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.