How the Super Bowl Will Reach US Submarines

Velcroman1 writes "Ever wonder how troops serving abroad in remote locations and even underwater might get to watch the Super Bowl? The very same highly advanced technology used to pass classified drone video feeds will be deployed this Sunday to ensure U.S. troops can see the Super Bowl — - no matter how far away from home they are. The broadcast is the result of a unique media, government and technology partnership with the American Forces Radio and Television Service, Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force. The Global Broadcast Service (GBS) may be normally used to disseminate video, images and other data, but major sporting events have been broadcast over it as well. The system will be 'as small as a laptop, and [equipment] the size of a shoebox and umbrella' yet 'in other places will be projected onto large screens in hangers' like aircraft carriers out at sea, explained Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems' chief innovation officer Mark Bigham."

Comments

Go Niners!

[saphena]

Go Niners!

Re:Go Niners!

[jd2112]

Fifty-minus-oners (see the Samsung Super B,, I mean Big Game commercial. )
Go Baltimore Black Birds!

Re:Go Niners!

[antdude]

It is not looking good right now! :(

FARTS

[petteyg359]

Ought to rename it Forces of America Radio and Televsion Service.

Re:FARTS

[craigminah]

Or...in your honor, they should name it Superbowl Transmission For U-boats (STFU)

Re:FARTS

[yerktoader]

Ought to rename it Forces of America Radio and Televsion Service.

Not far off - I'm a former Radioman/IT in the Navy, and we called these messages "A-FaRTS."

Re:FARTS

[cpghost]

Super Bow(e)l transmitted through FARTS tonight. Not bad!

Re:FARTS

[Forty Two Tenfold]

From BEANS (Battlefield-Accessible Entertainment Network Systems).

Sounds like a movie plot

[hey]

All the military guys and resources are busy with the game. Time for the surprise attack.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Yeah, also how are they broadcasting through water, or are all the subs going to surface simultaneously? I mean I know the cold war is over but...

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Good point. McDonalds will have burger flippers on duty, but the Navy won't have anybody manning the sonar screens.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

"Das Foot."

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[phantomfive]

All the military guys and resources are busy with the game. Time for the surprise attack.

From who? I mean, who is there that both wants to attack the US, and has the resources to win any kind of real fight, even if they have surprise?

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[HornWumpus]

The Canadians. No I'm not joking. All they need to do is take the ICBM fields and they aren't a bad joke anymore.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[milkmage]

periscope depth?

"The game will be received by a small antenna on masts, transferred to a receiver and then relayed to flat panel screens throughout the ship or submarine."

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll 'jam' them with maple syrup!

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Dins]

The Canadians. No I'm not joking. All they need to do is take the ICBM fields and they aren't a bad joke anymore.

Bring it.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[jd2112]

All the military guys and resources are busy with the game. Time for the surprise attack.

Does it involve a blimp?

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[jd2112]

The Canadians. No I'm not joking. All they need to do is take the ICBM fields and they aren't a bad joke anymore.

They sent us Celine Dion and Justin Beiber. I think that counts as a declaration of war.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[AK Marc]

No more Spaceballs for you!

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[HornWumpus]

The surprise really will be complete. Everybody treats this as a joke.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Cito]

Canada, the only country that has burnt down the White House and beat the U.S.

of course we lost Vietnam pretty much, but Canada sent the harsh message by burning the White House.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[hairyfeet]

This is why I've been saying for years we need to quit wasting money on billion dollar boondoggles like the F-35 and the Ford carrier, I mean who in the hell are we supposed to fight that we won't be super duper insanely overpowered compared to?

How many carriers do we have? 10, how many does anybody that is a viable possible adversary in the future? NONE. The Russians have an old cruiser/carrier that doesn't even have a full crew or plane load on board and is more just to say they have one, the Chinese bought a rusting hulk from the Russians that is roughly the size of one of our jeep carriers, no comparison to our super carriers. For the amount of money we've shit down the drain on the F-22 and F-35 we could have a whole fleet of Stealth Eagles and Fighting Falcons and as the Israelis have shown these designs still kick some serious ass, especially when compared to what the enemy is likely to have.

