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Secret UK Network Hunts GPS Jammers

Posted by samzenpus on from the hunt-you-down dept.

garymortimer writes "A secret network of 20 roadside listening stations across the UK has confirmed that criminals are attempting to jam GPS signals on a regular basis. From the article: 'Government-funded trials involving the police have revealed more than a hundred incidents of GPS jammer use in the UK. The Sentinel project, which has been running since January 2011, was designed to measure GPS jamming on UK roads. The project, run by GPS-tracking company Chronos Technology, picked up the illegal jamming incidents via four GPS sensors in trials lasting from two to six months per location.'"

14 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. at the risk of sounding stupid.. by neokushan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why block GPS? What do criminals gain from it? Genuine Queston.

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    1. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Tarmas · · Score: 5, Informative

      FTFA:

      "People illegally jam GPS for a number of reasons, Curry told the audience at the conference at the National Physical Laboratory. These include evasion of company-vehicle or covert tracking, and stealing high-value vehicles."

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    2. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Duncan+Booth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Possible but unlikely. I think at the moment they are just jamming the GPS signal which is really easy to do. To redirect you to another location they have to provide fake signals that your receiver will think are real. You can do that but it requires more sophisticated equipment. New Scientist had an article about GPS jamming last year and one of the more interesting things they suggested was that if you could distort the GPS instead of just jamming it you could cause mains blackouts over large areas of the US. Apparently US power stations use GPS as the reference time signal to ensure that the different power stations keep their generators in phase, so knock a few of them half a cycle out of phase and the entire network could come down.

    3. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by queBurro · · Score: 5, Funny

      [Meaconing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaconing) the GPS signal using the encoder, (and...) sending the British frigate HMS Devonshire off-course in the South China Sea

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    4. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      But that's just stupid! You don't have to invest in a GPS jammer, which is illegal probably in most places too. You can just wrap your whole care in tinfoil. TA-DA!

    5. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      evasion of company-vehicle or covert tracking

      Yeah there is a scandal here in Australia at the moment with a trucking company disabling speed limiters. Corrupting GPS trace information would be the other half of the picture.

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    6. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by billcopc · · Score: 5, Funny

      You must be new to America.

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      -Billco, Fnarg.com
    7. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I work for a telemetry company. Our units have a privacy mode the driver can activate when off duty.

      GPS jamming is also only really going to hide location, since these units are connected to the vehicle's CANBUS so read engine rpm, wheel speed, crazy acceleration, braking, cornering etc. So when the jamming is removed, it will still report back you drove the company car 500 miles at an average wheel speed of 86mph, with peaks of 112.

      Plus its blatantly obvious when the data stream stops due to comms failure.

    8. Re:at the risk of sounding stupid.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm a Protection Engineer. We have GPS at every substation in order to timestamp, down to the millisecond, faults. Helps us determine where the fault started, who tripped first, etc. It's a protection coordination thing. It's also required for Synchrophasors, which is a way to monitor power flows, system stability, and system disturbances at a very fine level. When you have several readings coming in from geographically spread out locations, all with the same down-to-the-millisecond timestamp, you can get a good feel on how the transmission grid is performing.

  2. Misleading Article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's not criminals blocking GPS it's blokes in trucks that don't want their bosses to know where they are and how fast they are going.

    Most UK fleets operate GPS tracking so they can schedule deliveries/keep tabs on driver behaviour, jamming the GPS allows that truck driver to exceed the speed limits, take unscheduled breaks, drive for longer periods of time and generally do things without his bosses knowing about it. In cab tachographs can be tampered with, GPS tracking done remotely cannot so the solution for them is to block the GPs signal.

    Yes it's illegal to interfere with GPS but we are not talking about hardened criminals here, what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve ?

    1. Re:Misleading Article by Dr_Barnowl · · Score: 5, Interesting

      what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve

      Part of me thinks the enforcement of this is a prelude to the coming age where our vehicle positions are all tracked ; that isn't tinfoil hat territory, it's a serious proposition that has been raised by the government of the UK amongst others in Europe. I'm firmly convinced that this is one of the major justifications for the new Galileo navigation satellite constellation - it's been designed to work much better in the kind of convoluted urban environment common in European cities.

      The legislative justification is "road pricing" - the idea being ostensibly to reduce congestion on busy roads at rush hour by charging higher tolls for them, all enforced by an on-board GPS / Galileo datalogger with a cellular modem. Since a back-of-the-napkin calculation can tell you that it's an order of magnitude cheaper to toll roads by mandating active RFID tags in license plates, Occam's Razor says that road pricing is not the real aim of fitting every vehicle with a tracking device.

      Quite apart from the current reasons for enforcing a ban on GPS jammers (interference with airport GPS equipment, etc), they have a vested interest in not letting these devices become common enough to render them effectively impossible to police.

  3. Re:Not that much of a stretch, really... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    When you consider that a criminal will also monitor police radios as well.

    UK
    Google TETRA, or Terrestrial Trunked Radio..
    Ain't that easy anymore....

  4. Re:OT: What's with all the hyperbol summaries late by slimjim8094 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Paranoid much?

    In any case, the entire reason we have the FCC is precisely because you don't get to decide how other people use radio. You're not allowed to jam GPS because you don't like it. That would be like shooting down a plane because it flew over your house.

    Sure, if you wanted to jam GPS for a 20 foot radius, people probably won't notice. But GPS is a global system of great importance - planes can use it to navigate, not to mention millions of people just trying to make it to their relatives' houses, or find the nearest pizza place. Not to mention, it's military. They'd have something to say about your "I'll block GPS!" plan, I'm sure.

    But let's accept the premise. Let's say for the benefit of the doubt that you didn't know the sorts of things GPS is actually used for. Can I jam the police frequency so they can't operate near my house? "Fuck da police" doesn't count. How about the fire department? ATC communications? Hospital pagers? WiFi? The local radio station while it's airing Rush Limbaugh, because I don't like him?

    Most radio is licensed, including GPS. You have to abide by rules to use a licensed service, but it grants you protection from interference. You as an individual don't get to decide that this particular licensed service can just be interfered with because it pisses you off.

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  5. Trucker disrupts air control tower by abelb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As mentioned above truckers, delivery van drivers etc can use jammers to hide thier location inadvertantly disrupting critical systems.
    "An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll."