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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.
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
We're jammin':
I wanna jam it wid you.
We're jammin', jammin',
And I hope you like jammin', too.
To me, "at least they aren't shelling villages" smacks a bit of the abused partner syndrome. None of these acts are acceptable, and while I get the whole holding themselves and parts of SK hostage thing, sooner or later a line will have to be drawn.
Abusive partner isn't the right metaphor for this situation. South Korea as a US ally is definitely the major power in this situation.
DPRK is more like a bully who knows they are weak, who knows they can't kick anybody without getting their face smashed in, so they throw insults around trying to annoy everybody else into doing something stupid. Hostility towards them is what they want, so that they can claim to be the victim.
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.
The power requirements are different.
To jam a signal you need to transmit noise that can drown the original signal, so that the receiver cannot figure out what it is. To transmit fake information, you need a much stronger transmitter because you not only need to drown the original signal but also have your signal be strong enough so that the receiver does not get confused when it receives both signals (the original and yours), otherwise you are just jamming.
Also transmitting fake information requires more complex electronics instead of just a noise generator and a big transmitter.
Perhaps they could put their money to more constructive uses, like, you know, feeding their severely malnourished populous.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.