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Comment by lokimedes | Hacker News Reader

I’m in the same industry, and find these attempts of constraining technology through secrecy extremely naive by our legislators. I’d wager that if you already know how to operate an SDR, you properly will have little trouble with the fairly simple algorithm of measuring phase differences, filtering, CFAR etc. to make a passive radar. Synchronizing a bag of RTL-SDRs with a common oscillator is a trivial soldering task.

The cat went out of the bag the second SDRs jumped from DARPA R&D to DVB-T commodity.

That aside having a passive radar breadboard is not the same as a high-end passive radar where frequency/phase stability, use of wideband multi-source emitters, ultra-low noise amplifiers and N>>2 channels for increased angular resolution are integrated in an operational system. These systems that actually works, should be controlled.

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>These systems that actually works, should be controlled.

Why? to know your enemies and friends share this technology is to succor temperment in your foreign and domestic political and military policy. in other words: Parity encourages clarity. That the United States specifically sees "technological advantage" as a blank cheque to blow up things and people it does not like.

to put it short, the reason we dont park aircraft carriers near china, or mine their ports as we did Nicaragua, is due to a technological parity that forces our statesmen to sobering and challenging political discussion.

learning radar means empowering nations to guard their airspace and detect an adversary, an achievement the US will fight to keep many other nations from gaining as it would see their exodus from the duly designated "evil countries" list.

Radar is an interdisciplinary adventure in electrical engineering and the material sciences as well as the further reaches of mathematics and physics. it is an enriching pursuit that enables independence and growth through learning and mastry. its uses are not strictly warlike, much to the scorn of ITAR.

The world you believe exists, doesn't.

> to know your enemies and friends share this technology is to succor temperment in your foreign and domestic political and military policy.

Any modern superpower will jealously guard strategic military technologies.

Ergo, any country openly sharing their own will be faced with an adversary who doesn't, who will then have an advantage.

Furthermore, if you follow your line of reasoning to its end, we should dissolve the NNPT [0] and BWC [1], which would result in a much more dangerous world for everyone...

Now where the line is on what technologies fall into and outside of this delineation is a fair argument. And, I'm tempted to say, should often be at the mercy "of what's available commercially internationally" (in this case, cat seems out of the bag).

But saying that democratizing access to military-applicable technologies has a restraining effect on military adventurism doesn't seem like a cohesive argument.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Tr...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Conventio...

> Any modern superpower will jealously guard strategic military technologies.

Parts of it will, probably. But societies aren't homogeneous, and modern ones in particular are interwoven in ways that produce behaviors at odds with protectionism.

> But saying that democratizing access to military-applicable technologies has a restraining effect on military adventurism doesn't seem like a cohesive argument.

Ukrainian combatants use of commercial drones and anti-tank shells might be a great example of how this argument is 100% cohesive. If a neighbor has the parts and ingenuity to craft weapons upon threat...maybe you try to play nice with them and their toys instead lest those toys turn deadly.

> Ukrainian combatants use of commercial drones and anti-tank shells might be a great example of how this argument is 100% cohesive.

That's a circular argument, as it's observing that a country fighting a defensive war will use available arms in a defensive manner.

Russia is doing the same thing.

Moreover, what they are doing is 'very crude' and the higher end drones, equipment, targeting, munitions are not available to them largely because that information is guarded.

They aren't missing information. They are missing parts. That embargo is what's important.

Russians are not actually morons. Neither are Iranians for that matter.

There's a difference between being "morons" and lacking a self-sufficient industrial base.

As to the latter, there's a reason Russia is buying drones and SRBMs from Iran...

The Russians are not morons, but, they are not just missing the parts, they are behind on cutting edge issues. Not all, but many. Yes, the are 1st-class in that some of their gear is leading, but not that much of it. Iran, even more so. There is a ton of know-how they do not have in addition to the missing parts/industrial base/budget etc.

Legalize nukes. Bro, just give me your phone password and I'll give you mine. We should all just share all of our information and be friends. Information wants to be free.

A well-armed society is a polite society.

Like Somalia.

Also, I know this is a cheap putdown but it illustrates the fundamental problem with "deregulate everything!" notion. Humans are horrible at tempering emotions and optimize for short-term gain. If humans could self-control with guns everywhere, then they could just as easily avoid obesity, alcoholism, environmental catastrophe, road rage, wars, and so on. We could just will ourselves to do the right thing every time. Except obesity only hurts ourselves, whereas guns can hurt many others.

Not to go too far off topic, but as an ex-military person and a weapons owner who always carries concealed, I agree mostly with you. I don't think I would have always agreed, but American society has become extremely sick.

