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North Korea Jamming GPS Signals In South Korea
Fluffeh writes "North Korea has been looking for new and inventive ways to mess with South Korea. It seems that their missile launch fizzled a bit though, so those wacky folks from the North have bought a few GPS jamming trucks from Russia and are now blocking GPS signals around their city of Kaeson. While Kaeson is around 60 Km inside their borders, the jamming circle is around 100 Km, so it actually covers good parts of South Korea including the airports at Inchon and Gimpo. While no accidents have been caused as yet, it has caused quite some disruption and has made ocean going craft suffer as well due to their heavy reliance on GPS signals."
Noob question here: apart maybe from frequency allocation, is there an international law or equivalent regulation on signal jamming?
Wouldn't this fall under most countries definition of cyber warfare? Then again, South Korea seems to ignore actual warfare/violent aggression from North Korea so I doubt it would make a difference either way.
Good to know the North Koreans have extra money to send to the Russians and can afford to maintain jamming trucks.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
do you think that treaties mean anything to them? Rules are simply something they use to assert control over the actions of others when needed, they do not apply such limits and rules to themselves.
If anything they would use it as leverage to gain something. After all they have their threat pretty well displayed. It is not ever loon that backs their insanity with a large army possibly armed with both chemical and nuclear weapons.
If anything expresses the danger of certain middle eastern countries obtaining nuclear weapons it is North Korea. North Korea simply proves what everyone knows but likes to pretend otherwise, when the irrational have weapons of mass destruction you can never be sure.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Given the recent changes in leadership at the top, I would be inclined to be forgiving about this kind of thing, unless something unambiguously nasty happens.
Send a note saying "please turn the power down a bit", because this is silly border squabbling on the level of building a stupidly huge flagpole ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gijeong-ri_Flag.jpg ) rather than the actively hostile sort, like shelling an inhabited island ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong )
While no accidents have been caused as yet, it has caused quite some disruption and has made ocean going craft suffer as well due to their heavy reliance on GPS signals.
It's amazing how many pilots/captains have completely lost the ability to navigate their vessels without electronics and the problem is made worse by the fact that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled in many countries. I have sometimes wondered what effect it would have on a major NATO military maneuver if you specified half way through the war-game that: "The enemy just knocked out several of our GPS satellites, please simulate this by not making any use of your GPS equipment nor any GPS enabled munitions except those that have a fallback mode".
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The DPRK does this every year. I am surprised that there have not been any significant accidents yet.
We're jammin':
I wanna jam it wid you.
We're jammin', jammin',
And I hope you like jammin', too.
airdrop millions of Skittles on the North - they'll soon sue for peace
I wonder if the electronics on these trucks can be mysteriously fried from a distance with some kind of directed energy beam?. Maybe can be taking out covertly with the ABL/ALTB?
If you can block the satellite signals and want do cause problems why not start broadcasting fake information.
Change the fake info on a rotating basis and even more fun.
In the USSR, the Soviets spent several hundred million a year on jamming stations.
In the UK, radio is jammed by allowing BT to distribute PLT networking kit which turns household mains wiring into large antennas and distributes noise all over the HF (and in some cases VHF) spectrum. The Internet is increasingly censored (CP, "piracy" and - if Baroness Howe has her way - porn) via the IWF "voluntary" tech, where "voluntary" is in the sense that a de facto prerequisite for government contracts is that an ISP uses it.
If NK is blocking a US military technology then that's frankly the least of our spectrum worries.
Yay for innovation!
International law does not seem to apply to any state powerful enough
Quite right, but it is simpler to think of this situation as sovereign countries being in a state of anarchy vis-a-vis each other.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Does glonass work? It'd be easy to jam that to, but are they?
Perhaps they could put their money to more constructive uses, like, you know, feeding their severely malnourished populous.
ARM = Anti-Radiation Missile. Should solve the problem.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
South Korea should simply take out those jamming trucks with missiles. If that escalates into a war, then that may be for the best. North Korea should have been liberated by force at least ten years ago. It was a much better target than Iraq, and a much nobler cause. What NK does to its own people is, on a per-capita basis, about as bad as it gets.