Frankly our military has become this giant bloated monster that acts like the cold war is still going on instead of facing reality which is any potential enemy is decades behind us. the new Iranian "super fighter" they just started showing off? According to Jane's its just a knockoff of the old F-5 Freedom Fighter we sold to the Shah back in the early 70s and that thing wasn't state of the art THEN, the whole point of the Freedom Fighter was to sell it to countries where we didn't want our best tech falling into enemy hands. Again according to Jane's their choppers are all knockoffs of the old Huey Cobra, just armed with the Russian knockoff of the Sidewinder. North Korea is flying early 70s MiG 19s and 21s, Pakistan and India have their own planes based on 70s designs but they are more likely to shoot at each other than us, and China has too much invested in their export business to want to turn off the west but if you DO consider them a likely adversary (which most don't as wars between nuclear superpowers is suicidal) that just makes all the money we are wasting on giant carrier groups even more pointless as their sea skimmer missiles could just spam a carrier group from over 900 miles away, well out of range of our stealth turkeys like the F-22.

When you are ass deep in debt the LAST thing you need to be doing is wasting money you don't need to and honestly our teen series fighters are more than a match for anything currently out there thanks to our state of the art missile tech. So all we are doing now is pissing money down a drain, makes the defense contractors fat and lazy but it certainly doesn't make this country any safer. You could probably cut our navy in half and still be able to just spam any enemy right off the battlefield, and our pilots need more teen series fighters, not expensive techno turkeys that spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. The whole thing is just a wasteful bloated mess and is long overdue for a good housecleaning.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

They sent us Celine Dion and Justin Beiber. I think that counts as a declaration of war.

Someone sent us up Da Bomb.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[LordLimecat]

the only country that has burnt down the White House and beat the U.S.

Im fairly certain that was the british.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[knapkin]

You are making a ton of points, many well considered, a couple less so.

1) F-35 and F-22 are wastes of money.
I'd rate this mostly valid. The way those programs turned out in terms of waste is definitely a problem, however being able to decisively have air superiority is a need. While a Russian or Chinese war will not happen, proxy wars will, and we need to be sure that our fighters can dominate or at least compete. The generation prior to F22/F35 don't. Supporting a next-gen fighter is a good thing, supporting a political boondoggle is not.

2) Our current enemies don't have fighters that can best our current fighters.
I'd rate this invalid. We don't know who our next adversary will be, nor do we know from where they will equip. We need to be able to beat anything a country other than us can produce to be able to ensure the ability to take air superiority as a given

3) We have too many carriers (adversaries have a couple and bad ones at that)
I'd rate this invalid. The carriers are less about tactical ability and need and much more about projecting power and influence. Sending a carrier strike group to the persian gulf or near north korea, enables the secretary of state to put muscle behind words, and that is well worth the cost, boondoggle or not.

4) War between nuclear weaponized countries is mutual suicide.
Yup. And so long as one side is not feeling suicidal, it won't happen. And (hopefully) if it does, it won't involve nukes.

5) Our current military is acting like the cold war is still ongoing.
Somewhat. Petraeus and associates started a paradigm shift about how we approach combat, this has not yet truly taken hold in terms of acquisitions, so in some sense, we are still buying weapons for wars we will never fight, but it is changing. Look at efforts towards littoral combat and multi-purpose ships.

6) Cut our Navy in half and spam enemies off the field.
Nope. This works for _current_ enemies and _current_ technology, and even then, not so much (see USS Cole, or your example of being spammed by sea skimmer missiles). The Navy needs to be smarter and maybe that means fewer ships, but it certainly does not mean cutting it in half just because we can.

7) The military contractor situation is a bloated mess and needs a good housecleaning.
Absolutely.

