United Nations Expert Arrested in Tunisia for Using an RTL-SDR
rtl-sdr.com
rtl-sdr.com
> As Kartas' business in Tunisia was to present his findings on the arms embargo violations, other experts believe that the arrest is politically motivated, and that ownership of the RTL-SDR for espionage is simply being used as an excuse.
No kidding. The government is failing on several fronts; and is trying to gain popularity by making fake moves (like finding and arresting a spy). They did that to several business man. The good news, they released them (no charges, no evidence, no nothing). The bad news, some of them were released only a year later. They had no right to a lawyer or a trial during that time. It was "investigation".
This is possible because technically speaking the country is under martial-law which keeps getting renewed every month. The sad thing people are quite busy these days trying to find gas, milk and basic necessities. The interest on political and freedom-related news is way down from the first few years of the said revolution.
It is funny because looking at the pictures, some parts of Tunisia are now in more dire straits than Venezuela. It is just not getting the media coverage.
Comparing to Venezuela on the other hand is ... an overstretch at best.
Our roads are worse, the streets are much dirtier, and unless you are living around lamarsa/lac, then food shortages are real. If you can afford them in the first place. I live in a "wealthy" neighborhood and yesterday there was a water cut.
Yesterday I was at the airport. Looking at Venezuela/Caracas airport and comparing, the one here is much more degraded. What do you think is Venezuela situation? No electricity? It might as well be a reality here if the government doesn't get its shit together very soon.
I can't speak personally to Tunisia's situation. However the people of Venezuela are starving to death. They're no more than two or three years from genocide by starvation at this point (or otherwise requiring desperate, massive food aid from the UN, Russia, China, or whichever countries they would allow to deliver it).
On the food security index:
https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com/Country
Tunisia ranks 51 out of 113. Venezuela ranks 78 out of 113. That's a lagging ranking, things have gotten much worse in Venezuela over the last six months and year.
A year ago, when things weren't as bad as they are now, the situation was:
"Venezuelans reported losing on average 11 kilograms (24 lbs) in body weight last year [in 2017] and almost 90 percent now live in poverty, according to a new university study on the impact of a devastating economic crisis and food shortages. "
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelan...
On a monetary, economic front, their inflation rate is so high as to be entirely pointless to track. They're formally a failed state with no functioning currency or central bank system.
Their economy has collapsed by 80% to 90%, in the last five years:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46999668
Tunisia's GDP per capita has declined in the last several years, back to about where it was in 2006/2007. They've seen a ~18% decline approximately, from the peak. A lot of that is dollar conversion decline however, only a small portion of it is real domestic economic contraction. Venezuela's collapse is a severe domestic contraction, a near total obliteration of all business and private enterprise, including basic stores (now entirely empty everywhere). Very little of Venezuela's decline is an issue of currency conversion against the jump in the US dollar: it's a flat out, straight down collapse.
When the US dollar took off on its historic run five years ago, it hit a lot of developing economies, including Tunisia. Tunisia's GDP per capita peaked in 2014, and began to decline, exactly in line with the USD taking off. Developing countries as diverse as Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia were hit by the same effect at the same time. The USD spike is also what pushed Venezuela under water, as it hammered the price of oil downward.
On a basic health front, diseases like malaria, diarrhea, typhoid fever and hepatitis A have skyrocketed in cases. Malaria has gone from relatively rare (15k-30k cases), to common (half a million annual cases), in Venezuela. At this point there is no functioning healthcare system in Venezuela, and essentially no medicine available to 99% of the population.
In terms of consumer goods, nearly all basic consumer goods were gone 18 to 24 months ago. They increasingly lack nearly all basic consumer staples, from diapers to toilet paper.
When it comes to access to safe drinking water, that too has essentially entirely disappeared. Water security is now a daily battle for nearly all the people of Venezuela:
"The water scarcity has driven people out of their homes and into the streets in search of any source, potable or not. ... Caracas, a city of 2 million, sits in a valley some 3,000 feet above sea level. The public water system relies on a succession of pumps that require massive amounts of energy. Without electricity, the water doesn’t flow."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/why-are-yo...
Venezuela is seeing a severe flight of population, whereas Tunisia's population is solidly expanding year after year. Venezuela has seen maybe as many as three to four million people flee the country during the crisis. These people fleeing Venezuela are often living in imminent fear of starving to death, or the fear that that is what's to come next.
As an outsider I'd be interested if the two of you can reach consensus by precision and what the resulting agreement would be.
Perhaps these parts of Tunisia can be specified?
There has also been several civilians either kidnapped or killed by armed terrorists. It has become common now and people stopped talking about it.