1. Is there a jammer for the jammer? If not, shouldn't somebody be working on making one? 2. Have the South Koreans ASKED the North to stop or are they just whining about it on Facebook? IF they asked and the North said "no", well it really goes against everything I beleive in but I would do something violent. Does the south have pinpoint accuracy (or there abouts) missiles that could take the trucks out? I don't think bombing the entire city would be a good idea. Maybe the Navy seals need some sequel material?
Cut all aid and permanently embargo the North with the understanding that if they attack the South they get nuked. They won't attack.
Tac nukes are what kept them in their box after the Korean war, which is still not over. The North plays the same game over decades, and each generation of Westerners thinks its fucking new.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Yes, NK state radio is delivered to each home by wire. And each home has a "radio" set which of course is geared to only connect to this wire, and does not receive any RF signal indeed. In NK not only you aren't supposed to listed other countries' radios, but you technically can't.
And incidentally, this "wire radio" is by design unjammable...
Herve S.
Hell, NK has shelled islands belonging to the South, and is believed to have been behind the sinking of a South Korean Navy Vessel. Lives have been lost due to this, both of which constitute acts of war, yet nobody responded.
That's just the beginning. Abductions of South Korean and Japanese civilians, and probably a few citizens of some other countries as well. The 1983 Rangoon Embassy Bombing and 1987 Flight 858 Bombing. Probable government-level drug-smuggling and similar criminal enterprises.
From a standpoint of international law, North Korea's government level, large-scale counterfeiting of US Currency, just by itself, might be sufficient to constitute an act act of war.
Well, if I dare say, SA was turned off not at all because of its ineffectiveness, but in a last, desperate move to try preventing Europe deciding for their own positioning system, aka Galileo.
Clinton turned SA off mere months before Europe voted Galileo funding, and this after an anti-Galileo campaign that was so gross that indeed it was vastly counter-effective for the decision-makers here.
The only other campaign that was as laughable as that was when we voted on the Euro: I still keep some actual paper newspaper full-page ads that were tremendous...
Herve S.
Their threats are as empty as their grocery stores. North Korea. Such attention whores.
Never underestimate the power of a used microwave oven klystron , some aluminium square tube, and a bank of air-conditioner capacitors.
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
Now that he's finished "Dark Shadows", and in the spirit of "Mars Attacks!", and Edward Scissorhands etc., we really need Tim Burton to do a movie about North Korea. I think he could capture the ethos.
Gently reply
Should be incredibly easy to knock out if any one in the US had balls.
Jamming GPS signals means that more ships and aircraft will mistakenly enter North Korean territory. If an off-course military vessel skirts too close to some imaginary line in the water it could be said to be invading and give NK a good excuse to justify mortaring it out of existence.
Do not click on the link above- that site is reported to have malware.
North Kora wants to be overthrown badly. Their only reason for existing is the trade with China.
It would take just one airplane crash or ship crash to accuse them of a military attack. China will gladly take over their resources, if South Korea would trade them in return for military favors.
Japan is also interested, as long as China can share.
One with a GPS jamming detector.
"Oh we're sorry - our missile wandered into your GPS jamming zone and lost its way..."
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
In the US, the FAA is planning to discontinue VORs and omnirange stations, the non-satellite navigational aids that have run aerial navigation for decades. The Coast Guard discontinued LORAN C in 2010. This was done with the concurrence of the Department of Homeland Security, which said it was "not needed for GPS backup."
GPS is a very weak signal, and easy to jam. Satellites put out only 500 watts, spread over half the surface of the planet. LORAN C was transmitted at power levels from 100KW to 4MW, with huge antenna farms. That kind of power is difficult to jam at any distance. VORs and omnis aren't as powerful, but they're usually located at airports, so that when you're close to an airport and need to find the runway, the signal is at its strongest.
Perhaps Falcone found someplace to try out his new 4G networks
Drop a big bomb on the mother fuckers. Problem solved. You know, I'm all against violence and warfare as much as the next person, but these stupid pricks just don't know when to quit. You wanna jam our shit? Hope you can afford to lose those jamming trucks, assholes.
