The campaign to terrify you about EMP | Hacker News Reader

The campaign to terrify you about EMP

theatlantic.com

14 pointsdctoedt34 comments

I was sitting in Chris Paget's "How to hack GSM" talk at DEFCON 18 last year[1], it was one of the biggest talks of the entire conference.

Chris has basically setup a make-shift cell tower in the room where the talk was being held, with two high-gain antenna pointed out towards the crowd. Behind him he had... (bear with me, I am not an EE guy) a huge receiver hooked to the antenna.

He kept belaboring the point that he was only turning the power up to some micro-fraction of what the box could output.

When someone at the front pushed him for more info "Why can't you turn it up more and try and pick up more cell phones from around the hotel?" he replied that if he "cranked it all the way up" he would "kick every cell phone in Vegas off their towers"... and then he kept presenting.

Given that Paget knows his stuff, and he is sitting there with equipment from any radio store... and could take at least most cell phones offline for a few-mile-radius if what he said was true... it seems to me that the biggest thread to America is just smart people in general.

He could hypothetically put that think in an SUV, turn it on, and just drive across town, causing havok all day long. ANYONE COULD.

Every time politicians learn about a new "threat to America" they get all excited, throw a saddle on the damn issue and ride it to glory, screaming and shouting the whole way until we can't remember why we ever thought it was safe to leave our houses in the first place.

I understand the need to push your own agendas for elections, but besides not being able to take laptops on airplanes, I only see a whole lot of hurt for citizens coming out of this.

While we're at it, you know what else is the worst threat ever to America? How about education, health, the sun, asteroids and gangs of unruly dogs.

<sigh>

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/202298/fcc_con...

And dropping a few concrete blocks onto railway lines could completely immobilise most countries with fear. Ditto for a few shooting sprees in shopping malls. It's easy to think of any number of utterly trivial ways to bring a society to a standstill.

The fact that these things aren't happening every day gives the lie to the "war on terror."

> Ditto for a few shooting sprees in shopping malls.

I don't know, the day after <insert your favourite high school shooting here> my neighbourhood supermarket was open like any other day.

Counterpoint: the DC sniper meant that people shoot down plenty of outdoor gatherings just based on the fear that he might shoot somebody.

Or even the hunt against geeks/trench-coat wearing people after Columbine (instead of just going after people who had told you they felled homocidal and where on antidepressants known to cause people to feel that way).

Would it be so if you did it eight times in a summer? At random shopping malls in different states?

While I agree with you, most people in America could cause a lot more trouble buying a gun and driving around with that.

I realise that is a very stretched metaphor, but even stupid people can cause serious problems, if they don't mind going to jail for them. I'm sure cell blocking would be a jailable offense. Harder (but not impossible) to get caught for however.

You can build radio transmitter to kick off other GSM, TV, radio stations, Wifi, but it's illegal and authorities can easily found the source of the signal. I don't think it could be a big threat to national security.

You could just turn it on for a few seconds, then go dark and drive away. Or trigger it remotely. You don't have to personally be at the source.

> it seems to me that the biggest thread to America is just smart people in general who have the motivation to carry out such a plan

Great point but had to FTFY.

Can these people ever walk away from the idea of war. I mean, really which rogue state can or will possibly launch a nuclear missile over the continental US ?

They will be happy to walk away from the idea of war - it is just that the Rotary club pays less in campaign contributions than Norman Gunthorp.

Today? Probably none. In ten or twenty years? God only knows. IMO, it's insane to ignore the possibility.

No, it is insane to worry about every possibility.

That's true, too. But you need to have a good reason for disregarding any given threat, at least some evidence that there's no substance behind it. I have not heard any such evidence regarding EMP, so I have to consider it at least a possible threat. Granted it's probably blown out of proportion and used as a football (like any threat regardless of legitimacy), but that doesn't change the reality.

I take a pessimistic perspective. It's better to take most threats seriously and be laughed at than get blindsided when something horrible happens that you weren't prepared for because you blew it off when someone warned you.

I mean, really which rogue state can or will possibly launch a nuclear missile over Switzerland?

FTFY

Seriously now, nukes are not toys available at every street corner. And the idea of rogue states is more or less fanciful. The dangerous thing is painting the picture of an imminent US invasion, which can keep the crazy people in power (and justify the need for nukes).

You don't really need a nuke to strike terror, just plain old conventional explosives. You are also never safe so long as you are in a crowd.

See: terror is not about killing people, but terrorizing them http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html

The article mentions the destruction that's caused by EMP. One of the foremost sources of EMP is a nuclear explosion, I don't think there are any conventional explosives that can 'turn on' an EMP.

If only it were so: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/hpm...

Anecdotally you can inject a surprisingly effective amount of noise into insufficiently-shielded systems with little more than the guts of a microwave oven.

I also would be curious about the efficiency of said weapon. Most of what research I believe the US did into these kinds of weapons revealed that they wouldn't be very effective. Just because it's nuclear doesn't mean it's going to magically transmit it's energy over a 1500 mile wide radius through the air, and jump past all of the plastic and metal "shielding" around your electronics and the wrapping around the electrical system. I'm not saying it's impossible, I just think that if it were that simple to transmit electricity efficiently to devices, maybe we would have good wireless electricity already.

Update: I'm sure these guys are at the center of the scare, so they may be biased, but here it is all the same: http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.p...

I love how an article in a US paper about US defense strategies and US lobbyists working to get US politicians to make choices that only affect the US, is filed under international.

The Atlantic isn't a paper, and on the website, people who write have a bucket (business, politics, whatever). This guy is an Iran scholar, so it's unsurprising his bucket is "International".

Ah, right. Thanks for the clarification.

I dunno, I think this is a somewhat legitimate issue. There's probably going to be another large solar flare on the scale of the Carrington event eventually and being prepared to recover from broken electronics and electrical systems in its wake isn't such a ridiculous notion.

I definitely do doubt that we're going to have to worry that much about terrorists using an EMP strike. I'd expect a nation with nuclear capability would be much more likely (like Schwarzkopf suggested doing in 91).

I hadn't heard of the Carrington event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859). Even in 1859 it caused havoc, so it's interesting to think what it would do to modern infrastructure. From the article:

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.

What would cause this?

Telegraph signals are sent by turning on and off the current in the wire. If the solar storm generates a sporadic electrical potential (rather than a constant unchanging one), then the receiver will get an apparent transmission, although it will be complete gibberish.

So how long is the solar storm duration?

>but the surge of electrical __particles__(???) produced by the bomb scatters down to Earth and affects electronics like a giant bolt of lightning

Where were the editors and fact checkers?? The __ __(???) was added for highlighting.

I'm surprised they didn't call it what it is -- electromagnetic radiation. Sounds much scarier to most people in our science-adverse society.

EMPs produced by nukes were in the news circa 1986. One producer of laptops computers, Grid Systems IIRC, advertised their computers as "EMP resistant" or some such and consequently suitable for use by defense personnel.

So the worry is about terrorists launching an ICBM and detonating it at high altitude? How many conventional cell-phone bombs can you make for the price of an ICBM? How many would it take to knock out the US power grid?

Still waiting for the GOP caucus on chemtrails or lizard people... what is it with the Republican party and paranoid conspiracies?

I find it funny that all of the end-of-technology-as-we-know-it criers never talk about bicycling and local farming.

I think they just finally saw the 007 movie Goldeneye.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-316.html

I didn't get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

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