There are a multitude of issues going on and weapons probably aren't the only thing we should get rid of. I love a glass of wine or beer, but alcohol should probably go too. If we look at how many innocent people are killed every week by a drunk driver there is a case to be made. Good luck though - if you bring up banning alcohol to anyone in the US they will look at you like you are some kind of crazy person.

I offer no good solutions as I realistically see none, but will continue to teach my kids to treat others with kindness, along with proper decision-making and understanding the consequences of one's actions.

> alcohol should go, too

We’ve been down this road before. Also, it’s been my understanding that prohibition is what solidified the diseased attitudes of the violence organized crime in the US.

Like US.

Lol.

"Information wants to be free, man!" Steals music and movies

20 years later: "Let's sue Github"

This is not exclusive.

I guess you are talking about GitHub "stealing" code for its copilot service.

They didn't "free" anything. All the code they took is publicly available, they just took it and included it into proprietary software. And part of the code they took is under a license (GPL) that essentially says "you can do what you want with the code, as long as you share what you are doing with it", and they don't. Copilot is not public. Not only that, but by potentially suggesting snippets of GPL code in projects that are not open source, they encourage others to do the same.

Yeah man I get it. I was pointing out a good ol' case of "rules for thee but not for me".

Further, how do you even define "enemy" when it comes to how modern products get built?

An engineer who is a citizen of country A, but works in country B for a company whose headquarters is in country C, builds a product that gets used by a warrior of country D's army, stationed in country E.

Which country-to-country enemy relationships count when determining whether the engineer is supporting "his enemy"?

From personal experience, if you're building things that have itar restrictions, you just don't hire people that are in other countries.

Indeed, and beyond that, you are restricted from even DISCUSSING of SENDING any info to any party that is not authorized under the Joint Certification Program (JCP), and there are databases to check whether a person or program is authorized

It is sad to see all these upstream comments that are plainly ignorant and advocating either some ideal of free info exchange, or that it is not possible to contain the info because once it is in the commercial domain, everyone must have it.

While it is almost certain that there will be some leaks in almost any containment system, it is a massive fallacy to assume that therefore all efforts to contain tech transfer are futile. I've literally watched as likely agents from adversary nations attempted in public forums to get even mid-level tech info in my field. It all seemed very collegial until the source of the requests was noticed to be Iran and they were shut down.

Yes, this does often result in 'false positives' and restrict technology transfer to a harmless person. Maybe that guy really was just some student trying to learn (or, more likely, he was well funded and trying to get info for their drone program which is literally at this moment killing people in a democratic nation).

Too bad — the possible benefit isn't even in the same orders of magnitude from the potential harm. The expansionist authoritarian nations (Russia, Iran, China, NK, etc.) are literally waging war against the democracies of the world. We need to treat it as such. Yes, there are sincere colleagues behind those borders. The best we can do is to help them escape their awful governments. Helping them, and their awful governments advance only increases the risk that those awful governments will also rule us.

What about the many things that do not fall under ITAR? The NSA recently awarded[1] a $10B contract to Amazon Web Services. I don't think AWS was built entirely by Americans. US military routinely purchases commercial off the shelf products and services, and I doubt there is any effort to ensure they all were made entirely by US Citizens.

I work along side of Russians, Iranians, and Chinese teammates (no North Koreans, to my knowledge). I wonder how they would feel if my company decided to sell their widgets or services to the US Military, where those things could plausibly be used against their own families?

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/27/qemh-m27.html

AWS has a dedicated environment (GovCloud) for US government use. Only US citizens and green card holders are eligible to be granted access to it.

They don't (in my personal experience) seem to be concerned about the nationality of the developers – but if the developer is non-US, they won't be able to gain any access to the production instance. They have to hand the app over to a US person who will be responsible for installing/configuring/operating it. Sometimes (especially when there is a problem), the non-US developer may be telling the US SRE/sysadmin/etc what command to type, but still a US person has to be the one doing the typing.

And that's just non-classified systems, for classified systems the rules are even tougher. I remember once a colleague was writing some code on a classified project (actually for the Australian government, but this story could just as easily have happened in the US) to call some API, he told me he was having some problems. I asked him if he could show me his code. "Sorry, I can't, it is classified." "How can your code to call that API be classified?" "Everything we write while on-site is automatically classified, and trying to get it declassified is too hard". He agreed he'd go home, and rewrite the problematic code from memory, and then give that to me. In the process of doing so, he worked out what he was doing wrong, he didn't need my help in the end.

