites? Shouldn't they be practicing jamming GLONASS or something?

Re:Weird?

[subreality]

It's not to practice jamming... it's to practice operating when the Bad Guys are doing the jamming.

Re:Weird?

[subreality]

1, There are are a whole lot of GPSes involved. It's a lot more than a nav unit on the bridge, and they don't all share a single off-switch.

2, You don't want to practice "OK, everyone turn off your GPS now and switch to plan B!". You want to practice "Why are we drifting to starboard? Is this an instrumentation failure? WTF is ERROR 7505?", because that's how it happens when you're doing it for real and you need to learn to work through that kind of confusion.

Re:What?

[ceoyoyo]

If you go to sea depending on GPS you're an idiot. If you go to sea without GPS, yourte an idiot. You shouldn't depend on it, but it does make things safer.

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

Massive WOOSH.

Is that supposed to be the last sound you hear after your ship hits the rocks and the water is rushing in over your head?

Re:What?

[Waffle Iron]

I wouldn't depend solely on GPS either, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to *intentionally* disable GPS and force people to use less reliable and rarely practiced methods, even if they all know how to use them.

Re:Ungrateful

[Scutter]

The US military developed, launched, and maintains GPS for military purposes. They allow everyone else to use it for FREE. Now those same users are screaming because the people who PAID FOR GPS want to turn it off for a few days in a limited area. "How dare they stop providing us free service! We demand they continue providing us free, uninterrupted service!"

The US military didn't pay for it. I paid for it. I graciously allowed them to use my tax money to purchase it for their use with the strict instruction that it was also to made available for my own use.

I think maybe you forgot who works for whom.

Re:What?

[GumphMaster]

Failing to hold station above divers in a diving bell potentially adds life threatening risk but is not likely to cause injury without other factors. On the whole I agree, this is an inconvenience not a threat.

Fishing area boundaries are charted but not typically physically marked and GPS is used by the vessel to maintain licence compliance, and fishery management agencies to monitor compliance. Buoys work in shallow water only and even a fully functional Royal Navy ship can hit charted rocks :).

Re:The US owns the satellites

[kimvette]

This is why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System

After Korean Air Lines Flight 007, carrying 269 people, was shot down in 1983 after straying into the USSR's prohibited airspace,[10] in the vicinity of Sakhalin and Moneron Islands, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making GPS freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good.[11] The first satellite was launched in 1989, and the 24th satellite was launched in 1994.

Initially, the highest quality signal was reserved for military use, and the signal available for civilian use was intentionally degraded ("Selective Availability", SA). This changed with President Bill Clinton ordering Selective Availability to be turned off at midnight May 1, 2000, improving the precision of civilian GPS from 100 meters (about 300 feet) to 20 meters (about 65 feet). The executive order signed in 1996 to turn off Selective Availability in 2000 was proposed by the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, because of the widespread growth of differential GPS services to improve civilian accuracy and eliminate the US military advantage. Moreover, the US military was actively developing technologies to deny GPS service to potential adversaries on a regional basis.[12]

GPS is owned and operated by the United States Government as a national resource. Department of Defense (USDOD) is the steward of GPS. Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) oversaw GPS policy matters from 1996 to 2004. After that the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee was established by presidential directive in 2004 to advise and coordinate federal departments and agencies on matters concerning the GPS and related systems. The executive committee is chaired jointly by the deputy secretaries of defense and transportation. Its membership includes equivalent-level officials from the departments of state, commerce, and homeland security, the joint chiefs of staff, and NASA. Components of the executive office of the president participate as observers to the executive committee, and the FCC chairman participates as a liaison.

USDOD is required by law to "maintain a Standard Positioning Service (as defined in the federal radio navigation plan and the standard positioning service signal specification) that will be available on a continuous, worldwide basis," and "develop measures to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations without unduly disrupting or degrading civilian uses."

Navigation at sea

[SpaghettiPattern]

Navigation at sea isn't that straight forward. You have to take into account the magnetic declination, the magnetic deviation of the compass on the ship, corrections for wind and current. And then comes the different chart type you have to know. And the tides, yes, the tides. And that's about it...

I recently studied all of this and passed the theoretic exam. Hey, I want to be a seaman.

The practice is somewhat different. You take GPS for granted. You also take the plotter for granted. And the collision warning thingy that goes beeeeep.

I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't.

