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."

Comments

Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noob question here: apart maybe from frequency allocation, is there an international law or equivalent regulation on signal jamming?

Re:Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a shortwave listener I can confirm that there are a lot of N.Korean jammers active. Often without a trace of the actual signal they are blocking. Same for China/Iran/Cuba and a couple of other countries I'm probably forgetting.

Re:Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

International law only works if backed up by threats of punishment if you don't comply.

And this is why American foreign politics are not taken seriously.

Let's not be naive here. NK is a bandit state that follows and discards laws and regulations on a whim and in a seemingly irrational manner to an outside observer. Still, smaller countries (Scandinavian countries for example) have seen great successes in frequency allocation agreements through such organizations such as HFCC against a number of larger countries. I remember the Norwegian delegation some years ago negotiating away -China- from a critical allocation they both needed. This was done through careful diplomacy, some clever alternative arrangements and generally both parties being interested in a solution even if they were miles apart on the issue to begin with. The next year, they did it again, this time fending off Russia. Anyone suggesting that Norway has anything to threaten Russia and China with is an armchair general not to be taken seriously.

Whether the same could be arranged with NK... I remain sceptical but to dismiss it off-hand is foolish. You seem to have a very ingrained mental image of NK being the very soul of evil and the US being the shining city on the hill, never acting in bad faith. This image is incorrect on both accounts.

Personally, I'd think an invitation into HFCC and serious negotiation from equal parties is the best option likely to succeed. If not, and NK would be bluffing, THEN you would be in the situation where other options could be considered.

tl;dr - You're too gung-ho. There ARE institutions to handle this sort of thing. I've served on several and we've done some very good and difficult work deemed "impossible" by the US State Dept. because they only really have a hammer and not every problem is a nail.

Re:Legality?

[yacc143]

Well, technically they are at war, just in a very long cease-fire.

And yes, while there might have been cases where other countries have done bad stuff, no questions, the US have the problem of being seen as a hypocrite.

"The land of the Free", "The Good Guys", ... => well, in many cases it would be helpful if they could pin labels in big high contrast letters on the Americans on site "WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. REALLY.".

The problem is that especially in the last decade, it has often become hard to find the goodness that the PR is still claiming.

Examples would include:

-) drone killings in foreign countries => collateral damage is accepted, and that does not even ask the question if the US administration can decide on it's own that they want someone dead, without a court, ... => how's that much different from a terrorist that want's to kill one person inside and bombs the whole house?

-) arrests without warrants, without the option to legal representation, => everything there in the PATRIOT act.

-) US agents wanted by international arrest warrants by supposedly friendly countries => yeah, sometimes the criminal (as the local law defines) energy of CIA agents can lead to embarrassing situations. (So if the local law does not apply, why do you expect Islamist terrorists to obey local US laws?)

-) Generally speaking, the US constitution has been turned into an optional guideline.

-) Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.

Re:Legality?

[d3ac0n]

Well, that guy or not, you are (sadly) correct. China has far too much economic influence in the world for any nation (even my much beloved USA) to stand up to them.

The Norks, on the other hand, hold no such distinction. The only reason they haven't been stomped into the ground yet is both their proximity to China (China doesn't want a war in it's back yard and all the Nork refugees that would come with it) and the fact that they really are that unimportant in the world.

Of course, should they actually get a viable nuke missile program off the ground AND the USA gets a president with some backbone (Unlike the current "teleprompter-in-chief") then something might be done about it. Maybe. At the rate China is divesting itself of US Bonds, the US won't owe them much debt fairly soon, and will be more free to act.

The next several years should be "interesting" to say the least.

Re:Legality?

[Ash Vince]

Ah, one last thing, the Supreme Court demands that capital punishment is handed down by objective criteria. Wonder how many service man have been sentenced to DR that commited multiple murders on the local population. Happened many times, and these guys usually get just a slap on the hand.

What's even more relevant is that these service men or women should often be tried and sentenced in the country where the crime is committed. Especially in cases where the US has an extradition treaty with the country in question and would,expect to be able to extradite any criminals it wanted to stand trial in the US. The US policy seems to be though that their own law usurps any other countries (recently it seems to usurp the US constitution so that should not be too surprising).

This is a fine attitude to take if you intend to impose it by force, but it completely fails to let you take any sort of moral high ground. This does not help win any hearts and minds of the local populace so has a habit of encouraging terrorism amongst them, especially if there is mass unemployment and people feel like they have nothing better to do than blow themselves up anyway.

Re:Legality?

[rahvin112]

So much Fail.

The Reason the US doesn't attack North Korea is twofold. The first being NK presents no tangible threat to the US. They've been trying to build that threat so we will take their threats seriously (and give them what they want) but they continue to fail at ICBM's. Second reason is that NK has about 50,000 ordinary artillery pieces within range of Seoul, a city of more than 10 million. Within 5 minutes NK could kill several million people with conventional artillery barrages. There is no doubt in anyones mind that if it came to war SK could at this time decimate NK, but the cost to SK would be VERY high (millions of casualties and decimate their industrial might). This is partly the reason the US troops stationed in SK are now several hundred miles from DMZ with the SK army taking the lead point of defense.

Now on to the History. China didn't give two wits about NK and certainly didn't invade and defend NK for the silly reason of a united Korea with US backing (Sino-US relations had always been reasonable up to that point, even under the Communists and the US acting like babies about Commies). China invaded for several reasons but two are the most important. The first is that after Patton launched the amphibious landing behind NK lines and decimated the NK Army he started talking about not stopping at Pyongyang and continuing on to Beijing. (Yes, he did talk publicly about invading China). This brings up the second reason, because of Patton's statements the Chinese issued an ultimatum to the US that if UN forces approached within 300 miles of the Chinese border that China would be forced to retaliate. Patton and the US ignored the warning and proceeded on to within IIRC about 50 miles of the border (and ran right into the 300,000 troops China had snuck into NK). Patton was fired after this, partly for his failure to take the Chinese threat seriously and partly because he started publicly talking about Nuking Beijing as retaliation. The rest is history but to sum up, the reason China invaded was because they believed that they were under threat from invasion if for no other reason than the top general of the UN forces was talking publicly about doing it. The Chinese believed they were defending mainland China from invasion by US forces.

Cyber Warfare

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Cyber Warfare

[Lumpy]

". Mere possession of the receiver is insufficient; it still needs the tightly controlled daily key."

This is incorrect.

You can fix the Dilution errors by using DGPS. 2-3 cheap GPS recievers in an area can create a correction signal to give you back the accuracy. Did it daily in the 90's when I worked with the new fangled GPS based survey equipment. Plop down 2 tripods with GPS recievers and you go winder with your third. if you are inside the area your two error receivers are set you have a 1cm accuracy, outside them but within radio range and you have 10cm.

You can easily make your own DGPS setup for a few hundred bucks and some used GPS units.

GPS reliance

[Savage-Rabbit]

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".

Re:GPS reliance

[phaunt]

The GP's point still stands. He mentions "that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled". This includes lighthouses, many of which are no longer being maintained. I find this a bad idea: they offer a globally distributed and resilient fall-back option to the much more centralised (almost single-point-of-failure) technology that GPS offers.

blocking in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:take them out

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as it may rankle the cheapest (and best) option is for the South Koreans to do everything it can to avoid war. Cost in life and money of war would be enormous (on both sides), that is not something that you can be flippant about. It would also likely end up being a fight with China who would use it as an excuse for a North Korean land-grab.

I think the resolution to this stalemate will probably come from China invading or otherwise taking over North Korea at some stage in next decade or two.

Tim Burton Movie Fodder

[retroworks]

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.