One of the Russian generals was recently killed in Ukraine when he was located by Ukraine forces because he was supposedly using regular cell phone as Russian military communication equipment was broken.
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.
It's reasonable to assume that usg has very advanced capabilities in this field, possibly space-based. Also reasonable to wonder if those capabilities have been used recently.
USA shares their intelligence with significant delay. Moreover, language barrier (Russian to English, English to Ukrainian) doesn't help. An Ukrainian woman can report more and faster directly to Ukrainian army.
This information can be deducted. It's an easy job for a former intelligence officer. For example, in my battalion no one knows English language except me, so any intelligence in English language must be translated and reviewed first by a native Ukrainian. Together with time shift and night time, this creates 12-18 hour lag.
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.
> in my battalion no one knows English language except me, so any intelligence in English language must be translated and reviewed first by a native Ukrainian. Together with time shift and night time, this creates 12-18 hour lag
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.
It's probably safe to say a multitude of Western countries are passing all kinds of information to Ukraine through various back channels. As long as it's all plausibly deniable.
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.
They're sharing intelligence directly with the Ukrainian military, and are very open about doing it, just as they are about sending high tech missiles to them. Thy won't say what intelligence they're giving them obviously.
You US definitely has space based ELINT satellites and has been using them for a very long time. TRUMPET the ELINT satellite used in the 1990s has been declassified. I have no access to classified information but the US has been fighting a Global War of Terror (2003-2022+), in such a fight one would imagine rapidly geolocating satellite phones and mobile phone would be high on the wish list of US capabilities.
They knew the location of where he made calls previously as well, enough to booby trap it with an explosive:
> 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.
You may well be looking at an instance of 'parallel construction', at the time that article was written it was not yet known that the NSA had passed information regarding the sat phone to the Russians. I do believe that the plane was already airborne at the time the call was initiated because the Russians were on one side of that call and made a play for peace talks keeping him on the phone longer than would have happened otherwise.
> What satellite network did he use, and did the Russians have access to the encryption keys?
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.
Wikipedia claims “Russian reconnaissance planes in the area had been monitoring satellite communications for quite some time trying to match Dudayev's voice signature to the existing samples of his speech” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination)
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.
> if so, what? Slight frequency and/or timing deviations that fingerprint a specific device?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
This is why militaries like to use DSSS communication technologies. It makes detection by these kinds of systems very difficult. The state of the art is offline processing of recorded "noise" on HPC server farms. In a "launch/guide missile" context, this is way too late, even if you find a coherent signal.
> 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.
USRP came out in 2005. Nowadays wide coherent multi radio SDRs are readily available in portable form factor. Beginner setup (sadly limited to <1.8GHz) started shipping recently https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/krakensdr
His Wikipedia article claims that the Russians were trying to "match his voice signature", which implies being able to listen to the call itself somehow.
Inmarsat and 'not that we know for sure', but that wasn't all that important because it did not matter what the contents of the call were (there was a Russian official on the other side of the call so they already knew everything that was said and could ID him) but where exactly it came from and for that the Russians had built a special purpose tracker that allowed them to pinpoint the location precisely enough that a jet sent quickly could make it to the location of the call and fire a missile. Since the Russians knew exactly when the call started they could presumably pick it out of the background and I highly doubt there were many such phones operating in the area to begin with.
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.
That's something else, that's known plaintext analysis using cribs. If you know that a certain text may be present in the messages then you can try a bunch of different keys and stop searching if your decrypt contains that text to inspect for a 'hit'.
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.
No he's on dark side of the Moon. James Webb telescope secret mission was to deliver him there and they also created surrogate that imitates his poses on Earth. Russia plans to launch moon lander mission in July this year to kill him.
One tidbit I found in this that I never heard of before is the Kalyna encryption algorithm. This is apparently a Ukrainian block cipher that became the national standard in 2015: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalyna_(cipher)
That's an unusual take on the technical capabilities of the "old and experienced". I agree that it's generally hard to secure, but many "old and experienced" in governments are not against new technology because they understand it, but because they don't understand it.
Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
> [...] many "old and experienced" in governments are not against new technology because they understand it, but because they don't understand it.
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.
Whole Continuous Improvment process is devoted for such changes. Just follow the process. 5 why's, 3 alternatives, trials, statistically significant statistic, etc.
I recall watching the congressional hearing about the Iphone encryption thing that went on a while back and being incredibly surprised at their level of competency.
It somewhat rekindled my faith in politicians, compared to the daily media circus that only focuses on the worst of the lot.
I'd expect politicians who don't understand something to bring experts that does understand that thing, not to ignore everything they don't understand.
Bringing in actual experts would be at odds with the informal duty of a politician to appease to the donors. That's why you see such obscene amounts of absurdity out of modern politics - they don't ask actual experts for advice, they ask their top donors.
> Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
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.
> 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.
> Makes me wonder if your assertion is more based on the superficial media takes of the day, and not reality.
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.
I love technology as much as anyone, but at the end of the day we're humans, and experience in being a human comes with time. I think detracting from the wisdom of old men because they can't post memes on their smartphone is not the best thing we could do as a society.
I'm not saying because they are "old and experienced" they don't have any value nor wisdom. I'm simply saying that don't trust their opinion on things they don't understand. And if they don't understand something, I expect them to bring themselves up to speed on that thing, or bring in others who do understand that thing. I'm not expecting them to ignore that thing simply because they don't understand it, or worse, pretend like they do understand it when it's clear they don't.
They understand something which most of us have no grasp on and small chances of getting up-to-speed about, which is governing masses of people, with the realities of the situation.
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.
I'm sorry, I'm not making any pro statement for backstage of politics. I'm saying that people who are not exposed to this, could think that they could run a better society, but ultimately they wouldn't. Coming in with high technological hopes of societal improvements while closing a blind eye to how it's actually done at this point will never work, or so I feel.
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.
You were making a broader point about expertise in governing many people, which I would consider as a general positive quality. When you then reduce that expertise to what happens behind closed doors, it (to my mind) becomes explicitly about bribery and corruption. 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.
Unless of course you think both are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. In that case we just disagree.
> You were making a broader point about expertise in governing many people, which I would consider as a general positive quality.
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.
Experience comes from doing, not time. Just because someone is old doesn't mean they are experienced. It just means there is a greater chance they are experienced.
you expect them to be experienced in things that are your priority, but instead they are experienced in things that are their priorities, like corruption, political games to keep being in their comfy seats etc.
I don't expect them to be experienced in anything remotely related to my current life and work, instead I believe that corruption, political games, comfy seats, backdeals are how things are done today at a human level. Is it good? I don't think so. Can we just uplift this with technology and call it a day? I also don't think so.
Sounds like guy is proposing usage of Signal app, and maybe "flashing custom ROM",
"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.
The naivesness of the young lad mixed with enthusiasm, grown up in ubiquitous cell and smartphone era. He could use pack of saved money to put to his ear and make call during the war now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination