The phones of Ukrainian president Zelensky
electrospaces.net
electrospaces.net
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination
In general Ukraine seems to be doing a lot of cell tracking/intercepts for intelligence purposes there as Russian military personnel (whose cells were taken away before the invasion) robs the civilians of the phones and are using the phones for calls home as well as among themselves.
Very few people can credibly speak to what the U.S. is sharing with whom on what timeframe. Perhaps nobody.
Moreover, Ukrainians know Russian tactics, language, technical capabilities, or even know them in person. We also have relatives in RF, which can text us when rockets are launched, for example.
USA intelligence is not important at this stage of war, when everything changes every few hours.
First off, thank you for your service.
To your point, yes, one can anticipate that mean lag for that intel stream to your battalion. But that doesn't describe all intelligence streams. Translating every troop-movement report into Ukranian so it can be read faster would be a waste. But messaging e.g. the coordinates and description of the specific tank a general happens to be in to a nearby battalion with a few Javelins handy?
More broadly: while there may be intentional and unintentional delays in various intelligence streams, nobody can credibly make a blanket statement about what is being shared with whom. The circumstances in which U.S. intelligence shines are closely-guarded state secrets.
With operations in the Middle East now basically "over" and a nuclear threat looming, I'd imagine it's all hands on deck for most Western intelligence agencies wrt to Russia. And rightly so.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/04/politics/us-ukraine-intel...
[0]: Trumpet (satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trumpet_(satellite)
> The Russians did have the technology to track a satellite phone call but Dudayev never spoke long enough on the phone for a plane to get airborne and find him to launch an attack.
> A Russian unit on the ground, however, did identify the gully as a place which Dudayev visited and planted a booby trap bomb there.
> A combination of events leading up to Dudayev's death worked well in favour of the Russians.
> When Dudayev made his fateful call from the gully, a plane was already airborne.
> Once it was known that Dudayev was in the gully, the booby trap bomb was detonated and moments afterwards a rocket hit its target.
Dudayev "was killed by a signal-guided missile" [1], an anti-radiation missile [2]. That doesn't require compromising the call's encryption any more than taking out a radar installation requires cracking its track algorithm.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120816090458/http://www.foreig...
If that’s correct, it required decryption.
However, that Wikipedia page continues “Dudayev's phone signature and coordinates were also reportedly passed to the Russians by the NSA after U.S. President Bill Clinton's meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin”, so it may have been specifics of his phone (if so, what? Slight frequency and/or timing deviations that fingerprint a specific device?), not of his voice.
How many satellite phones were operating in Chechnya at the time? It's not like the handset was beam forming or performing fancy modulations to look like static.
In the right frequency--in publicly known frequencies--the handset would shine like a torch.
To clarify: if a satellite phone of a particular manufacturer uses a known set of frequencies and is talking to a specific satellite and you know the rough area where you are looking for phones from that manufacturer you can filter out the rest of the electromagnetic radiation and then all you are left with is instances of phones of that type (or other devices using the same set of frequencies).
It's not quite as easy as picking out a torch at night and to get accurate coordinates you will need to do some more measurements and some math but this is all definitely doable, especially if the call lasts for more than a few minutes if the device you use to scan for the phone is mobile (such as on a plane) because with every passing second your baseline is getting longer (and thus your accuracy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding
Radio amateurs do this sort of thing for sport, it's called fox hunting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmitter_hunting ), and with experienced hunters it can be done pretty quickly if the target is stationary.
I've done some digging and this pretty important information (if true) was added unsourced in this edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dzhokhar_Dudayev&...
It probably should be removed without any kind of reference to corroborate it, it's been more than 15 years since that edit has been made and there is zero evidence for this.
Probably but not _necessarily_ - if someone's vocal cadence was somehow visible in the encrypted modulation then that could be an identifier.
Nowadays we have enough compute power in a laptop with connected SDR to render this moot security by obscurity.
Can you provide some sort of example of how a laptop+SDR was used to discriminate something equivalent to a military-grade DSSS signal (i.e. one in which the pseudo noise function and its parameters are classified)?
