Forget cyber crims, it's time to start worrying about GPS jammers – UK.gov report The UK must reduce the dependency of its critical infrastructure and emergency services on GPS technology to mitigate against the potentially disastrous impact of signal jamming, a government report has warned. In a forward to the long-awaited doc from the Government Office of Science, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Dowden …
said that they don't have on-site co-gen/UPS because of the excellent 99.99% commercial mains availability,
in my day in TELCO land we used to like 4 x 9's after the decimal point = 99.9999
whats the point of ultra gold platinum premium access to LTE if there's no resilience to a mains outage?
of course my mate might have been winding me up?
p.s. last time I looked at a critical infrastructure run by GPS, it trusted and locked onto 1 x satellite, I tried to suggest that it should also carefully evaluate all the other visible space-vehicles, their relative strengths and their timing, to discover a meaconing or replay attack. My iPhone/Android now does Glonass & soon galileo will be at full strength, just need a widespread little retrofit away from the single-point-of-failure outlined in this article!
And yet the UK is presently in the middle of a plan to remove the dedicated radio network for the emergency services, and to put them on a shared service with the EE 4G mobile network, and they don't consider that to be a problem?
I believe emergency services have priority over the general public on the network, and some dedicated facilities.
I also believe that GPS is also used for the current dedicated radio network (TETRA, as provided by Airwave)
No. I work for three major contractors providing frontline 999 to the public on behalf of more than one significant service. The sort of people you want turning up in a hurry when you need us.
In one service area we have MDTs fitted to our trucks, but these fault at least once every few shifts, and whilst there is a "company phone" in the vehicle as backup this does not have any ACCOLC or other special simcards (whatever the new equivalent is) as we are "only a private company". Usually when we book on with control we are asked for a backup number as well which will be the crew's own mobile. Again there's no way for us to get any priority simcards that we are aware of.
In the second services area we only get issued one airwave handset with all instructions coming by text, everything else is done on crew's own mobiles and crew's own GPS units suckered onto the windscreen, so the comms is even less resilient, and the third service is a major voluntary provider so with less budget there are not enough airwaves if quite a few of use are working (and these all have to be booked in and out of a central depot over an hour away, for "security reasons" before and after each shift) and we rely on point to point VHF (probably more resilient) and again crew's own mobiles.
Whilst there would undoubtedly be some abuse of allowing all front line contractors to get priority simcards, the current view from HMG services is that such things are for senior managers only and we peons should just learn to use the equipment properly as it was very expensive and cannot possibly go wrong.
As the services move towards 5G, then someone needs to sort out a system whereby those of us doing this kind of work can get access to the infrastructure we need to provide that service, currently it is simply not there.
Presumably a priority sim card only helps if you can get on the network.
If there is a major incident in central London and a million people all try and call home so say they OK.
Does the GSM standard allow for shutting down all non-priority handsets in a cell ?
Wikipedia suggests that low priority handsets can be told to go away in an emergency. I guess this "conversation" will add load to the network though.
I had a priority marker attached to my company mobile a few years ago. Reason: Emergency contact for surveillance (not the UK, but continent).
The GSM/UMTS system has provisions for this. If a prio sim tries to log into a cell tower and all availiable slots are full, then the system kicks other sims from this tower/antenna block until the prio sim has a stable connection.
I could test that during several new years, being on call while partying with some friends on a remote location near a city, that was serviced by one tower.
My mobile had rock steady contact and no problems with calls. The others had only intermittent contact to the tower.
One year I was not on call and did switch the phone on to check something and several pals got kicked during calls from the network. (with resulting "no service" even though having 3 bars reception).
Getting SMS or sending one did havoc to the connections of the other mobiles when on heavy loaded towers. SMS uses part of the signaling bandwidth.
I moved on since and lost this nifty feature.
If I could lower the level of this conversation - I'm a cyclist. These days ride leaders are invariably led by a GPS enabled Garmin. Brilliant until something happens, we are delayed, the battery goes flat, it falls out of its holder or (whisper) the code crashes.
