DOD vs. 802.11b 352
goombah99 writes "The NY times (reg required) reports that "The Defense Department, arguing that an increasingly popular form of wireless Internet access could interfere with military radar, is seeking new limits on the technology". It would seem they have a good point; radar is an essential for both defense and civilian aviation as well as ship navigation in tight quarters. Critics of the restrictions contend technology can limit the interference, but what proof is there to these assertions? Sure we all want wireless internet but maybe there should be more careful review of its consequences."
Concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider the impact of a Beowulf cluster of these!
FCC should take care of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Take time to be sure (Score:3, Insightful)
"The Pentagon wants regulators to delay consideration of opening an additional swath of radio frequencies..."
It seems prudent to at least explore the possibility that wireless could degrade the use of radar (for military and civilian purposes) before jumping on this issue. The key to being responsible about it is to move quickly on the necessary research.
Typical Military BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider yourselves warned.
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Baloney! (Score:3, Insightful)
I would say this has more to do with either pure ignorance on the part of the DOD, or an excuse to squash this liberating technology.
Planet P Weblog [planetp.cc] - Personal Liberty with Technology.
Ha ha! (and 1984) (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget it! This will be another great technology that will no longer be avaiable in US.
But pay attention, acording to Goldenstein (984)continuous state of war serves as an excuse to cut civil rights avoiding protests!
Hot on the heels of terrorist Wi-Fi infiltration (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:FCC should take care of this (Score:1, Insightful)
But unlicensed wireless is at the bottom of the totem pole by being governed under FCC Part 15-247 rules. Part 15 equipment operates on a non-interference basis to everything else. Look for mention of part 15 in the manual for any consumer electronic device to see the official language.
If DoD says WiFi is interfering with aviation radar, I'd expect to see the WiFi spectrum yanked in short order. But the FCC usually wants to see proof of interference or at least documentation showing such interference is probable... not sure they'd require that of the DoD though - the FCC is pretty protective of government-use spectrum.
Already wireless available in airports... (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone ever hear of any planes crashing at any of these due to the 802.11 WAPs in use? No? I didn't think so.
Re:Typical Military BS (Score:2, Insightful)
You're right - because we all know that heading off problems before they happen is a bad idea. Exactly what is wrong with a state agency issuing a statement that there is the potential for interference and that further investigation is warranted?
and knowing the predilictions of the current administration, it all bodes very ill for wireless in general and WiFi in particular
Huh? George Bush hates WiFi? WTF are you talking about? Lemme guess - you're referencing this article [slashdot.org]. In case you didn't read it, it basically says (according to Wired no less) that the Department of Defense thinks that open wireless networks have the potential to be dangerous. Guess what, they're right. Do you know how much damage even the lamest script kiddie can do from an open WiFi network? The danger comes from the fact that they're utterly anonymous. If he gets caught fucking up someone's network all he has to do is start his car and *poof* he's untraceable. That's pretty dangerous.
Au Contraire ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Using ISM Bands (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems that the military should have taken this into account in the original specs of their equipment.
I never thought I would see the day /. and .gov (Score:3, Insightful)
We all know GWB and his little gang of croonies have been silently moving to gain "control" over the internet. They've enlisted the help of the RIAA and MPAA plus their teams of lawers to overpower the routers of major backbone providers with threats of bankrupcy. Those that play ball such as AT&T will have their right of way taxes deferred, those like worlcom will have to suffer.
They want it controlled for "our safety" "We don't want no stinkin terrorist using "Our network" to transmit dirty messages to bad 'ol osama (read satan)
They want it controlled to keep the ever slipping grip of media copyright back in the hands of the huge players like sony, virgin, capitol records, ect. Who cares if it hurts the smaller labels.
And killing 802.11 would be a major win to them because it's such a "pirate radio station" They can't control it and that scares them. The worst thing is seeing slash become party to the "psychological warfare and FUD" the
I can't really comment about the technical aspects of if this REALLY affects radar, but as an american citizen watching this issue, I can.
A smart person would look at thier reasons and say, "Hmm, messages, oh yeah, PGP mail... and uh people trading MP3, well can't do much there unless you cut off their ears"
Instead of letting the smart people address this issue they're trying to play on our emotions and get the mob riled up. You are not a good american if you run a public 802.11 node. You are not patriotic for sharing MP3's. You're in bed with the terrorist for using encrypted e-mail.
Well, this message too will probably be modded into oblivion too. As i'm sure
Re:Baloney! (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither software defined radio nor the Open Spectrum initiative renders interference problems obsolete. Saying otherwise is about as meaningful as saying that modern computing repeals the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Radios of any sort increase the energy in the bandwidth that they use. This is true whether they are narrowband traditional radios or ultramodern, cellularized, spread spectrum or ultra-wideband radios of the future.
Any radio receiver has to pull its desired signal out of the ambient noise. That noise consists of natural noise (thermal noise, spherics, astronomical sources, etc) and man-made noise (either noise-like signals or coherent signals). Many radio systems must operate close to the theoretical edge of practicality. The military and reconnaisance organizations especially need to operate with very small noise margins - their ability to do so is one of their advantages.
Increasing the ambient signal levels do degrate the capabilities of these systems. That is trivially proven.
Open Spectrum is an approach to improve bandwidth sharing. That is all it is - it is not a magic panacea that somehow makes interference vanish. Software Defined Radio is simply processing radio signals in software. It also doesn't change the underlying physics.
