World Surveillance Group Inc (fka WSGI)

[rattlewatch]

Another WASP mention in the article below "How America’s Soldiers Fight for the Spectrum on the Battlefield". This time it's for signal jamming rather than Beyond line of sight comms.

Seperately have also read the Dod is looking to go back to Loran rather than using GPS to stop the threat of dronejack.

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"These newly minted spectrum warriors found that their skills were much in demand in Afghanistan, where the Taliban recovered from its initial defeat in part by learning how to hack mobile technology—not only to detonate IEDs but also to maintain communications while on the run. To stay in touch with one another in the nation’s hinterlands, Taliban operatives often extend the range of existing mobile networks. “They pay some guy 10 bucks and say, ‘Go climb up that mountain over there and put up this repeater,’” says Brian Filibeck, a chief warrant officer who picks candidates for the electronic warfare school at Fort Sill. Many Taliban ambushes were planned using those simple bundles of antennas and amplifiers."

"US forces had to rapidly come up with solutions to this challenge. Tasked with dominating the spectrum in regions largely inaccessible to ground vehicles, the Army built Ceasar, a modified version of a Navy jammer that can be affixed to a C-12 Huron turboprop airplane. Ceasar can sense the emissions of the Taliban’s repeaters, then jam their signals. The Army is now trying to miniaturize the system so it can be loaded onto unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Gray Eagle or even the hand-launched Wasp."

"The Taliban and its ideological brethren are constantly trying to improve their spectrum-warfare weaponry. Chief among their goals is to reduce the threats posed by American drones. In 2009, US forces discovered that Iraqi insurgents were using a commercial program called SkyGrabber to intercept video feeds from Predator UAVs. The software allowed the insurgents to use ordinary satellite dishes to capture data as it was being transmitted back to base; because the data was unencrypted, SkyGrabber was then able to convert it into watchable media files. The US has since begun encrypting the drones’ video feeds. But according to a classified report leaked to The Washington Post by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and then published last September, al Qaeda is also trying to figure out how to sever the links between drones and their human operators, who can be stationed half a world away. One of the organization’s most promising lines of inquiry has involved the construction of GPS jammers, which could theoretically be used to corrupt a drone’s navigation and missile-guidance capabilities. Analysts with the Defense Intelligence Agency observed that such systems, if further developed, “probably would be highly disruptive for US operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

read the rest here:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/spectrum-warfare/