I'm the the one with an OS in my back pocket so disaster is adverted. OK for now but an increasing number of leaders can't properly read a map. Because they never had to. This unknowing dependence on a fragile radio signal goes right up the life endangering scale.
Plan all you want. But imho the only way to safeguard the planet is for the US/Russia/EU to turn their systems off for a day so to concentrate minds so we should know the backup will really work. Signalled well in advance 'cos I'm not taking a flight that day ...
If they're doing it properly, then they're feeding the GPS timing pulses into ntpd (or equivalent). If they're doing it properly, then ntpd is configured to record how much the system clock is drifting from UTC (as supplied by GPS). If they're doing it properly, then ntpd will be configured to also use networked references (some of which will also be GPS, some of which will derive from atomic time standards). If they're doing it properly, then ntpd will be configured to use the system clock, as compensated by the recorded drift, as a last resort.
With a sensible set up, you'll know the time with less than one second of error for days after GPS fails and all the networked time sources also fail.
It's neither hard nor expensive to get right.
to the point where jammers are now sought and owned by everyday citizens seeking to hide from a perceived risk of being tracked during their day-to-day lives.
We are long past the days when the statement 'I don't have anything to hide so let them track me' meant something.
People just want to be able to go about their lives without the threat that someone is tracking your every move just because they can.
By all means reduce the Government and the services delivered with our tax money dependency on GPS but don't replace that with something even more draconian.
There is a reason that I keep location services on my phone OFF unless I really need to use them.
That won't help much, tracking was being done long before most phones had GPS added. As your mobile's existance is picked up by a base station then you can get a pretty good idea of somebodies distance from that base station via the signal strenth. If your in range of 3 base stations then you can get a pretty good accuracy through triangulation.
Worth noting that all phones keep signalling base stations, even when turned off. Easily verifiable yourself with basic radio equipment, or by sticking a mobile in very close proximity to an unshielded speaker. The speaker will buzz when the phone is on. Turn the phone off. You'll note that it still buzzes occasionally when the turned off phone transmits.
Unless you remove the battery, the masts track you even on 2G. So that when you are called the network can use the nearest masts.
If you are in range of several, the best (depends on sector loading and signal quality) connects. The handset does "ranging" too so as to use minimum TX power. The operator can use three masts to quite accurately locate you. Even with one, the operator knows approximate direction (sectorised masts increase capacity) and distance (the ranging handshake).
Even if a totally dumb 2G / GSM phone. An "agency" may or may not need a warrant to get the information.
Then also there are MIM attacks, a working "fake" mobile mast (anyone can do this now) and it pretends to be your handset to real mast.
Mostly neither GSM nor 3G uses the better encryptions they could use. I've no idea how good the "best" GSM and 3G is.
There is no native voice on 4G, it's high overhead VOIP, so often operator uses 2G/3G for voice. More efficient, better capacity & range. Even if YOU only use 4G the handset may still be doing 2G GSM and/or 3G handshakes with mast.
"puts on Tin-foil hat"
Which is why when I'm driving, my phone is switched off and inside a tin box in the boot. Not because I'm paranoid but I was involved in a traffic accident where the main cause of it was a driver on his phone. Putting it there takes a definitive action on my part to drive safely.
This is only an interim solution as soon ALL our cars will send not only its positon but all sorts of other data to 'you know who' every minute on the minute and there will be nothing we can do about it.
what happens if you need to call the emergency services quickly?
I imagine he stops the car, gets out and gets it out of the boot. If he has been in a bad enough accident to become unable to do that, he may not have been able to use it if it had been in his pocket.
@Korev:
> Out of interest, what happens if you need to call the emergency services quickly?
