Several NATO members accuse Moscow of deliberately jamming positioning signals

GPS is no longer reliable around the Baltic Sea and northern Norway. Interference in the Global Positioning System (GPS), which has affected all NATO members bordering Russia for two years, has worsened in recent months. Alternative systems to GPS have had to be activated on tens of thousands of flights and the main Finnish airline has suspended one of its routes due to the problem, which is also disrupting maritime navigation. Several of the affected countries accuse Moscow of intentionally jamming signals with its electronic warfare systems.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, GPS interference has been recurring in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These types of disruptions are common in and around conflict zones. Even so, in the last half year, the airspace of the three Baltic countries — in addition to that of Finland, Sweden and Poland — has been much more affected than at the beginning of the war. What’s more, thousands of ships have been navigating the Baltic without GPS since December, when the Russian army’s electronic warfare began in the Kaliningrad enclave. And in remote northeastern Norway, near Russia’s Northern Fleet base — which has eight of the 11 Russian submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles — outages are almost daily.

    • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It’s just a big antenna. If you can broadcast a large signal on all the same frequencies you can drown out the other signals. It takes lots of power. More targeted approaches can make it more efficient, that probably where most of the money went.

    • assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Igor Shushko should not be trusted for OSINT. He has claimed repeatedly that the FSB was going to stage a coup, etc. since the beginning of the invasion. He also just makes stuff up pretty frequently.

      He’s in the “completely ignore” category in the OSINT community.

    • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      They say I can download the PDF.
      maybe I’m too blind or stupid for X/Twitter, but I at least can’t download/see it on mobile.

      Anyone having said PDF to actually see the details?

  • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Imagine that kinda sucks for a pilot. A ship is at least moving fairly slowly, so you have time and plenty of space to do your charting the old fashioned way. Might even be kinda fun for the first few times, a chance to actually use that skill for once. A plane would have a tougher time of it, unless it has some inertial navigating system or something.

    • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Lots of lighthouses don’t operate anymore. Ships crashing into thing in the night was a big problem before GPS.

      There are other navigation methods, radio towers etc. But GPS is a reliable works everywhere system, outside of malicious actors.

    • _edge@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      unless it has some inertial navigating system or something.

      Don’t all commercial planes have this?

      • darvocet@infosec.pub
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        6 months ago

        There are other ways to navigate and fly other than gps and it’s basically just as easy to do. It’s just not quite as accurate and relies on stations on the ground which have been decommissioned over the years as gps has become more prevalent. VOR to VOR flying airways and then using ILS type approaches as an example.

          • darvocet@infosec.pub
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            6 months ago

            Well they are all radio signals even the ILS and localizers. In the US our 5G network interferes with radio altimeters. A person at home can spoof airplane traffic that would show up in cockpits. Bad actors could cause havoc anywhere.

          • darvocet@infosec.pub
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            6 months ago

            They could but you wouldn’t want to do that for all planes. Planes follow standard departure and approach paths so the controllers know where everyone is and should be going. Moving a few planes around no biggie but if you’re doing radar vectors for everyone that will slow things down dramatically.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              6 months ago

              That makes sense. I was thinking more about emergencies because it says outages are almost daily, which means not consistent.

      • Inductor@feddit.de
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        6 months ago

        They do, but compounding errors are always a problem with inertial navigation.

        Instead of GPS, they can use fixed radio beacons like VOR and TACAN (which I think are both just US systems, but there are similar systems around the world and at major airports). This is basically the system that was in use before GPS.

        EDIT: grammar

        • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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          6 months ago

          VOR is international, my local airport has one. TACAN is military only (though some can be used as a VOR by civilian aircraft), also international, and by the way originally British as per Wikipedia.

        • spirinolas@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I understood everything in your comment! All those years playing FSX instead of going to school finally paid off!

  • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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    6 months ago

    I mean… It’s obviously electronic warfare from Russia.

    There isn’t a need to “accuse” and nobody will listen to a denial.

    This is just deliberate communication disruption, and prequel memes aside, we all know what disrupted communications leads to.

    And they started with Ukraine, thinking it an easy target.

    When I read an article the other day about laser point-to-point communication with a sattelite , I immediately thought to myself “oh this probably isn’t good, widespread sattelite communication disruption is about to be put to widespread use, why else would this be necessary when current systems have much higher bandwidth” and you know if you’re reading a news article about it, it’s been put to use by the DOD for years.