If they want test their shiny new GPS jamming equipment, So. Korea should test their shiny new ANTI-GPS JAMMER missiles.
It looks like Lightsquared found its market after all.
Tom Ashbrook, on NPR, was absolutely gushing in his panties about the Saudi intelligence agent, and kept chanting:
“It sounds like Mission Impossible! It sounds like Mission Impossible!”
One can just imagine the scenario: Abdul is enjoying his usual Friday noon lunch in Riyadh, taking in the weakly beheading of innocent women.
Suddenly, a woman’s severed head rolls in front of agent Abdul. Abdul gazes at the glassy-eyed stare on the bloody head and quickly reaches down and rips off her crystal earring.
Holding the earring towards the noon day sun, a holographic image appears, with a caftan-wearing man intoning,
“Agent Abdul, you will proceed to Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and retrieve the latest underwear explosive. We will call this Operation Calvin Klein.”
“Should you be successful, the CIA will pay you a fortune and reward you with endless nights with the pink slime lady, Ann Coulter. Should you fail, it’s sloppy seconds from the US Secret Service and no more lunchtime beheadings for your viewing pleasure.”
Abdul tosses the earring into the hot desert sky and watches it fizzle into dust, while suddenly the Lalo Schfrin theme blares in the background, scaring the crap out of Abdul!
Stay tuned for agent Abdul’s next adventure when he confronts Al Qaeda on Wall Street (AQWS) and closes in on Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm, Hank Paulson, Hank Greenberg, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Neal Wolin, Gary Gensler, Fredric Mishkin, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Stephen Friedman, Sandy Weill, Kerry Killinger, Gene Sperling, Martin Feldstein, C. Fred Bergsten . . . .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAYhNHhxN0A
If negotiation is such a powerful tool that'll work on the North, get with it. The EU doesn't need the US to participate or consent. Go, arrange it, get an agreement, and see that they live with it.
However before you get all up on that you might want to spend some time reviewing the history of diplomacy with NK and realize that it has been tried, and see what the outcomes have been (cliff notes version: spectacular failures).
I always find it funny when people whine that more diplomacy with NK is needed but then never seem to be interested in having their nation get involved. As though you can somehow write it all off as "the US's problem" and then just criticize the US for not dealing with it how you want.
The EU nations are big boy countries, with diplomatic corps and all that. Go to it, if you think it'll work. However I bet if you ask said diplomatic corps they'll tell you that you are out of your mind.
Why? Because the US owns GPS. GPS was 100% funded and is operated by the US military. It is not some international collaboration, it is a US military project and always was. They decided to open it up to civilians of all nations back in the day, and it has enjoyed great success and is now the primary navigation system for essentially all civilian and commercial traffic. However it is still military, it was never handed over to any international body or anything.
This means if they US wants they can just straight turn it off. Nobody has standing to say otherwise, it belongs to the US, in particular the US military. So whatever the US government says, goes. It is their ball, they can take it and go home if they like.
Hence the argument to build something like Galileo and have another GNSS. The problem is, nobody wants to spend the money. Galileo has been talked about by the EU forever, and was supposed to be fully online years ago, but isn't. If it ever is then there'll be a system not under US control so if they US decides to mess with GPS, people can still use Galileo.
However thus far only the US military has wanted to foot the bill for a GNSS so they can do what they want. That means they are also the one and only group with real standing to mess with it.
Thank goodness they are protecting the US GPS Satellites. If someone were to try to shoot down a GPS satellite, the missile would be diverted to destroy the GPS jammer truck, protecting Global Positioning for the benefit of the world!
Several of the events included in this list are US internal, and, by that standard, this list is way to short. Of the top of my head you are missing Little Rock, and probably other places occupied during de-segragation.
Likewise, including the Virgin Islands is misleading, because as a very small area, it has a very small National Guard (22 people in 1980).
I think if you removed the US internal affairs, you'd make a stronger argument.