8) We need to stop wasting money on boondoggles like we are.
Yes, absolutely correct, but the devil is in how to figure out what those are _before_ they get funded.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Runaway1956]

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

Using a little imagination, a sub commander can rig up a flotation device, attached to a mast. The mast is weighted at one end, the antenna positioned at the other end. The boat can stay submerged just as deeply as the length of the coax permits.

Or, to save a little trouble, the mast might be affixed to an existing buoy, or maybe even an oil rig that might be conveniently located. A sub operating in the vicinity of a surface force task force might just ask that one ship or another drop a long coax for them to tap into.

Of course, attack boats might just surface. I'm not aware of any doctrine forbidding them to do so. The missile boats aren't coming up though.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Crosshair84]

2) Our current enemies don't have fighters that can best our current fighters.
I'd rate this invalid. We don't know who our next adversary will be, nor do we know from where they will equip. We need to be able to beat anything a country other than us can produce to be able to ensure the ability to take air superiority as a given

So we need to keep pissing money away against some phantom boogieman, yea sure.

Let me let you in on a little secret, your fantasy will NEVER play out. If Migs ever have air superiority over Seattle covering a troop landing then that's not the time we start worrying about Fighter development, that's when you start loading targeting data into the ICBMs and SLBMs.

Nuclear weapons made this big military obsolete. For national DEFENSE all you need is a good nuclear stockpile for the major powers and a small conventional force to take care of things like Somali Pirates.

3) We have too many carriers (adversaries have a couple and bad ones at that)
I'd rate this invalid. The carriers are less about tactical ability and need and much more about projecting power and influence. Sending a carrier strike group to the persian gulf or near north korea, enables the secretary of state to put muscle behind words, and that is well worth the cost, boondoggle or not.

Translation: Yes I realize that carriers are quickly becoming obsolete due to increasingly advanced missles and AIP submarines are being developed, but we need to keep spending ourselves into bankruptcy so our "leaders" can continue playing world police against counties that pose no threat to the shores of the US.

You do realize that the biggest thing keeping the ruling party in Iran in power is the continued US presence in the region? I've talked with Iranians online and they don't like the current leadership, but they also remember what the US did the last time they tried to change their government.

As far as my view, given what we spend vs the rest of the world, FOR STARTERS the military budget needs to be cut in half, ultimately it should be more like a quarter to a third of what it is now. That is easily doable for a military focused on DEFENSE, not global empire and world policing.

That WILL happen at some point, the only question will be if we do it voluntarily or are forced to when the dollar collapses and the government cannot defect spend anymore. Economic collapse has killed far more empires than any military,war just tends to speed that progress along. Our leaders have been eating the seed corn for decades, they have only been able to do so because the world has been willing to accept our paper money. That is already beginning to end. China and Russia no longer trade in the US dollar. China is diverting 100% of its gold production into its vaults and buying as much gold as they can on the open market without sending the price through the roof. The world is getting ready to end the 40 year experiment with accepting a fiat US dollar and our leaders are oblivious to what is going to happen.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Dins]

For national DEFENSE all you need is a good nuclear stockpile for the major powers and a small conventional force to take care of things like Somali Pirates.

Some good points all around here. I'll just comment on this point alone. What if someone invades you and you want to repel them but you don't exactly feel like starting a major nuclear exchange? That's when you need a bit more than a small conventional force.

That said, my thoughts on the US military (yes, I am a US citizen) is that we should have a large enough force to defend ourselves against ANY invader(s). Then we need to keep that force home and stay the fuck out of other peoples' business. So yeah, I think our current military is too big and is structured incorrectly for that task. War sucks. And we shouldn't be starting ANY wars. But if someone starts one we should be able to finish it.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[hairyfeet]

I'd say the answer to whether our teen series planes are more than a match can easily be answered by looking at Israel, they have gone up against the best Russian tech and bitchslapped them right out of the sky. frankly our missiles have such high accuracy and long range that an F15 or F16 fully loaded with missiles can easily dominate the sky, the whole "stealth" bullshit was for fighting the Russians who had invested a ton in radar, now that WWIII in Europe is off the table the potential enemies we have now just doesn't rate needing "techno turkeys" like the F35 that again will end up just like the F22 spending more time on the ground being fixed than they will in the air.

