Libya SIGINT Jamming Satellites, Towers 463
h00manist writes "Libya's Gaddafi apparently loves radio hacking. Signal jamming is being used to disable Thuraya satellite phones. Also being jammed is satellite TV network provider Arabsat, affecting vast areas in the Middle East, Gulf, Africa and Europe. Cellphone and internet transmissions are working only intermittently. Soldiers are confiscating electronics, too. This has gone on for days, allowing killing to be carried out largely hidden from the rest of the world, quite different from what happened in Egypt. The locations of the jamming signals are known to company executives — around the capital, Tripoli — but nobody can do anything. Only POTS is available, and it is monitored. Technically speaking, could this happen everywhere? Alternatives?"
Solution? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile [wikipedia.org]
Re:What next? (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly Qadafi is going to do the full Tiananmen Square on his people
Tiananmen Square was Army firing on unarmed demonstrators. The situation in Libya is way past that already - Ghaddafi has been using fighter jets to do airstrikes, and ships to shell areas, while opposition has taken over several regions of the country entirely (organizing brand new power and law enforcement structures in place in a grassroot manner), and in large cities, has captured large amounts of weapons. At this point, it's pretty much a civil war already.
Re:Solution? (Score:4, Informative)
People are afraid of that sort of intervention, because of what happened last time: after two US servicemen were killed by a nightclub bomb that was probably connected to Gadaffi, the US conducted widely condemmed airstrikes on some basically random Libyan government targets, killing at least 15 civilians (not counting those working for the government in a non-military capacity), and Gadaffi's 15 month old adopted kid.
The overall result was massive damage to the reputation of the United States in the middle east, internation sympathy for Gadaffi, who had otherwise looked like a nutter, and of course no change in the regime's behaviour, since they were already completely uncooperative.
So, the world is now very nervous about intervening...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_El_Dorado_Canyon [wikipedia.org]