Brazilian Pirates Hijack US Military Satellites 359
blantonl writes "Brazilians all over the country are using modified amateur radio equipment to communicate with each other using US Military communications satellites — effectively creating their own CB radio network on the backs of the US Military. Recent efforts to crack down have resulted in arrests of some of the users, however the behavior still continues today."
2 options (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounds like the feds have 2 good options:
1) Shut down this capability. This may involve shutting down the birds.
2) Find a way to charge for it
Oh, and maybe a 3rd:
3) Replace the satellites with something secure and sell the birds to someone else and let them worry about it.
Same Thing with Video Game Consoles (Score:2, Interesting)
Until then, the military is still using aging FLTSAT and UFO satellites -- and so are a lot of Brazilians. While the technology on the transponders still dates from the 1970s, radio sets back on Earth have only improved and plummeted in cost -- opening a cheap, efficient and illegal backdoor.
It kind of reminds me of video game consoles. With the advent of computers, it became possible to emulate things like the NES and SNES on your computer as those consoles became outdated and your CPU could easily emulate the chipset in those devices. With the Dreamcast, it seemed like they still hadn't learned their lesson as there was little to no-copy-protection on the media that contained the game. It was only a matter of time before hardware caught up and Dreamcast emulators were available.
Systems like the PS3 and Xbox360 have learned from this but it is arguable that soon (if not already) that will be cracked and emulated. The military should take note of this battle as now that communication with satellites has become cheap, they are facing the same cat and mouse game. So they have two options: either attempt to crush it politically (like Brazil's Operation Satellite) or live with it and prepare mitigation plans.
Some might argue that if you give anyone enough time with something, human curiosity and boredom prevails against the highest standards.
The ecologists were right. (Score:3, Interesting)
You really can hear rare birds in the rainforest!
Re:Crazy (Score:3, Interesting)
forgot the frequencies, but you should be able to find them by googling. you just need something that can transmit and receive on those frequencies.
back when i was in korea we used to pick up ABC and a few other TV stations with Army FM radios because they supported a few civilian frequencies.
didn't work in europe because over there their freqs end with an even number, in the US they end with an odd number. look at any radio station and the freq will be an odd number in the US
W.T.F. (Score:5, Interesting)
"If a soldier is shot in an ambush, the first thing he will think of doing will be to send a help request over the radio," observes Brochi. "What if he's trying to call for help and two truckers are discussing soccer? In an emergency, that soldier won't be able to remember quickly how to change the radio programming to look for a frequency that's not saturated."
What if he's shot in the field and the *enemy* saturates all the frequencies? This should have been secure from the get go, anything less is criminal.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
They needed to shift data around the world and sniff for it.
Huge amounts, everyday, all day.
The last thing that would help is a big slow computer up in space.
Encrypt, bounce (in space), decrypt
You can swap out the ground stations and systems if the Soviets got the info.
Swapping out a satellite is a pain.
Back in the cold war all the Soviets could do was read encrypted traffic.
Anyone can bounce their own 'data' too.
US 'training' staff and private 'consultants' will track your position as you are transmitting.
Now your "arrested" ie your not up on condortel for the SNI to "find".
Re:Not used anymore... (Score:1, Interesting)
Wouldn't surprise me if those were just beacons relaying telemetry.
Anyhow try it yourself - they start around 291 mhz - you won't hear a thing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An even easier option... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit OT but interesting to note that (as far as we know) Russia is the only country ever to arm a satellite. One of their military space stations (Almaz?) had a cannon which apparently test fired, destroying another satellite.
Re:40 year old tech? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really a surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason this isn't common is because the satellite operator will eventually notice the extra power drain on the transponder and will pinpoint the offending transmitter fairly quickly (a few hours to days). Then it's a fairly simple matter to send the authorities to impound your pirate equipment. That appears to be exactly what happened here, although the satellite operators were lazy about tracking down the pirates and let them operate for a fairly long time.
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
The 'techie' Brazilians I've dealt with work for IBM (from Sao Paulo) and admit that the only qualification to be an IBM Linux System Admin was the ability to speak (broken) English. No kidding.
Brazilian geek reporting for duty. I can attest that, in the midst of our gigantic stupidity, there are incredibly bright people around here. My PhD advisor came from MIT. My MSc Advisor came from Brown Univ. Publish and Perish is enormously fierce in our scientific establishment. We are stamping out more PhDs per year than Canada or Italy, for instance (but the average quality is lower, IMO). No surprise to see them hijacking US (or anyone else's satellites). That's probably trivial to do, given a little effort.
There are some hotspots of smart people even around the samba-dancing banana republic crazies.
Anybody is welcome to use it (Score:2, Interesting)
This has been going on for years. The US military operates vhf satellite relays
that are open to anyone who knows position and up and downlink frequencies. I
couldn't care any less about their relays being used by third parties, obviously
they put no effort into securing them. Another thing is, if they're too upset about
third parties using it, they can shut it down.
As far as I'm concerned anybody is welcome to use these relays but that's just me.
They could have fitted those realys with some sort of security mechanism such as a
side channel to transmit/receive authentication data to activate the relaying of
the main signal. That wasn't a priority then, why should it be now after the system has
been in use for decades.
What a bunch of sorry losers to agonize over this in the first place.