Also Tunisia has got a significant forgotten population. Think people with no access to water, electricity, roads, education... most Tunisians you'll see in the nicer neighborhoods do not relate to those and probably don't remember them except for some brief Facebook posts.
Tunisia rural population is around 30%. That's a third of the population. Compare that to 10% in Venezuela.
To answer your questions:
1- It is more likely we don't reach a consensus on how bad Tunisia is. You should take into account that probably neither of us went to Venezuela in the first place.
2- The US Travel advisory is spot on. You should stick to it: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/... I'd never venture into these places myself and I'm a local.
It took Germany until something like ~3 years ago to finally do the switch.
12.5k NFM has the same signal bandwidth as a timesliced (dual timeslot -- two virtual channels per physical RF channel) DMR or APCO P25 signal.
Digital schemes like TETRA and DMR compress the audio and add error correction. The audio bitrate for DMR is somewhere around 2400 Baud. This means a lot has to be thrown away. As a result, some things confuse the codec (usually AMBE). I have Scottish and Irish friends with strong accents; AMBE makes their voices both indistinguishable and unintelligible.
The second problem is what's sometimes called "the cliff-edge effect" or "graceful degradation". An FM signal degrades progressively as the signal gets weaker. If there's a temporary 'fading', you'll get a bit more hiss for a second or two. An experienced dispatcher or radio operator will often be able to "hear through" the hiss.
Digital signals don't degrade gracefully. The audio quality is perfect up to a point, but after that point things fail quickly. You get corrupted, missing or glitchy audio, loss of control packets (more lost audio), loss-of-sync (no audio until the next SYNC burst, ~1-2 secs)...
Incidentally, analog speech scramblers have similar issues. Rolling Spectrum Inversion scramblers send an FSK data-burst every time the seed (ephemeral key) changes. If your radio misses one of these bursts, the rx/tx audio will be screwed up for a second or two.
Even Motorola has recognized that problem and added options in their programming software that makes the DSP boost higher frequencies before feeding the signal to the vocoder.
As to the graceful vs cliff-edge degradation of signals I've yet to see real comparisons where both analog and digital radios use the same frequency, radiated power and bandwidth (with co-channel interference!). With digital systems, the degradation will surely be much more noticeable, but the real question is whether the critical signal level is above or below that of the analog system.
A lack of ethnic diversity in vendors and standardization committees, which has also led to issues such as the "racist soap dispenser" (https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...).
When most or all testing is exclusively done on White US-english male persons, issues such as a lack of sensitivity/quality for anything diverging from that norm only crop up when it is way too late to fix.
[0] Not to detract from the skin colour issues we've seen countless examples of, like the example you mentioned or the Google Photo fail https://news.sky.com/story/google-photo-app-labels-black-cou...
I'd absolutely love to see a Codec2 based DMR radio, even if it were a firmware mod to an existing radio.
As for the degradation - same. The only data I've seen is from radio manufacturers and the DMRA. Practically it's going to depend on the specific radio, the antenna and so on. You could measure sensitivity as dBm vs error rate for digital or dBm vs SINAD for analog and plot the two together.
Once you cross the line of what the ECC/FEC can handle, things tend to break down very quickly. Most DMR radios will cut out entirely if they see a lot of Post-FEC uncorrectable bit errors.
I suppose you could alternatively keep the existing analog infrastructure and apply an ECC to the analog signal too.
TETRA, the German digital police/ems/... network, uses SIM cards for that part. Pretty easy, if you ask me.
With digital radio on the other hand, a bad signal results in lost chunks. There the transmission is clear until it gets choppy and that's a lot harder to make anything out of.
I suspect this kind of encoding works badly with encryption, as decryption needs a perfect preimage otherwise the decrypted message will simply be garbage. Also, even a slightly increased delay makes for very awkward conversations.
The person who was arrested was using the device to probe stuff that the Tunisian government doesn't want to be made known. If he had been using binoculars and a notebook at the airport, he would have been arrested too.
They were watching him, knew what he was doing there, and used whatever pretext was at hand to arrest him upon arrival (which suggests he had been there before).
A rule that is rarely enforced, but which was used few times in nineties to expel foreign embassy staff for just owning cellphones.
This seems like it should be the bigger (though less on topic) deal.
UN has the power that its members collectively attribute to it. It is far more than a US tool.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_treaties_unsigned_or_u...
But when appropriate, US govt will pull out a UN card. When not, it will be simply disregarded.
So UN doesn't have any power in the real sense: Serbia has been relying on that power yet there's this now practically independent state of Kosovo created against UN rules. Not that I agree with the rules (hopefully we can amend them so there is a viable way for regions to split out of their parent countries, thus avoiding wars).
