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Blog Editor’s Notes: An interesting article by Fox News that raises some interesting points, but also conflates several issues and gets some things a bit wrong. Perhaps understandable for a popular news outlet dealing with a very nuanced technical issue about which there has been a lot of static and disinformation.
For example, we had not heard that Ligado was planning on providing resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services. Of course, we had not heard that Ligado was going to do 5G until about a year ago when the company decided it would be a good talking point to support their application with the FCC. Perhaps they have decided that resilient PNT is a hot topic and are now tossing that idea around to see if it will stick.
Perhaps next Ligado will tell us they have figured out how to use their transmissions to kill the Covid 19 virus.
Take a look at this article and see what you think. Several other questionable points (which do you see?), but perhaps not a bad overall theme.
(BTW, Fox News has only been interested in PNT a couple times that we can recall. They covered the danger of hijacking via GPS spoofing in 2013 after Todd Humphreys’ group spoofed the yacht in the Mediterranean, and then in 2017 after two US Navy ships suffered collisions. Glad to have such a popular media outlet engaged in this issue.)
Lawmakers concerned China may hack, disrupt US military satellite networks
The Pentagon has voiced its concern about a potential risk to GPS
What if a drone-launched, precision-guided Hellfire missile or fighter-jet air-dropped bomb was heading directly toward a designated enemy target, but it was disabled or its trajectory was suddenly jammed, altered or thrown off-course? Even worse, what if its flight path were sabotaged, taken over, or directed toward a friendly target?
Or imagine a dismounted infantry unit is navigating rigorous, uneven terrain while under enemy fire, when their hand-held GPS location device showing friendly and enemy troop locations was cut off or fed false information?
While there naturally continue to be ongoing efforts to “harden” GPS signals against enemy interference, these types of concerning scenarios may become even more likely to take place under one dangerous scenario. The problem is what would happen if a firm’s emerging 5G network is permitted to further mature into American and U.S.-allied markets for GPS-types of networking technology.