Consider the issue of radar... radar operates with an inverse-fourth law (the radar equation). The return signal is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the range. Normal radio operates by an inverse square law. Thus radar is especially vulnerable to interference.
To put a little numeracy in here... let's look at a 5GHz space based radar. Assume it outputs 1000 watts peak power (power is very expensive in orbit, you know) from an altitude of 150 miles. Assume the antenna shapes this to 100,000 watts effective radiated power (ERP).
By the time this reaches the earth, it is about 1E-7 watts per square meter. Assume the radar wants to image an area of 100 meters. This is 1E-3 watts or 1 milliwatt. A *single* WiFi stations puts out 10s of milliwatts. Thus if you have one WiFi per 100 square meters, you will have ambient "noise" of 20-30 decibells above the radar signal.
So, this is not a trivial issue. Of course, coherent integration can overcome much higher SNR's, but only at a cost (it requires much more time per resolution area, reducing the overall capability of the system).
In other words, there ain't no free lunch.
The Pentagon has the services of the best experts around to advise it on issues like this. Discounting their objections out of hand is arguing from either ignorance or opinion, not science or engineering. Determining whether their objections are appropriate in this case is a matter for analyses far more complex than will appear on slashdot, and in some cases, probably will require access to very sensitive classified information.
It goes even deeper then that! (Score:3, Insightful)
More Nonsense from DoD (Score:2, Insightful)
This seems like a thinly-veiled attempt to limit personal freedom and access to the internet, IMHO. If the millitary is using radar in these spectra, that's their fault; they must deal with it and not blame their ineptitude on the wireless internet community.
So I might be paranoid but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Its one thing if the network is owned by a large corporation that can be dealt with easily by the dod. But as a lot of WiFi is community based, a widespread network would be harder to control or shutdown. Making 3g attractive to the DOD as their lawyers can mandate the tapping of someones account or even shut the network down in a region. But Community WiFi has no such centralized authority that can be targeted.
Re:Baloney! (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly sounds reasonable considering a large enough network built using wireless could effectively prevent a large segment of traffic from ever going across major backbones. That means in some instances, the DoD's net and ISP sniffing technologies will be greatly snubbed.
Re:Baloney! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's The Man keepin' us down some more.
Write it up for your leaflet.
Re:fear mongering (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:fear mongering (Score:5, Insightful)
If he had gotten up and actually acted, the planes would have been followed by fighter planes, and given authorization, shot down before they got close enough to take out the towers.
I notice your conspicuous use of the plural term "towers" above. Do you honestly mean to suggest that on the morning of 9/11, before the first tower was struck, it was appropriate and justifiable behavior to shoot down airliners that were flying off-course?
Let's take the discussion further. Let's move to just after the first plane crash. Do you expect the president of the United States to authorize the destruction of every airliner in U.S. airspace which is off-course because one happened to run into a building?
I don't know what a careful decision on the part of the Commander in Chief to use deadly force against innocent civilians looks like in your political universe, but I sleep better at night knowing that my president is reluctant to take such action.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
DoD FUD (Score:3, Insightful)
Markoff has been wrong before (Score:2, Insightful)
Markoff is such a tool, have you read his books on Mitnick -- what a joke.
Re:fear mongering (Score:4, Insightful)
first, he is reluctant to take military action against US civilians -- if you listen to the rhetoric coming from washington at the moment (take out saddam) you will note little indication that the loss of civilian lives weighs heavy on the minds of military planners (considering large civilian losses are expected if an invasion is to actually take out saddam).
The contrast you are attempting to make is poorly supported by the practices and doctrine of the US military, which takes incredible measures to protect the lives of enemy civilians, and by the fact that the only people being shot at in Iraq right now are U.S. pilots. I therefore find your suggestion as to the state of mind of military planners with regard to said civilians to be extremely suspect.
it's a situation that we havn't encountered but we should be flexible enough to handle these situations. a lame analogy to my line of work would be having a production server crashing while i'm eating lunch and lesurely enjoying my lunch instead of fixing the problem. the point is that people (i won't point fingers) didn't do their job.
Your lunch analogy has a very big problem in being applied to the 9/11 crisis. In your example, you have complete awareness of the problem, its scope, and the solution that is required. You do not depend on thousands of people in various organizations that lie between the president and a radar operator for the FAA to impart the knowledge that radar operator has that Something Is Wrong.
Can you identify for me a point of view, be it Air Force One, the cockpit of an F-16 searching the skies for the missing plane, a fire truck parked in front of the twin towers, or anywhere else in the country from which a clarity of vision sufficient to kill hundreds of airline passengers could have been obtained? Given the pain and tragedy of that morning, I would consider such conceit not only hopelessly divorced from reality, but also viciously unfair to those who struggled to find the right thing to do that day, many at the expense of their lives.
I spend a great deal of time studying history, particularly moments of crisis such as Pearl Harbor. I find that we are instinctively driven to find a meaning in disaster, so that we can try to create a construct of belief that we can avoid it in the future. It is therefore much easier to find blame in the actions of those in crisis than to admit that given the millions of life's uncertainties, combined with our own imperfections, nothing could have been done. I admit that it is a painful, powerless confession to make, but I simply believe that the honor of those who died that day demands it. Somehow, I think that our ability to truly learn from those events depends upon it.