Indeed, there is plenty of stuff that is non-ITAR. ITAR, AFAIK, is basically for more advanced tech.

There is also a set of information that is not classified, but is called Controlled Unclassified Information. That info, designs, drawings, specs, tech data, etc. is all controlled, even though it is not "classified". Same restrictions — must check first before communicating any of it to a non-US person or organization. It is a bit of a PITA when we need to make parts as a subcontractor that are CUI, but need to send those out for another process like painting or coating, to a non-JCP/ITAR-registered org. Funny that we can send the part, but not the drawings.

I'm sure there's plenty of nonclassified and non-CUI non-ITAR stuff. The first thing that comes to mind is clothing, food, basic transport vehicles, fuel, etc.

The US Navy routinely sends aircraft carriers and other warships near China. They are obviously not parked; a carrier has to sail into the wind to conduct flight operations.

We tried to do passive radar for detecting high energy cosmic rays in 2009 (GNU Radio/USRP) that turned into passive-ish when the team brought a 20kW Harris NTSC Ch 2 (52Mhz) transmitter we decommissioned as part of the move to ATSC.

We had a hard time with cosmic rays (relativistic doppler is fun), but meteors, planes, and lightning strikes were common sources of unwelcome signal.

I spent an evening at a star party chatting with someone that spent a bit of time at the big radio facility on the east coast that is famous for having total radio silence in the area surrounding it. (too early in the morning to remember the name.) One of the stories was specific to listening to meteors from well past the horizon from where they were, and then talking to someone that was able to confirm them visually. This same individual was also previously in the military spending time playing with radars. The stories from that time were even more entertaining. Steering the beam to mess with the sheriff's car, and a few other stories that seemed so crazy I'm still not sure he wasn't just seeing what he could get us to believe.

That'd be the Green Bank Observatory[1], located within the US National Radio Quiet Zone [2] where radio emission is tightly managed. In the highest sensitivity zones near observation facilities, only diesel engines are allowed in motor vehicles as the spark plugs found in gas vehicles effectively constitute a spark-gap transmitter. [3][4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Observatory

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter

[4]: https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven...

> only diesel engines are allowed in motor vehicles

One would assume mechanical diesels at that, since the piezo injectors in common-rail systems require almost as big a bang as a spark plug.

Once I rescued a broken-down Citroën CX that had experienced a complete electrical failure, by removing the little brass slug from the injector pump and screwing the valve body back down, and then push starting the car. Pop the clutch in second and - clattaclattaclattaVROOOM, off it went.

Cue a hilarious 15 seconds or so where the power steering, suspension, and crucially braking system had absolutely no hydraulic pressure and I was piloting an unguided unbraked 5mph "missile" across the yard...

Haha, love the story. Always wanted one of those Citroen sedans. It sadly feels like that culture of being able to get out of a jam with one's car with a bit of simple mcgyvering disappears a bit more every day in modern times.

And yes, you're right, mechanical diesels only in the most sensitive areas. You can see some delightful photos of those in the blog post at [4] above :)

Did it have an electric hydraulic pump for these? Surely the steering and brakes still worked, just required 10x the force or something?

When I was a kid, my motor cycle had resistors in the spark plug wires that aged out and turned to a fine dust, I could not source replacements, either the resistor or the wires, so I replaced them with brass rod. It had a noticeable effect on TV reception over short distances.

Ha, that unlocked a memory of removing those resistors on my motorcycle to get more power. I did not get more power but when I explained what I did to the local mechanic I did get a valuable lesson in how combustion works.

What are the supposed dangers?

I can think of turning drones into self-guided missiles, obviously intercepting from the front since they are slow, but you can track planes visually too.

And if this is to prevent foreign states, I'm sure in a couple years you'll be able to buy this stuff on AliExpress.

https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600484445946/Silent-Sentry-Pa...

The dangers are the capability to intercept stealth cruise missiles.

Which appear to be the future weapon du jour for degrading integrated AA systems from outside A2/AD bubbles.

The other danger is, by removing the ability for people to experiment and understand the tech, we will lose out to places which can. They will have the engineers, and we will have effectively stopped ours from becoming so.

Defense contractors continue to devote huge resources to experimenting with and understanding all forms of radar technology. You just don't read about it on HN.

Not just supposed dangers — real danger.

The saying the mil guys have about using active radar is "he who lights up first gets smoked". As in you turn on your radar, and it'll be a beacon seen in milliseconds, located in a few more milliseconds, and then receiving an incoming missile. Radar has to be passive, using ambient RF frequency 'noise', in any modern military operating theater to survive.