As for the carriers? I would argue any more than 4 is just a waste, 4 of our modern carriers can blacken the sky with craft and again our missiles means that wave of aircraft can just blast anything in their path right out of the sky. Now that both russia and China have sea skimmers (range 900 miles plus, over 90% accuracy) having giant floatillas of boats just makes for a big slow moving target to anybody technically advanced and so worthless, and for those that aren't advanced enough to field sea skimmers frankly a couple of carriers will blow any country like Iran all to hell with little risk.

The only place where I would argue we need to spend money is we need to make more A-10 Warthogs, its becoming pretty damned obvious that on future battlefield the Warthog is gonna be worth its weight in gold for enemy ground suppression yet we have less than 500 of these all told. We should kill the F-35, buy more F-15 and F-16 to replace the aging fleet, let the marines field their own F-15s instead of needing VTOL or at least give 'em a load of Warthogs, and quit acting like its WWII and building these giant carrier fleets that are gonna be nothing but sitting ducks if we actually go against somebody that can put up a fight.

I mean here we are in the middle of the era of IEDs and enemy troops fighting from caves yet we are building like we are facing the USSR in the European theater, its just a stupid pointless waste of money we don't have.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Cito]

On June 2, 1814, Sir George Prévost, Governor General of The Canadas, had written to Cochrane at Admiralty House, in Bailey's Bay, Bermuda, calling for a retaliation against American depredations against non-combatant civilians and private property, as such acts at the time were considered to be against the laws of war. On July 18, Cochrane issued orders to Cockburn informing him that to "deter the enemy from a repetition of similar outrages...You are hereby required and directed to destroy and lay waste such towns and districts as you may find assailable" However, Cochrane also stated "you will spare merely the lives of the unarmed inhabitants of the United States".

Also Canada has burned the white house down twice...

https://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/canadian-burning-of-the-american-whitehouse-1812-the-us-national-anthems-origins.1380/

not just once but twice has Canada burned the White House down... So don't piss off Canadians... they are pyromaniacs :P

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[LordLimecat]

From your link, that was the british:
Having destroyed Washington's public buildings, including the White House and the Treasury, the British army next moved to capture Baltimore, a busy port and a key base for American privateers.

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

The war of 1812 was between the US and Britain; AFAIK "Canada" didnt exist as a separate entity for quite a while after that war.

Re:Sounds like a movie plot

[Cito]

Yea the whole thing was British led, but the fight was about Canada, a commonwealth of the british.

Canadian troops sided with british and beat US troops at every turn. leading to the US defeat and the burning of the capital not once, but twice

another anecdote from history

"Attempts to invade Canada during the War of 1812 failed even more spectacularly. An early attempt to invade failed before it began when Gen. William Hull, reportedly frightened into a state of near incoherence, surrendered his entire army at Detroit without firing a shot. Two months later another attempt was bungled when Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer failed to persuade his militia to cross the U.S.-Canada border. A small detachment of troops which entered Canada was shot down and forced to surrender while Van Rensellaer's troops stood by and watched. Another invasion attempt, on 19 November 1812, collapsed when American troops refused to leave New York State and forced their leader, Gen. Henry Dearborn, to march them back to Pittsburgh. Less than two weeks later, Gen. "Apocalypse" Smythe twice ordered his troops to cross the Niagara, both times failing in his courage and calling off the attacks. On returning from the second attempt, the soldiers turned their weapons on Smythe, forcing him to flee to Virginia."