In the USA I don't think he would be protected as an International Organization staffer (he is not a diplomat):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_immunity#In_the_Uni...
An indication that he might actually have been doing what he was accused of?
His job for the UN was to find out if tunisia is violating UN rules.
In other words, he did exactly what they are accusing him of, just that it isn't spying because tunisia have themselves decided to be a part of UN.
"As opposed to United Nations officials, experts on missions for the United Nations, like members of the International Law Commission, Special Rapporteurs, or members of United Nations peacekeeping operations, serve under a temporary and specific mandate. They also enjoy certain functionally limited privileges and immunities pursuant to article VI of the General Convention."[1]
The relevant document is "Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the Specialized Agencies" from 1947[2].
So, as long as the US doesn't intend to break that convention specialists working for the UN probably have immunity in the US too.
(IANAL, and so on)
[1] http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/cpiun-cpisa/cpiun-cpisa.html [2] http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=48887&URL_DO=DO_TO...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tunisia-libya/tunisia-say...
Could it be the case that Tunisia didn't grant his ingress as a diplomat they knew would be investigating their non-compliance with sanctions, he went and did the investigation anyway, and Tunisia now consider this to be a violation of that non-consent?
Or do you mean "here in the US if I am a citizen"? :)
A fellow Tunisian here,
I tried several times to buy stuff online (listed with foreign currencies) using a regular credit card. But the transaction always fails.
Since we don't have paypal either, I'm interested, how do you purchase stuff online using a foreign currency?
they explain that he was using the RTL-SDR as part of his investigation for monitoring air traffic to Libya in an attempt to link flights against violations of the arms embargo.
So the person in question supposedly wanted to prove that Tunisia is potentially violating UN embargo by possibly monitoring air traffic communications without permission.
He had a noble cause but what he was doing would have to be done in a hands-off, anonymous way with relay to an outside recipient. Perhaps remote solar-charged SoC units with satellite uplink, but that's getting into serious money.
From a purely statistical viewpoint, there are 11M Tunisians out of 7.5 billion people, which would put them at 1.5 out of any 1000 people are Tunisian :) Even if we take technological and language exposure (which is what I am guessing you are hinting at), I'd say at least 1 person in 5000 on here is Tunisian :) And I suspect there are more than 5000 people on HN.
If this was more of a small-talk "hey I've lived there and so nice to be reminded of it", pardon my intrusion with data :)
Yeah statistically speaking you are probably right. It's probably because the vast majority of people around here are from the US. I'm from Spain and I rarely find Spaniards either.
They used to be illegal in Germany (along with wifi-specific sniffers): is this still the case?
AMPS is completely gone now, and that provision of the ECPA hasn't been enforced against individuals in a long time as far as I'm aware. But it's still on the books. ("When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.")
Here's a backup: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509030015/https://www.rtl-s...
Tunisia being a tourist hot spot I expected their customs to be knowledgeable enough to differentiate a malicious device.
I think they had already made their mind to arrest this person and RTL device is just a scape goat (or) they were super paranoid for some reason & this person was just unlucky to have a USB device with a antennae which for the uninformed has spy gadget written all over it.
Fixed that for you :)
[0] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/using-the-rtl-sdr-as-a-transmitter/
You may not take them seriously as a technological country, but such arrests indicate that the army is worried about the smuggling of military tech and has power to enforce checks.
Now, this can be a valuable tactic; it is good to be underestimated by your opponent. I doubt this is intentional, though.
> Tunisia is a member of the UN
Umm... what? Logic tells me these two statements should be incompatible.
The West's global markets are on thinner ice than ever. Domestically, the US, the world's biggest superpower, is crumbling. Poverty is on the rise. The wealth gap broadens. The US has begun assaulting its citizens' Constitutionally granted rights, including the rights to free speech and the right to bear arms against the government.
Dozens and dozens of extremely important natural resources, minerals, etc will be dried up within half a century. This will likely lead to global instability and riots. [0]
The environment is wasted. Thousands of animals and insects and other life evaporated. We are literally in the middle of a global extinction event [1] whose impact has yet to be fully appreciated. Our biosphere is rapidly collapsing. Our generation will be synonymous with plastic and the destruction of the Earth.
Multiple Middle Eastern countries are gaining access to nuclear weaponry. Things are as tense with Iran as ever. Al-Qaeda's plan [2] for Islamic global domination and war, while dampened for a moment, is still chugging right along. ISIS is not gone. We have not defeated them. They want a global religious war and everything they do is working towards this goal.
If we get out of the next three decades without a world war, I will be very surprised. The coming War for Resources is inevitable, the only unknown is when.
No, the UN is not doing their job. Nor is the US.
[0] https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/NICR%202013-05%20US%20Na...