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2009-01-09 Home Front: WoT

NYPD Wants to Jam Cell Phones During Terror Attack

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Posted by Anonymoose 2009-01-09 10:30|| || Front Page|| [11132 views ] Top

#1 Oh, that is fucking brilliant! Never mind the calls for 911 help, reporting of additional terrorist acts, calls to loved ones to get out of the area/let know you are ok.

Anyone else see major problems and the possibility of addition major casualties because of this shit, or am I just that jaded?

Posted by DarthVader 2009-01-09 10:51|| 2009-01-09 10:51|| Front Page Top

#2 Plus, the terrorists don't even have to use cell phones. Walkie-talkies or just plan time-table planning make the NYPD idea completely fucking worthless and more of a danger to civilians and responders.

Posted by DarthVader 2009-01-09 10:53|| 2009-01-09 10:53|| Front Page Top

#3 As I rememember on 9/11, the cellphone system got so overloaded that it pretty much ceased to function on it's own.

Posted by tu3031 2009-01-09 11:07|| 2009-01-09 11:07|| Front Page Top

#4 No, Emergency calls kick everything else off the cell.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2009-01-09 11:16|| 2009-01-09 11:16|| Front Page Top

#5 American police departments don't want people trying to help. They consider it interference, they want you to run away or hide under the bed until they handle it. You're right Darth, it's B.S. and it will probably cost more lives.

Posted by bigjim-ky 2009-01-09 11:38|| 2009-01-09 11:38|| Front Page Top

#6 Testimony of Under Secretary Charles Allen before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, "Lessons from the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks" Click HERE.

Posted by Besoeker 2009-01-09 11:46|| 2009-01-09 11:46|| Front Page Top

#7 They're looking at the Mumbai attacks. There's also known cell phone usage for coordination during anarchist 'protests', and during several riots.

Walkie-talkies? Perhaps. There's a problem with their use in highly-urban areas. Timetables are susceptible to be discovered. Besides, no plan ever fully survives contact with reality.

I guess it's a toss up between 911 calls, and terrorists' ability to coordinate attacks. Glad I don't have to make that decision.

Posted by Pappy 2009-01-09 11:56|| 2009-01-09 11:56|| Front Page Top

#8 Can't really speak for others, but our fire department uses cell phones for a couple of reasons: radio traffic so congested that to reach a specific person promptly, and sometimes the repeater tower is down and cell works. Also, sometimes things need to be said that shouldn't be heard on the scanners.

Second: isn't a lot of the evidence being gathered about Mumbai available because they were using cell phones? Can't they at least get a guestimate of the location of the baddies if they are using a c-phone?

Perhaps this might seem a bit rural, but something like Mumbai can be checked during Magic Hour? That being said, if I and a couple other dudes got a baddie pinned down it would be a lot easier to use a c-phone to call the PD and identify us and the baddie so to prevent friendly fire rather than have someone get to the nearest pay phone with a shtload of dimes.

Posted by swksvolFF 2009-01-09 12:06|| 2009-01-09 12:06|| Front Page Top

#9 I believe any traffic surge that overwhelms the capacity of the switch automatically triggers a mode that allows only emergency traffic anyway. I also believe this mode can be set manually by technical personnel.

This mode of operation came out of the day Kennedy was shot. So many people got on the phone that the telephone systems because saturated. This resulted in a requirement that switches have an emergency mode of operation where if the demand for service increases to a certain point, all but emergency traffic is dropped.

Take a town with 10,000 phones. It might have only 100 trunk circuits out with the reasoning being that less than 1% of those telephones will be in use talking to people outside the town at any given moment. If 101 people suddenly run to the phone to see if grandma has heard the news, nobody else can get out. That means hospitals, law enforcement, etc, can not call out. To avoid that problem, residential service is disabled in a surge of demand so that emergency services can still communicate. At least that *was* the state of things back in the early 1980s.

Posted by crosspatch 2009-01-09 12:14|| 2009-01-09 12:14|| Front Page Top

#10 In major emergencies cell systems are immediately overloaded and virtually nothing gets through (Katrina proved this to me.) Except text messages - that was the only time I personally ever sent any.

Posted by Glenmore">Glenmore 2009-01-09 12:21|| 2009-01-09 12:21|| Front Page Top

#11 *I'm sure there is a congregation in CO which would remind me dudettes can do just fine.

And of course our situation out here is completely different than a major metropolitan area. The system crosspatch mentions makes sense, perhaps that is what the proposal meant and didn't come across to me.

Posted by swksvolFF 2009-01-09 12:34|| 2009-01-09 12:34|| Front Page Top

#12 Um, read the article folks. This isn't about preventing calls to Grandma.

When lives are at stake, law enforcement needs to find ways to disrupt cell phones and other communications in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them.

This is in reponse to

the complications of media coverage that could (ed. - and did in Mumbai) disclose law enforcement tactics in real time

as well as to

The chaos the attacks created magnified the difficulty of mounting an appropriate response. First responders, in order to deal with such a crisis, must first and foremost have adequate information on what is occurring as well as the capability to mount a rapid and effective response that minimizes the impact of the attack. In Mumbai it was not immediately clear to authorities whether there were multiple attack groups or a single group. The attackers were able to exploit the initial confusion because of the indiscriminate firings to move on to new targets.

They used cell phones to coordinate that shift in targets. They avoided the authorities because of media real-time coverage showing what forces were doing what where.

Mumbai has been discussed as a new phase in terrorism - deliberate multiple coordinated attacks in urban centers designed to disperse and overwhelm government forces. In other words, terrorism morphing into urban guerilla warfare.

The attackers in Mumbai exploitated real time info from their own cell phones, the media, Blackberries and hostage phone accounts.

It's generally considered a useful thing to interdict your enemy's comms capability in such situations.

Posted by lotp 2009-01-09 14:25|| 2009-01-09 14:25|| Front Page Top

#13 Cellphones don't work like this - Jamming is stupid.. I have a patent in this area.
Look at it and see how to regulate cellphones...
Anybody want it -email the request and I will provide the patent # or a pdf...

The simple answer is look at the set of PSISTs broadcast and dynamically adjust them to suit your restriction needs. In addition all Public Service Cellphones (Police, fire, ambulance, spec ops etc.. ) should be registered as such and always use those PSIST values and not the general populations.

I know the CDMA one a little too well for my brain's good. GSM has similar stuff.

We came up with the patent after 911 and troubles at sporting events around the world.

Most cellular systems just set all the values to zero and configure it once. That's lazy work by the providers who charge so much for their "service"..

Posted by 3dc 2009-01-09 15:11|| 2009-01-09 15:11|| Front Page Top

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