now, how many of these birds are there in the sky without access control? Since they are in geosynchronous orbit is its coverage area as wide as Brazil? Sarad. --- On Tue, 4/21/09, Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
From: Peter Gutmann <pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz> Subject: Brazilians hijack US military satellites To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 3:25 PM The whole story's at:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2009/04/fleetcom
it appears
cheap are using US FLTSATCOM
that Brazilians wanting to communicate on the links to talk to each other. This works
because "the communication
channel was open, not encrypted, lots of people used it to
talk to each other" (later they talk about hearing encrypted military voice comms, so I assume they mean that there's no access control, not necessarily
encryption).
Truckers use it because you get better quality voice than
with CB. Drug
dealers use it to coordinate operations, rogue loggers use
it to warn of raids
by the authorities. As the story says "Until [they
get upgraded to use
crypto], the military is still using aging FLTSAT and UFO satellites - and so are a lot of Brazilians".
Peter.