America's first defeat: http://www.lutins.org/1812.html

We were spanked at every turn. War of 1812 is the great embarrassment, hell it's barely even taught in public schools except via small blurbs of propaganda and the sacking of the whitehouse TWICE is never mentioned when I went through the public school system and didn't know about it until I went to the smithsonian where they have a few burnt bricks and old oil paintings of the burned whitehouse in different stages of repair, then the 2nd burning occured.

Sounds like a fantastic idea

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Let's just broadcast hundreds of gigs of known cleartext through our encryption stream - and announce in advance that we're going to do it.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[Qzukk]

Let's just broadcast hundreds of gigs of known cleartext through our encryption stream

No problems, the drone video streams are unencrypted.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[cryptizard]

Any encryption that would be used (say AES-CBC) would be IND-CPA, which is resistant to known plaintext attacks. That is one of the most basic forms of security for symmetric encryption. Without it you have essentially nothing.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[Anonymous Coward]

With older encryption that actually would make it less secure. This is a drastic oversimplification, but encryption was plain+key=cypertext so you could do cypertext-plaintext=key and then have access to all the messages because you now know the key. Of course, modern cryptographic systems are designed to stop a know plaintext attack and usually have forward key security anyway.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[Hognoxious]

Those were relatively short messages, less than a hundred characters, and they have a certain degree of error correction and redundancy if they contain actual language.

With a video stream there's going to be about a gigabyte per hour and you could mung it (say by adding a little noise or blur or shifting the tone) as you feed it into the encrypted pipe and it'd still be watchable, while having very little similarity byte-v-byte with the original. There'd be no publicly available plaintext to compare it against.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, it's unlikely that message length has any serious contribution to overall system integrity. The supersecret key is probably only used to exchange a randomly generated temporary key, meaning that even if you break that key, you have successfully discovered the key used solely to broadcast the Super Bowl. You now have a known-plaintext attack against the top-level key, but the value is again limited because your known plaintext is now limited to the length of the temporary key.

Re:Sounds like a fantastic idea

[AK Marc]

That, and you could always generate a one-time key for the game, then transmit that (encrypted) and encrypt the system with a one-time pad, but without all the regular secure treatment of the OTP, since cracking it will let you see a game that'll be shown everywhere for free.

Re:Ever Wonder?

[gatkinso]

Would you rather the sailors and soldiers be out plying their trade?

same highly advanced technology

[Anonymous Coward]

"The very same highly advanced technology used to pass classified drone video feeds"
Ah, those video feeds. Everyone in the world will be able to watch the Super Bowl then.

Re:Ever Wonder?

[sjames]

First, it's a sunk cost. The network was already needed for their mission. It would be wasteful not to put it's idle time to some good use.

Next, morale improvement is very much a legitimate contributor to military readiness.

Re:No problem paying for

[sjames]

The equipment was already necessary for legitimate military objectives. Why not put it's idle time to good use?

Meanwhile, I am guessing that you either don't understand the role of morale in military readiness or you want to pay for defense but not actually be defended.

will they get the ad's or will they be simsubed?

[Joe_Dragon]

will they get the ad's or will they be simsubed?

"The Big Game"*

[ExecutorElassus]

FTFY. The combination of the words "The," "Super," and "Bowl" is copyrighted by the NFL: anyone not paying royalties is commiting copyright violation by using it (which is why everybody refers ambiguously to "the big game").

/OT-rant

Re:"The Big Game"*

[93 Escort Wagon]

Copyright Infringement Time!

The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl
The Super Bowl

I have no problems with the military doing what they can to maintain or improve the morale of their troops. I know a handful of soldiers, and they're just trying to do their job and (as they see it) serve their country to the best of their ability. When I take issue with the policies of the military, I lay blame with the president and with congress.

I do, however, have issues with the fact that my Seahawks didn't make it to The Super Bowl.