The same thing that used to happen 2 decades ago before I owned a mobile phone,
You might as well say I should carry an EPIRB in case I get kidnapped and dropped into a remote location so I can signal for help. Or carry a complete set of spares in the car (fan-belts, light bulbs, gaskets, o-rings, hoses, radiator/brake/hydraulic/engine/transmission fluids) for a 5-minute drive to the mall, because I might need them.
I don't get this whole "But what if you need to make/receive a call in an emergency".
I lived fine for 25 years without that immediate capability to hand, I have no trouble doing without now. It is a convenience, nothing more.
I know how to navigate with a street atlas (a topographical map and compass for that matter) - in fact I prefer it when planning trips, as it shows more classes of roads in a single high-level view rather than the limited road information you get when trying to use google maps for example, you often have to zoom in so far to see anything but main highways that you can't use it to plan a trip.
I can live without the convenience of a phone on my person for a few hours, even a few days. I went on a 10-day cruise about 5 years back, the ship's on-board cell was so expensive to use that I never signed up and just left the phone locked in the cabin safe for the duration. It's annoying to have to do so, to not be able to contact or be contactable immediately, but it is by no means important let alone a necessity.
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It used to be a thing, back in the days of original-spec gsm phones. Of course the 900mhz-ish carrier's a little bit out of the audible range, but I believe the buzz was a harmonic of a timing signal modulated onto the carrier. Wasn't uncommon for it to interfere with stereos; personally I usually knew when my Philips Diga was about to ring because guitar amps were sensitive to it and I was usually near a guitar amp in them halcyon days .... bz b b bz b b bz b b bz b b bzzzzzzz, phone rings. Of course that was 1998 and I haven't heard a phone do that in close to two decades, very much a thing of the past.
Sorry, I don't believe you on this one, at least on every handset that I have been in contact with, OFF is OFF.
I'm an IT professional, not a preist so i'm not demanding beleif. Just duplicate the conditions and see what happens.
Once upon a time I was assigned an urgent job to figure out why $importantperson had problems with their deskphone in conference mode getting intermittant severe interference that made it unusable. Problem traced to their mobile when it received a text while they were on a call. Turning the mobile off resolved the issue and ticket solved. Ticket was then reopened at a point afterwards with a comment along the lines of "it still does for about a second every so often". Problem immediately traced back to mobile (this was many years ago, so would have been pre-smartphone) transmitting while turned off.
Que a couple of us scratching our heads and duplicating the conditions to recreate the issue, figure out what was happenning and then figuring out how to eliminate the problem. IIRC it happened on several phones and we fixed it by taking the handset apart and reconfiguring it so that the conference mode used external speakers. The downside was that the speaker was also used for ringing, as we discovered when somebody rang the phone...
I'm tempted to set up a little experiment....switch off a phone and leave it next to a speaker in a very quiet place. Set up some audio recording equipment and leave it overnight. Should be easy enough to review the recorded WAV file and see any spikes where the speakers have picked up activity from the phone (better than listening to 12 hours of audio anyway)
Give it a go. Make sure that you get noise from your speaker setup when you send/receive a text first though.
Problem immediately traced back to mobile (this was many years ago, so would have been pre-smartphone) transmitting while turned off.
And how did you determine the mobile was transmitting to a mobile network while turned off?
I suspect, as others have said, a mobile does not perform a controlled transmit to a mobile network when turned off. However, given the nature of the circuitry, there is no reason not to suspect some inductive build up of charge that is discharged in a way that can cause interference to nearby equipment.
So I suggest you try the experiment, but with the phone's ground line actually connected to a real earth - charging cable plugged in and attached to mains but with mains power switched off.
So you've never had a mobile near an inadequately shielded speaker when a call is arriving? You've never heard the noises the speaker makes? Yes, the range is very short (no more than a couple of feet, normally), but it's not zero either. Equally, it doesn't mean that the speaker is picking up RF from the mobile transmissions. It may well be picking up noise from the non-radio parts of the phone, which tend to wake up when a call is being negotiated. (By definition, a mobile phone cannot be totally free from RF emissions, and it's hard to prevent "unwanted" emissions from getting out of a box that's *designed* to emit RF.)