If you know the PN function, I agree that it is trivial to detect/recover the transmission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9RkPt6uVQ4 now add ability to do phase correlation
His big mistake was to be on the phone for just a little bit longer than it took for the plane to get there, on that day he spoke on the phone for 3 times as long as normal, 15 minutes as opposed to normally 5 or less.
Nobody said that encryption will save you from enemy knowing who you are, where you are, who you talking to, etc.
Like Nazis always ending their encrypted communications with 'Heil Hitler' making reversing the keys easier lol.
Although, for modern encrypted telecoms, I doubt this is as easy.
Network analysis or traffic analysis is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
It allows for instance for the de-anonymization of network nodes based on known nodes and it allows for determining which nodes in the network are more important than others.
Thats a classic, you never read that "old and experienced" official propose smartphones. Maybe they know something that young doesn't.
Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
I think the thought that perhaps they've seen a proposed "huge improvement" many times before and need a little bit more than breathless enthusiasm to endorse it has merit.
Has anyone done some good study / writing on the subject?
I recall, as a young know-it-all, laughing at that one Congress Critter for his "internet is a series of tubes" comment - but as I've gotten older I really just look at most of these things as plumbing data such that I'm not all that sure he was wrong.
Makes me wonder if your assertion is more based on the superficial media takes of the day, and not reality.
He wasn't just comparing bandwidth to plumbing
> an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Again, it's based on watching hearings and other media released by my government when they are talking about technology.
I'm in no way laughing at them for not understanding something. But I am laughing at those who pretend to understand something, or who simply ignore something because they don't understand it. It's not that hard to find experts in certain subjects, and it's really bad that they don't leverage this more for subjects they don't understand.
How do you even know they don’t understand, misunderstand, don’t have conflicting agendas or just don’t like an idea? It’s easy to assume, especially when one has never stepped in the backstage of politics.
You were making a good point until you ended up here. The backstage of politics is essentially bribery in it's many legal and not so legal forms.
I would like a bit more context into how you feel my mentioning of backstage of politics, which is indeed how the world is run today, is detrimental to my point that old men have experience in exactly this.
Unless of course you think both are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. In that case we just disagree.
I guess this also depends where you lead them. Personally I don't consider it a positive quality, I consider it a dangerous quality.
> When you then reduce that expertise to what happens behind closed doors, it (to my mind) becomes explicitly about bribery and corruption.
I'm sure bribery and corruption are a big part of backdoor deals, but I'm sure also some discussions which would be impossible in the public space are taking place. Could you orchestrate a coup towards a hostile regime out in the public? Could you actually state your support of gay people when in a conservative party? There are a lot of things that can't be said in public space, but must be said in private in order to advance society. I feel.
> Perhaps folks with experience have more experience with that as well, but it's not germane to their general competence in dealing with groups of people.
I feel it is. I've seen a new wave of politicians in my country, they rode off on the excitement of the population for a new political force, but once they managed to get an ounce of power, their holier than thou attitude made it impossible to work with them and kinda crashed them in the polls. They are still getting my vote as they're against the status-quo, but damn it I wish they were a bit more 'backroom' in some aspects.
> Unless of course you think both are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. In that case we just disagree.
This is actually where I stand. I am also considering the historical context of my country where in more totalitarian times, a bit of backroom dealing managed to create some form of space for revolution to happen.
Disagreement is healthy and I thank you for stating your views clearly. I hope I managed to do the same.
That chance also increases when they are part of a committee.
That chance also increases when the ‘adversaries’ are tech-moguls trying to push for their version of utopia.
Ultimately, I’m not sure we can realistically accuse most political dinosaurs of just passing time for a couple of decades.
Dubilet makes some insightful points:
- That having a centralized legacy system creates a single point of vulnerability, unlike peer-to-peer encryption.
- That the app can be installed on a special-issue smartphone to avoid hardware backdoors and risk of compromise from other apps.
- That the status quo (politicians use chat apps anyway for lack of an equally convenient certified option) isn't secure anyway.
"special issue smartphone"? Good luck on that, producing your own smartphone . And you are going to need to produce it to avoid hardware and software backdoors.