Re:"The Big Game"*

[ShanghaiBill]

FTFY. The combination of the words "The," "Super," and "Bowl" is copyrighted by the NFL

Nonsense. It may be trademarked by the NFL, but it certainly is not copyrighted. If you want to complain about IP law, you might want to take a few minutes to learn the basics. Also, using a trademarked term to refer the the trademarked item is fine. It is only a violation to use it to refer to a confusingly similar item, or in a way that implies endorsement. So it is okay to use the term "The Super Bowl" to refer to ... The Super Bowl.

Re:"The Big Game"*

[ShanghaiBill]

businesses may not refer to the game unless they have rights to do so (so, for example, a bar cannot say "come watch the [big game] on our flatscreens!" even though doing so in no way implies endorsement.

Can you provide a link to a single example of this actually happening?

Bogus title

[DrJimbo]

How the Super Bowl Will Reach US Submarines

The actual answer is that the submarines have an antenna that reaches into the air. The title implies that the video signals are sent through sea water to submerged submarines. That is still impossible to do in real-time. The bandwidth (either acoustic or electro-magnetic) is just not available. The acoustic bandwidth is greater than the electro-magnetic but it is still many orders of magnitude lower than what is required for real-time video.

Re:Bogus title

[93 Escort Wagon]

The title implies that the video signals are sent
through sea water to submerged submarines. That is still impossible
to do in real-time.

Well, technically it is possible - but you don't get much of a video stream with only a handful of bits per second.

Re:Bogus title

[DrJimbo]

Well, technically it is possible - but you don't get much of a video stream with only a handful of bits per second.

We can do much better than a handful of bits per second with acoustics (yes, IAaUAE) but it is still not enough to watch the Superbowl in real-time.

Re:Bogus title

[DerekLyons]

Right. And on top of that, no submarine is going to hang about at periscope depth for the duration of the game. PD is a dangerous place as you have limited visibility and you're shallow enough for surface vessels to potentially get a piece of the 'scope or even the sail... Stealth also goes down when you have a 'scope and antennas making a wake on the surface. (On top of how exhausting it is for the control room party to maintain PD and a scope watch...)

Unless they're in port or on surface transit, boats will probably get the game and the score the same way they have for decades... fasties and non-alert boomers will pick it up when they next grab a sked or a satellite pass, alert boomers will pick up whatever gets sent across the wire (VLF).

Been there done that, got the t-shirt. Though back in the day it was something of a tradition to send the score of important games (especially the Army-Navy game) out as FLASH priority traffic. (I.E. went to the head of the queue and had transmission priority over pretty much everything but nuclear launch orders.)

Hint to $EVIL_POWER

[Alain Williams]

Attack while they are all watching a football match

Yes, god forbid they should want any entertainment

[Sycraft-fu]

Soldiers should be perfect automata, wanting nothing but to serve their country, needing no entertainment, no respite, willing to work with complete focus as much as is required.

Oh please cut the fucking shit.

Soldiers are human, and they need recreation just like everyone else. Now maybe watching football isn't your choice for that, it's not mine either, but you are in no position to judge others for what they like.

What's more, it helps give them a sense of connection to their country. Serving on a ship, and a sub in particular, is lonely. You are gone for months at a time, in the case of a sub often totally cut off. This is a way to get a "taste of home" as it were, to get to participate in something that a large part of the nation is also doing.

OPSEC

[devnullkac]

I sure hope they're doing something obvious like fuzzing the feed over those classified channels. I'd hate to see an opponent get an opportunity to attack the crypto when there's a 4 hour-long known plaintext transmission.

Re:OPSEC

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Wish I'd said that -- and been attacked for it.

Re:OPSEC

[cryptizard]

Known plaintext is the weakest form of attack. Every cipher in modern cryptography is resistant to it. This would not be a big deal. Using AES in CBC mode is believed to be IND-CPA secure even, which means that it is secure against chosen plaintext attacks.

Re:OPSEC

[DarkOx]

There should be no risk in sending something like this. First you don't have a known plain text because you don't know what the output of the video encoder for the stream is; though you might make some guess like; its probably mpegts and therefore there ought to be a certain magic number every 288 bytes etc. I am sure it helps the crypto analyst but probably not that much.