No, I realise that's not a physics-based explanation, but, frankly, empirical evidence of something happening, even if it doesn't explain *what*. Yes, a physics-based explanation would be able to explain the origin of the noise, but the noise is real.
EDIT: oops, ninja'ed by paulll
Not just noises being picked up through a speaker. I've had instances where I've been somewhere and recording audio either on a camera or dedicated digital audio recorder and have forgotten to put my phone in aircraft mode. The recorded audio is punctuated with occasional beeps and burps as my phone picks up emails or whatever in the background.
"Seriously, the response of a typical speaker is from about 60 to 8000Hz (spend more, ymmv of course). The voice coil is inside a fairly large magnet which also shields it electrically rather well. There's no obvious means of rectifying a microwave signal to provide a strong enough LF chirp to activate a speaker."
The microwave signal is not directly coupled to the speaker but through the amplifier/speaker driver/radio receiver etc. There are lots and lots of diodes in the electroncis connected to the speaker which can convert the modulated extremely high microwave frequencies down to something the speaker can respond to. The actual power probably comes from the electronics driver/amplifier.
I am a bit surprised you doubt this can happen I thought everyone had heard a few odd noises when putting a phone next to some audio devices. I must have heard this several hundred if not thousands of times. A credible mechanism is nice but does not over rule every day observations. Hopefully my explanation in any case provides a mechanism.
@Voyna i Mor
Audio amplifiers in domestic equipment easily pick up mobile phone transmission IME. I guess it's the transmitter on/off or other low frequency pattern in the signal.
I've also seen disturbance on a CRT TV (analogue UHF signal) but not sure at what stage the mobile signal is getting in.
The effect is real, whatever the mechanism (I'd be interested to know more too).
The 'phones still transmitting when they're off' thing is junk: you can know this is not true by looking at battery drain: turn your phone off with a newish, fully-charged, leave it a month and check the battery state: if it's still charged then it hasn't been talking to basetations.
The interference thing is real: I believe it is caused because the RF transmitter in the phone takes quite significant current, and takes it in short, frequent (but kHz not GHz) pulses. So the PCB traces / wires which take power to the transmitter act as antennae and this leaks into audio systems. This used to be really common but I suspect design has got better (or phone transmitter power has gone down a lot, or both) and it no longer seems to be such a problem.
It does sound similarly unbelivable to the bunk that was touted a few years ago that leaving laptops in your car, even hidden in the boot, was bad because the batteries could be detected: automagically somehow, I never did get a non-nutjob answer as to how. Leave a laptop in a car with bluetooth and/or WiFi active and yes, it could be detected, but that's a different matter although it is considerably more likely that somebody just saw the laptop being put into the boot.
I'm pretty sure the whole thing about phones transmitting even when switched off (so the government can track you) is bunk, put around by the tin-foil hat brigade. My only evidence thus far is that had an old fully charged phone which had been put to one side, and when I picked it up months later it still had 99% charge - basically what I'd expect an elderly battery to lose just by sitting on the shelf.
I'm tempted to set up a little experiment....switch off a phone and leave it next to a speaker in a very quiet place. Set up some audio recording equipment and leave it overnight. Should be easy enough to review the recorded WAV file and see any spikes where the speakers have picked up activity from the phone (better than listening to 12 hours of audio anyway)
Some or many phones, off might be really off. Often the screen etc uses a separate CPU to the RF part.
I'd not make assumptions if I was doing anything clandestine. Also someone can clone your phone to a modified one with additional tracking & monitoring.