So, yes, keeping passive radar technology as maximally secret as possible among the world's democracies retains an advantage over the expansionist autocracies, which are increasingly belligerent, from Russia attacking in Europe, China making louder noises about attacking Taiwan (sending fighter jets to the shore today), NK launching missiles near Japan... yeah, we need to keep an edge.

Why not just separate the emitters and receivers a bit more, then?

Wouldn't it work to put some cheap drones or other hardware that "light up" and send nice pulses out for you to get info from that are far enough away from your real position, or am I missing something?

If they're cheap enough, it wouldn't be very worthwhile to destroy them I'd think. I mean it'd probably be in your interest to let them waste million dollar missiles on hundred dollar drones if you could get them to do so.

Or does something like this exist that I'm just unaware of?

My understanding is that GSM towers are very predictable and well located emitters.

Isn’t this what AWACS and datalinks are for?

It isn't my area, but I think you're on the right track.

Most radar systems have already (for decades, AFAIK) separated the emitter from the control panel with at least a long cable, so when the emitter gets smoked, at least the operators are more likely to survive.

The USAF & DARPA are already publicly working on aerially deployed drone swarms, and it would not surprise me in the slightest if a swarm of theater emitters was among the goals (but I've got no inside info to share).

You're getting dangerously close to an idea I had back in 1991, when I was working at the Defense Information Systems Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon. I talked to our security officer, and he put me in touch with a guy from the intelligence side of the house. I explained my idea, he said they already had something in that space, and that I shouldn't say anything more about it to anyone.

I never heard anything further on that subject.

To this day, it is one of two things I don't talk about.

You're failing very hard at not talking about it, but thank you for the interesting story.

It's a pretty logical step, I would think lots of people have come up with a similar idea.

> To this day, it is one of two things I don't talk about.

What's the other thing?

It's called bistatic radar.

That's not really accurate. Militaries continue to heavily use active radar despite the risks of detection. Passive radar has some potential use cases, but in many situations there won't be enough ambient RF energy to do target tracking precise enough to employ weapons. This particular applies at sea and in rural areas.

Modern low-probability of intercept radar obviates a lot of those concerns. Technology has advanced way beyond transmitting a steady sine wave on a constant frequency that is easy to detect and track.

Keeping passive radar technology secret from potential adversaries is certainly worth doing. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's some magical technology. In the real world it has only very limited value.

The dangers are to modern stealth aircraft like the F-35. They optimize the stealth to work in the ~5-20GHz range.

They are easy to pick up in the UHF and lower band, although at these lower frequencies much accuracy is lost.

This is how NATO lost an F-119 in Yugoslavia. The old Russian system used ~0.9GHz frequencies and a very large explosive warhead. That combined with operator skill and NATO being overconfident resulted in a loss of the aircraft, although not the pilot.

Disclaimer: not a weapons specialist. I'm not sure passive radar has much use as missiles and such. But it should be quite useful defensively (radar is useful for detecting fast moving incoming objects), so I don't think it's very justified to put it under arms control.

Drones for instance can be guided with off-the-shelf technology against slow moving targets.

I'm definitely not absolutely against arms control, the extreme case of course is nuclear proliferation. I think it's best to keep nuclear secrecy and try to break nuclear proliferation and even disarm countries as much as possible. It's just too dangerous, hopefully an unnecessary risk and unnecessary technology for a peaceful world.

If the goal was to state that potentially-ITAR technology cannot be hosted at GitHub nor sold to consumers, that message was received loud and clear.

we've already been through this with crypto in the bernstein case

code is speech

in the us the 1st amendment protects your right to publish code

selling to consumers is a different case of course

disclaimer, i'm not related to krakenrf

It's very analogous to regulating certain common chemicals as "controlled precursors." It's not that the government wants people not to have these substances, or that they want to restrict their use in making useful, non-controlled substances; rather, it's that they want to know who has these chemicals, so as to be able to attribute and trace any controlled substances that might be produced.

In this case, they want to have a list of everyone who's playing around with radar systems, because any such person could — entirely just by taking the commonly-available tech and advancing their own private understanding from there — become a fully-fledged radar engineer, and build a system that could be interesting to terrorists et al.

> it's that they want to know who has these chemicals,

This is why we have the police around farms a lot, to see how safely the diesel and nitrate fertiliser is locked up. A legacy of the Republican violence of the 1970s to 1990s, when we had a lot of keen "amateur chemists" bimbling about in white vans at night...

If they were particularly consistent about this, they would have to watch a lot of electrical engineers.

You can't copy-paste controlled precursors.