Next while I don't know anything about military communications in particular; I am pretty confident they are not using unchanging per-shared symmetric keys. They probably are doing something like every commercial encrypted streaming communications does:

First you use some asymmetric method PKI like method to identify, and facilitate some sort of additional challenge, and if successful exchange a value to be used for a symmetric key system that you will then use to send your stream efficiently. You might even do this twice if you need to mutually assure identity. This symmetric key value will be generated as randomly as possible, and probably either not stored or stored on some never use again list. The stream is then sent using a common algorithm like AES. Anyone working on a plan text attack of the stream already knows how to do AES (although it might take some effort for them to be sure it is AES as the data should look random); what they are after is symmetric key which would enable them to decode this particular message but no other messages.

Probably with enough resources they will be able to do this given time, because the more vulnerable stream cipher emulation mode OFB or CTR will be used; as with video you'd want to tolerate packet loss. OFB and CTR are weaker than CBC and similar modes in that you don't need to have correctly deciphered the previous block to decipher the next one, you only need to know the key, initialization vector and the position in the stream. I am sure other communications like orders would use the more secure modes.

So I don't think there is actually an potential to reveal valuable information about the cryptography in use. The initial exchange is probably the most interesting thing to any would be snoops but those probably happen thousands of times each day already.

Re:OPSEC

[cryptizard]

OFB and CTR are weaker than CBC and similar modes in that you don't need to have correctly deciphered the previous block to decipher the next one, you only need to know the key, initialization vector and the position in the stream

If you have the key then you can decrypt the first block and all the other blocks in a CBC encrypted stream so it doesn't really matter. If you have the key you win no matter what. With CBC, losing a packet of ciphertext would mess up only adjacent blocks, errors do not propagate. Also, CBC decryption requires only the previous ciphertext, not the plaintext. OFB and CTR are both proven to be IND-CPA (assuming a secure block cipher and your counter is not reused), so they are no weaker than any other modes of operation.

Gee

[bythescruff]

Gee, media, government, and technology partnership acts to provide commercial sporting event to soldiers despite the remoteness of their locations. How about not putting soldiers in remote locations to start with?

Re:Ever Wonder?

[fleebait]

Ever wonder how troops serving abroad in remote locations and even underwater might get to watch the Super Bowl?

No, I'm more concerned at the already over-inflated military budget being spent on watching a fucking football game.

Ever wonder how much it costs to get a contractor to the services to do a network wide test of high data rate services?

Watch a ball game, and get a system wide test for free.

Re:News for nerds?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Let me guess - some soldier stole your girlfriend.

Re:News for nerds?

[Cat_Herder_GoatRoper]

You are right. Lets bring back the draft. Hope they call your number first!

Re:Ever Wonder?

[craigminah]

Do you expect the military to never have time off or to do anything to boost morale? Glad I don't work for you...

Hangers

[Hognoxious]

Do they dangle the aircraft from the roof? No. The word is "hangars".

Hangers are what you put shirts and coats on, you wrist-tapping gibbons.

Re:Hangers

[AlexG55]

I think on US carriers in WW2, some aircraft were actually stored hanging from the ceiling: http://steeljawscribe.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/g17425.jpg

Re:Hangers

[messymerry]

In Texas, hangers are the people that throw the rope over the tree branch, you pathetic baboon. Somebody git a rope.

Re:Encryption risk?

[cryptizard]

You are the third person to post this comment. Short answer, no http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishability

Re:No problem paying for

[westlake]

The NFL exists to sell beer and hookers I don't see why the taxpayer has to subsidize them beyond what we already do.

The bottom line is that soldiers have chosen to do a job. I can't tell you how many times my choices have prevented me from participating in a national event. But we are grownups and we deal.

You don't seem to be dealing with it very well.

More like you are carrying a chip on your shoulder the size of a 2x4.