    Am I sounding like a conspiracy theorist? Genuine question, because that seems reasonable in the modern world to me.

        • NoIWontPickAName@kbin.earth
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          Sometimes people really don’t know.

          Thank you for answering the question.

          I hope you have a bad day for being an asshole about it though

          • PugJesus@kbin.social
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            I’m familiar with Linkerbaan. Pattern recognition is not an offense.

            EDIT:

            All from our dear friend - took me only a few minutes of searching. Not faulting you for not searching, that would be ridiculous to expect of someone who didn’t know the poster, but this isn’t just “SOMEONE ASKED A QUESTION ABOUT RUSSIA!” it’s “Someone with a long history of playing ‘bothsides’ and putting forth bullshit assertions and feigning ignorance is doing it on one of the subjects they constantly do it on”.

            Israel has already killed more civilians in 45 days than Putin during his entirely Ukraine war.

            The west is commiting actual genocide right now. Don’t mis use the word for Putin.

            Ukraine is doing plenty of terrorism against their occupier. Your double standards are showing.

            Reminder that israel had already killed more civilians than Putin did since the start of the Ukraine war. Biden is literally worse than Putin.

            You fuck off genocide apologist. When it came to Ukraine you were all calling for the Russians to assasinate Putin.

            Now that it’s about non white people you’re literally saying you’re gonna vote for the genocide guy. Fucking racist hypocrites.

            The war crimes Russia committed in Bucha pale in comparison to the complete genocide israel is committing right now.

            America is already talking about dropping support for Ukraine.

            Ukraine was just a proxy to exhaust Russian resources with.

            Now that the entire country is in ruin America is going to pull support and leave them for dead like they’ve done with all their other proxies.

            Even the Russians had far greater precision than this when attacking Ukraine.

            You’re in for a treat when you start reading about the Azov brigade. They’ve got literal Nazi’s.

            It’s so sad that all you have is whataboutism isn’t it? And the worst part is that Genocide Joe isn’t even the lesser of evils anymore. He is now the worse evil.

            Genocide Joe is the person able to stop this. Instead he removes all war crime restrictions on the weapons and protects israel with all his power. He is actively committing mass genocide.

            A reminder that Genocide Joe has killed more than twice as many civilians than Putin in Ukraine already.

            Not to mention the amount of children murdered by this barbaric Zio Nazi

            Not to forget Ukraine is slowly getting ditched too so the “world powers” are losing that one as well.

            Israel is like 10000% more genocidal than Russia.

            But anyone not supporting Ukraine with weapons against Russia obviously has to go because that’s very “unfreedom” of them.

            The Kurds welcome Ukraine in joining the long list of groups abandoned and left in ruins by the US after being promised support to fight their enemy as long as needed.

            Biden needs to focus on committing Genocide now. He has no time for Ukrainians beating an invasion. Surely Zeloonsky understands, he unconditionally supports israel’s genocide himself.

        • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Everyone can use Glonass or GPS or the Baidu thingy from China. They publicly broadcast the timestamps there’s no encryption on GPS stuff. Why would Russia limit themselves to just their own?

          • PugJesus@kbin.social
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            Because Russian systems run almost exclusively off GLONASS, and GPS is owned by the USA. Russia has a history in the Ukrainian War of… get this… jamming GPS signals but not GLONASS.

            You wanna explain to me your thought process over Ukraine jamming GPS signals, the same GPS system they use, over their European allies in order to combat Russian GLONASS?

            You can stop JAQing off any time.

            • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              The combined spectrum is called GNSS and you can get receivers that combine all five for get this…

              20 bucks.

              Russia would not using the other spectrums because… ?

              Are you okay by the way? Someone asking a very reasonsonable question doesn’t mean they are pro Russia.

              • PugJesus@kbin.social
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                The combined spectrum is called GNSS and you can get receivers that combine all three for get this…

                20 bucks.

                Russia would not using the other spectrums because… ?

                Because that’s not how integrated systems work in a massive institution like a government or military. Jesus fucking Christ.

                Are you okay by the way? Someone asking a very reasonsonable question doesn’t mean they are pro Russia.

                You really want me to trot out your long history of this bootlicking shite?

                • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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                  6 months ago

                  Yeah nobody there would think to ever update anything. Ever. Especially not those suicide drones from Iran. Which must have been developed 50 years ago.

                  GNSS is all public broadcast. There is no encryption. Nothing prevents anyone from using the extra signals of the others.

                  If all you can do is spam ad hominems then don’t bother responding.