Re:Navigation at sea

[dkf]

I wouldn't be surprised if a disruption of GPS actually will kill people. And I don't blame GPS but the able navigators that probably aren't.

Before GPS, a lot of seamen died from poor navigation. Knowing where you are at sea is hard, especially when conditions are less than ideal. The issue is just that there are far fewer landmarks (hah!) and if visibility is obscured by storm, rain or fog, you just don't know where you are. The old methods of navigation (a chronometer, compass and sextant) are only relatively crude. GPS has made a gigantic difference to marine safety, making going onto known rocks, sandbars and other (semi-)fixed obstacles a much less common occurrence.

Mercator Projection: Why Scotland's sea is NOT BIG

[evilandi]

>the ocean is big

Sigh. Mercator Projection.

The "ocean" around Scotland is NOT big. The SEA around Scotland is actually quite small. It's as far north as Newfoundland and Labrador.

It just LOOKS big on the map due to two-dimensional maps stretching out the northern and southern extremities of Earth.

Scotland, in particular Faslane, is where NATO keeps its nuclear submarines. The locals live cheek-by-jowl with these submariners and for the most part get along just fine. But closing off all the sea between all the inhabited islands in the west of Scotland just isn't feasible.

Scotland's only 200x150 miles

[evilandi]

>What the hell is a fishing boat doing within 20 miles of a major exercise?

Scotland is only 200 miles x 150 miles in size. A fourty-mile exclusion zone (20 miles radius) would kill the entire marine economy for the western coast of the country.

And the marine economy is pretty much the only economy in western Scotland.

Re:Scotland's only 200x150 miles

[evilandi]

Short answer: They are probably simulating the invasion of a nuclear submarine base. This requires: 1x nuclear submarine base.

>So why can't the military just test this a hundred miles farther away?

Because it is difficult to simulate the invasion of a nuclear submarine base using a bunch of pontoons in the Atlantic. The nuclear submarine base in question, at Faslane, is attached to a fixed landmass (the Scottish mainland).

>Is there a specific reason they need to be close to civilians to test this?

Yes. This is equivalent to asking: "Why is the nuclear submarine base close to civilians?"

Scotland does not have any deserts or oceans. It doesn't have any uninhabited areas. The narrow strip of sea around the nuclear submarine base is full of inhabited islands, fjords and peninsulas. The civilians rely on ferries between the islands, they rely on fishing to provide an economy, they rely on ships to get their goods to market. Europe is a densely inhabited place. There isn't anywhere you can put a nuclear submarine base that's more than a couple of miles from civilians. Scotland is one of the least densely inhabited places in Europe, so it's the most suitable place we've got.

Europe doesn't have a Gulf of Mexico or an Area 51, we don't have any spaces that empty or that big.

Anywhere else in Europe you might try to simulate the invasion will be have just as many, if not more, civilians. And the civilians around Faslane are used to the inconvenience; civilians elsewhere would make even more fuss.

The only alternative is: Don't do the exercise anywhere Europe. That's fine, but you're no longer simulating an attack on Faslane. I'm no expert, but my guess is that Pacific islands do not have fjords.

Re:.mil or .not?

[sjames]

Half and half. It was a U.S. DOD thing, but to make sure they got it funded they included civilian benefits in the bullet points. They even designed a two tiered accuracy into the system so that by knowing the right decryption keys the military units could give more accurate positions.

So it's fair to say that the civilian use was intended from the start.

Re:Terrible location

[dkf]

Seriously, guys. Off the coast of Scotland?

It's close to a base (saving a lot of transit time) and great for practicing maneuvering in tricky waters. But they should practice being without GPS by just turning the receivers off, not jamming them.

Fixed it for ya.

[Barryke]

What the hell is a major exercise doing within 20 miles of fishing boats?

Re:Freeloaders should have to pay for GPS service

[ledow]

No problem. We'll charge you for Galileo too, when it comes up - and more because it's a more accurate system - and encrypt it so you can never use it without paying. Because you know what'll happen if you charge for it now? Nobody would touch it with a ten-foot-bargepole (distance measured by the Galileo constellation) and everyone would start giving Europe money instead (if you have to pay, might as well pay for something decent!).

And most of Europe doesn't have TV licences. Only the UK, to my knowledge, and you're sadly mistaken if you think it's a license for the TV instead of a badly-named sponsorship of the BBC (which is *always* referred to, linked to, and respected by other news establishments when something happens - including reporting on their own strikes and scandals pretty fairly and accurately) and associated services.