Right. And phones have magic batteries which somehow allow them to talk to their basestations when they are off without running the battery down. But there's a giant conspiracy to keep the existence of these batteries from us, so they pretend to run down in a day when the phone is on. This is because the batteries use nucular technology harvested from alien corpses from the Rosslyn incident also they are irradiating our brains most phone users have cancer in their ears from this of course we never went to the moon hitler lives there the its flat i tell you flat there is no conspiracy they're coming for you they're coming i tell you coming soon the light
Worth noting that all phones keep signalling base stations, even when turned off. Easily verifiable yourself with basic radio equipment, or by sticking a mobile in very close proximity to an unshielded speaker. The speaker will buzz when the phone is on. Turn the phone off. You'll note that it still buzzes occasionally when the turned off phone transmits.
Sorry, I don't believe you on this one, at least on every handset that I have been in contact with, OFF is OFF. Off is rather more thorough than "airplane mode" where all of the radio transmit circuitry must be disabled but can still operate in receive mode. If you consider "off" as "screen is dark" then that is not off either. Removing a SIM is also not "off" as a SIM is not required for network communication, just for user (not handset) identification. I can believe that some phones may have "deep sleep" mode but that is not "off" - doubtless similar to the idiotic way that it was near impossible to close apps in W8.
I believe that we had a radio, land based positioning system. If memory served, it obviously covered just the UK but was turned off when GPS gained a wider foot hold. I'm going to try and see if Google will tell me what it was. I could be remembering completely wrongly, though.
You mean LORAN and eLORAN
Hey best thing:
https://www.nlb.org.uk/InformationCentre/News/Documents/UK-speeds-ahead-with-rollout-of-eLoran-stations-to-backup-vulnerable-GPS/
Lets demolish these expensive pieces of equipment:
https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/europe-gives-up-on-eloran#gs.UxcCsGI
Apparently it was Gee... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gee_(navigation)
"Post-war use
Gee was of such great utility that the hurried deployments during the war were rationalized as the basis for an ongoing and growing navigational system. The result was a set of four chains, South Western, Southern, Scottish and Northern, which have continuous coverage over most of the UK out to the northeastern corner of Scotland. These were joined by a further two chains in France, and a single chain in the UK occupation zone in northern Germany.[18]"
Well having had the fun of finding where I was in a desert in pre-GPS days, the precursor systems weren't that precise - Loran was +- 10 kms (I think Gee could do +- a few hundred metres, but that's way before my time and not available outside Europe). We used Omega, which was about +-10km , better if we could average signals for 24 hours or so, but I wouldn't want to rely on it to find my nearest Costa coffee. In practice old fashioned map reading was probably better, the electronics just served as reminder of how inaccurate the map datum was.
Gee was nicked from the Germans (OBOE) and developed by the DECCA Company.
DECCA was developed & deployed worldwide (oh apart from part of N America; but they used the Canadian chain anyway - because it wasn’t invented there).
Accuracy a couple of metres to a few 10s of metres IFF you truly understood the system. You RENTED DECCA boxes; never sold.
Then there was HiFix DECCA - accurate to better than 1 metre.
Then someone copied DECCA onto a lower base frequency system and thus we got LORAN - if you were lucky you could get Kilometre level accuracy.
Then the idiots who wouldn’t allow DECCA in their country; made an even lower base frequency version called OMEGA (pronounced OH ME GAA) which was so crap; that sat in Portsmouth Polly with all the relevant updates and correction tables (5 or 7 BIG thick manulals plus addendums) and the very latest over the air updates (changed HOURLY) we still managed to get one fix in Scarpa Flo; one fix somewhere near Paris; and one on the Dogger Bank. The OMEGA readings were taken on 3 consecutive minutes. yup; ideal conditions and it was still crap.
Or there was your trusty chronometer (rated against MSF/WWV/WWVH/BBC0 and a sextant with some spherical trig tables and a star/plant/moon or Sun.
eLoran; well it was better than LORAN but no sane navigator relied on it with in 50 nautical miles of the coast.
That reference triggered a few memories - Hyperbolic Radio Navigation Aids; DECCA was amazing; Loran not so much; and OMIGA was/is just ridiculous- basic radio propagation theory suggested it would never work; quite correctly.
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