Within the Morale Service Division of the War Department, a ''radio section'' of the Bureau of Public Relations was formed in 1941 to make sports broadcasts available to personnel scattered in locations outside the United States.

The Armed Forces Radio Service

How very dare you!

[Hognoxious]

That's a ridiculous assumption based on no evidence at all.

The soldier was his boyfriend until he ran off with a football player.

Re:No problem paying for

[sjames]

I sure as hell hope you aren't an employer or even a manager. If you are, I genuinely feel sorry for the people under you.

Re:Red October

[Hognoxious]

Maybe that's why you normally crew them with sailors, moron.

Oh hang on, I misread your post. They were doing this?

Fail for starters, fail for main course. Got room for dessert, you spacktard?

Re:Yes, god forbid they should want any entertainm

[ducomputergeek]

"You say that....like soldiers and humanity are two different things. I mean soldiers aren't machines.....we're just people."

There is no place to escape.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Everywhere you go you must watch. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. We are the Borg.

Re:News for nerds?

[cervesaebraciator]

Might not be such a good idea. Whatever did the enlisted soldiers do to deserve having such an AC in their unit?

Re:News for nerds?

[AK Marc]

Thought experiment:

If we can turn off our military for 3 hours a a well known time, and nothing happens, why can't we turn them off for the other 8757 of the year and save ourselves lots of money?

Re:Ever Wonder?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the Navy likes sunk costs...

Isn't this a risk

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the information can be predicted and known by any would be interceptor, isn't it a fairly considerable risk that it gives that interceptor a great chance to break parts of how that information is transmitted and encoded?

Laughably wrong

[michael021689]

This is an impressively ill formed and ill researched article, even if you consider the reputation of the site that is distributing it.

The misinformation spread about the Navy, and submarines specifically, is awe inspiring. Whereas most of the government spends its efforts to protect secrecy fruitlessly, the Navy seems to have grasped the idea of quantity. If you spew enough bullshit out, it doesn't matter if someone says the truth because it will be lost in a wave misinformation.

Re:Ever Wonder?

[Nefarious Wheel]

First, it's a sunk cost. The network was already needed for their mission. It would be wasteful not to put it's idle time to some good use.

Next, morale improvement is very much a legitimate contributor to military readiness.

Indeed - if you have people fighting for you, it helps to remind them once in a while of what they're fighting for.

somewhat relevant

[circletimessquare]

http://satwcomic.com/epic-battle

Re:somewhat relevant

[DKlineburg]

Wish I could mod you funny.

Re:News for nerds?

[AK Marc]

So you are asserting that no on-duty person will view the game?

Re:News for nerds?

[Firethorn]

To expand on his point a bit - soldiers don't typically work 7 days a week. Sailors often do; but then there's not much else to do. In addition, there's all sorts of non-critical tasks - maintenance, paperwork, training, etc... That can be put off for 3 hours every so often without any real effect.

Keeping the alert positions manned - bridge, engineering, power, and such while deferring maintenance and such(minimal manning), you can probably let 90% of the ship watch the superbowl, and pipe at least the sound to the rest of the crew. And they'll STILL see anybody/thing coming with plenty of time to sound general quarters and get everybody back in position.

Re:Ever Wonder?

[DKlineburg]

I'm sure that you only got to watch if you weren't on shift. I know the game was on where I work, but you could only watch on your breaks. I missed the entire second half due to this.

Re:Ever Wonder?

[heefeneet]

Indeed - if you have people fighting for you, it helps to remind them once in a while of what they're fighting for.

Securing foreign oil to keep the lights on? :)

Re:NFL-military relationship

[heefeneet]

When you see a x-military person on TV or at some type of post military gathering or event, they are usually quiet and reserved and shy away from from the spotlight.

I've often thought that it must feel really awkward for those soldiers who are paraded in front of the crowd at half-time. 100,000 people staring at them and all they can really do is wave for a few minutes then walk off.