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Comment by markovbot | Hacker News Reader

Deploying and maintaining radio jamming devices is _way_ more difficult and expensive than telling an ISP to shut down service.

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Nobody needs to jam anything, a starlink cpe needs to transmit. Try to operate one in xinjiang province, for instance, men with portable spectrum analyzers and guns will come to take it away and arrest you.

With a horn antenna tuned to the right band and a portable spectrum analyzer, finding a starlink, kuiper or oneweb cpe will not be technically difficult.

Also worth remembering that this kind of equipment, beyond being available to militaries, is also routinely in use by governments everywhere to enforce local RF regulations. Even in times of perfect calm, if you start illegally transmitting and disrupting legit radio activity, you can expect the local equivalent of FCC to quickly track you down.

Ku and mid ka, high ka band spectrum analyzers are no longer a $40,000 item anymore. I'm pretty confident I could put together a (starlink, kuiper, oneweb) locating kit for under $10k USD. The knowledge to run a spectrum analyzer just to locate on class of equipment could be taught to any moderately educated local police in one day.

Not much is using these bands anyway, especially in places like Iraq. Wouldn't it be even simpler to skip the spectrum analyzer and sweep the area with high-gain antennas tuned for these bands, the fox-hunting way?

Ku and ka aimed at the sky doesn't propagate like vhf, uhf. You'd need fairly high gain horn antennas to detect off-axial-aim emissions.

True, but jamming is even easier (and cheaper) -- particularly if you aren't especially concerned about incidentally jamming nearby frequencies.

Depends on the frequencies and types of antennas used. Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service (people do this by accident, that's why RF regulations exist everywhere). It's not that much of an expense for a government to set up a few antennas and make them put out half a megawatt of noise each.

sure, but they have to have the hardware for that ready to go, and they have to get people deploy each site and prevent it from being vandalized or disabled

Wideband noise generators are cheap and trivial to make. Giving them more power is a bit more tricky. If satellite internet becomes a norm, I'd be surprised if most armies didn't end up with one of them.

> Doesn't take much to disrupt a radio-based service

Particularly satellite signals, because they're very weak to begin with.

Indeed. High-gain antennas and some math trickery can compensate a bit (see e.g. GPS and its below thermal noise floor signals), but I don't think a commercial transceiver could in any way win with a 50kW signal on a broadcast antenna turned jammer on a nearby hilltop.

But iraq is quite a big country. So do you think some jammers are enough for the country, or would you have to deploy them on every big hill/mountain?

You don't need to deploy them on each hill because you don't need to cover the whole country. Just concentrate on the densely populated areas and surroundings. People both away from the protests and not taking part in organising anything are likely irrelevant to gov in this case.

You can also use directional antennas to find and destroy RF jammers

Thats why they would be probably based on military bases etc.

Can you destroy them with the antenna? Or is that just for locating it?

Such antennas however are an easy target for rockets, grenades, IEDs, car bombs... in a riot situation good luck defending the jammers.

What kind of protests are you imagining? With that kind of ordnance in use, it's no longer a protest but an all-out civil war.

Let's face it these things will be used mostly in situations which can at best be described that way. France's Yellow Vests, Hongkong, China and whatever is happening in India at the moment.

It's the first time I hear Yellow Vests or Hong Kong protests involving explosive ordnance deployed on either side.

That depends if you're counting tear gas grenades as explosives - I do. But even then, arson has been used as weapon in both conflicts, and a molotov cocktail is pretty easy to build, transport and throw.

The technology that "turns off" the internet is not, in any way, required to run the internet. A router that uses deep packet inspection can process fewer packets than one that simply routes.

When communication networks can be accessed wirelessly, the devices that can block those communications will simply become part of what we understand as standard communication equipment.

Way more difficult maybe than running a bash script but in real terms it's very doable.

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