Jammin' GPS
erco
Posts: 20,256
http://www.electronicproducts.com/RF_and_Microwave_Components/RF_and_Microwave/Man_buys_GPS_jammer_to_duck_employer_jams_his_local_airport_instead.aspx
Kind of a funny story, but it reflects a sad state of affairs if any joker can interfere with aircraft landing systems with a pocketable device that plugs into a cigarette lighter. Imagine what terrorists could do with a briefcase-sized device hidden in the bushes near an airport.
Kind of a funny story, but it reflects a sad state of affairs if any joker can interfere with aircraft landing systems with a pocketable device that plugs into a cigarette lighter. Imagine what terrorists could do with a briefcase-sized device hidden in the bushes near an airport.
Comments
Oh wait, this has already happened http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/woman_arrested.html
Walk into a crowded airport wearing a hoodie with obviously live electronics strapped to the chest...
Frankly, anyone dumb enough to do that so soon after the Mooninite scare...
How did she even manage to get into MIT?
'She walked off when staff asked about the electronics'...
Yeah, that was clever...
'A terrorist would have blown herself up then, not waited to be arrested by cops'...
Actually, many terrorists will try to take out police, firefighters, medics if they can, so waiting until such worthy targets appears is unfortunately a valid course of action for them. Even more common is 'secondary bombs' placed at likely staging points and set to go off a while after the man explosive.
'There was no capacitor on the breadboard'...
For one reason or another some people think you need a capacitor to set off a detonator.
Nope. A normal 9V battery is more than enough in itself.
We who know about electronics should always remember that not everyone does, and that the general public unfortunately get their education more and more from movies...
Did the Police exaggerate the real danger afterwards?
In describing it as a fake bomb? yes.
When saying that she could have been shot? No...
The officer who arrested her had no way of knowing that it was something harmless until afterwards.
And even if he had a look at the electronics before he brought her in, he probably didn't have the knowledge to understand it and to see that it was harmless. And wasn't hiding a 'dead man switch' or something.
It's not that difficult to hide a switch or wires on the back of those breadboards. Just cut open the back to get access to the metal tracks...
Shocker: It's possible to hide triggers electronics in-between harmless electronics...
Well plenty of women do that all the time, and no I'm not talking about Muslim women in burkas. They used to call them scarves. I'm an old guy but notice that "hoodies" have been standard apparel for a long time. Have you ever noticed that suicide bombers and the like tend to hide what they are doing? Which itself was a classic example of paranoia induced panic. Rather like the broadcast of Orsen Welles' War of the Worlds back in the day.
Perhaps young enough to not realize the world had gone mad?
All this tells me that the "terrorists" have won a long time ago.
In an insane world, behaving sanely is only going to get you shot...
Lets just say that I'm not planning any visits to the USA any time soon...
(I've been to Thailand 3 times the last years, and Russia once... With THAT visa in my passport, I probably won't get into the USA anyways... There's no way I can convince the NSA that I'm not cooperating with Snowden. )
Sadly the article also exposed how easy it is to monkey wrench a airport.
I think though we should thank our lucky stars, that mad bomber types are dumb as rocks. If the baddies get a James Bond villain type like Blofeld to decide what to hit, we're in trouble.
Winter time last year I was working on my multi-engine land rating and we had an interesting GPS failure during a training flight. We were running with an on-board Garmin 430W and also had an iPad for our charting. All of a sudden both of them went out. Kind of annoying since it was dark out, but the towns/cities in this area have distinctive light patterns so it wasn't any big deal to fly back to the airport visually (this airport only has GPS approaches, or we would have just dialed up a VOR approach to make life easier). Squawked it to the mechanic.
Next training flight, same thing happens. We decided to start fiddling with things and see what was going on. Turning the iPad on/off did not help, but when we turned the on-board GPS off, the iPad would work again! Turn on the Garmin and yep, iPad GPS immediately fails! At that point I recalled reading awhile back about how some antennas are amplified... Gave the airplane to the mechanic again and recommended he check the antenna/wiring. Sure enough, there was an intermittent wiring fault that was turning the GPS receiver into a GPS jammer!
I'm just glad I wasn't betting my life on GPS either of those nights...
That is a rather suicidal attitude to take. History would suggest that sometimes they are not so dumb and are actually rather well organized. Think 9/11 or back in the day the King David Hotel bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing or the IRA.
Or this lunatic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
Are you saying Guido Fawkes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes was dumb? OK hat plot failed but pretty close.
Still, it highlights that spending tens of billions on airport security, homeland security, and the rest can be a waste of time. It just means the baddies have to find another way to throw the "monkey wrench" in.