Making knowledge illegal (a la nuclear "born secret") is a dead end. I'm pretty sure these guys would email their stuff to anyone who asked still.

It would be naive under the assumption that the intended goal is secrecy. If the goal would be simply "legislative control over a subject in case of unforseen events" it works exactly as desired.

In case anyone is curious, I believe the acronyms used here are the following:

SDR: software-defined radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio

CFAR: constant false alarm rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate

RTL-..: a prefix (likely standing for "RealTek Limited") used by Realtek in its chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek

DARPA R&D: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

DVB-T: digital video broadcasting — terrestrial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T

I think you naively underestimate the value of such skills and how easy it is to do this for some actors like terrorist groups. They do not have easy access to people like maybe you who are interested in it and internally motivated to do it. Because people at some intelligence, education and skill level are much less likely to join terrorist organisations.

People who join terrorist organisations are usually ones that do not have many other options.

The government knows they are fighting a loosing battle but the idea is to make it harder and delay development, not necessarily ensure the knowledge is not available at all.

I read multiple times during the invasion of Iraq that the opposite was true, that engineers greatly were over-represented in terrorist cells - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....

Man, that's an interesting read

> For their recent study, the two men collected records on 404 men who belonged to violent Islamist groups active over the past few decades (some in jail, some not). Had those groups reflected the working-age populations of their countries, engineers would have made up about 3.5 percent of the membership. Instead, nearly 20 percent of the militants had engineering degrees. When Gambetta and Hertog looked at only the militants whose education was known for certain to have gone beyond high school, close to half (44 percent) had trained in engineering

https://web.archive.org/web/20220106004629/https://www.nytim...

If a foreign country invades you it pisses allot more than radicalists off

I mean consider how many engineers in the US work for either the government or a contractor for the government. Folks who studied Computer Engineering or electrical engineering, especially things like RF, control systems, high speed embedded systems, etc work mostly in the government space, as the private space has a small portion hardware/embedded and a large portion of web technology.

Many of those engineers create weapons. Deadly missiles, jets, drones, robots, and other tools to maintain military superiority.

And many of those completely ignore the implications of their career.

Engineers are people who are driven to find and implement solutions. Sadly we don't always agree with the correctness of the chosen solutions.

There seem to be two concurrent drivers there -- first, that Mideast terrorism tended to attract young men who lacked economic and social opportunities despite being credentialed, and, second, that engineering disciplines are overrepresented amongst persons holding rigid and authoritarian beliefs (a replicated finding, but it should be stressed that this does not indicate that most engineers are authoritarians!). See, e.g., Gambetta and Hertog, "Engineers of Jihad" (2018: Princeton University Press).

When you have to denigrate your opposition to understand why they think differently than you do, you are understanding nothing.

> Because people at some intelligence, education and skill level are much less likely to join terrorist organisations.

> People who join terrorist organisations are usually ones that do not have many other options.

Don't you rather believe that if the government makes life hard for engineers (legal redtape etc.), it makes such people who, as you claim, have many options more likely to choose the "become a terrorist" option because of their increased hate for the government?

> Don't you rather believe that if the government makes life hard for engineers (legal redtape etc.), it makes such people who, as you claim, have many options more likely to choose the "become a terrorist" option because of their increased hate for the government?

no, I'd imagine that mostly it's things like religion, having a foreign power occupy and invade your country, or having a military junta seize control of your government and displace the democratic processes.

like we even have statistics about this stuff, it's measured and we know what the answers are here. domestically it's alt-right extremism (neo-nazis and associated ideologies, with some religious extremism rolled in), followed by religious extremism, everything else is a rounding error. Internationally, true terrorism is pretty much only religious extremism. In cases like the iraq war or myanmar, it's people fighting the junta/occupying power.

https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/te...

https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-u...

like jeez what a HN answer that is... thinking that insufficient libertarianism and "too much red tape" is the cause of terrorism. absolute rorschach blot moment, those are the causes that YOU think could radicalize YOU.

Which is kinda sad, like, really? You could see yourself (ok, not "you" but hypothetically you could see ""other people"") killing over red tape? seriously? in the most libertarian nation on the planet?

man we live in a fucking society, don't we. one where people low-key think actual civil war, neighbor against neighbor, is better than red tape...

Correct. This is the original American ideology, persisting since the declaration of independence. If it seems absurd, you may wish to recalibrate your notions of absurdity to the prevailing reality.

> People who join terrorist organisations are usually ones that do not have many other options

As the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Being an engineer doesn't make you apolitical or free of ambition.

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