US Wary of Allowing Russian Electronic Monitoring Stations Inside US 232
cold fjord writes "The New York Times reports, '... the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from Snowden. Instead, this menace may come in the form of a ... dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States. ... the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing ... the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen ... monitor stations, on United States soil ... These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow's version of the Global Positioning System ... The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries ... to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS. For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration's relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin ... But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow's satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders. ... administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences.'"
Allow it! (Score:2, Interesting)
We need the jobs assholes!
Our economy is in shambles and these morons are worried about the Russians listening in - on what? Talk Radio?!
Police chatter?
If we're not doing anything wrong... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, the Russians want to monitor stuff inside the US borders. Ok, so what?
To flip what we've heard from the NSA around, "If we're not doing anything wrong, we don't have to worry."
In point of fact, letting the Russians monitor internal military chatter sounds like a good idea to me. That way, they -know- we aren't planning on attacking them. And.. by the way, we -aren't- planning on attacking the Russians, are we? If we are, _I_ would like to know about it, forget what the Russians know.
The days of Red Baiting should be over. We should have an open society, and if the Russians want to eavesdrop, more power to them. Truthfully, I'm a lot more worried about what our own government wants to keep track of than I am about what any Russians (or Chinese) want to track. And if it improves the accuracy of their weapons, does that mean that they're more likely to blow up a military base than the local YMCA? That's good, isn't it?
Re:Easily dealt with. (Score:5, Interesting)
Begging the question "aren't current nukes sufficiently accurate"?
Depends on the application and the size of the nuke. One of the reasons that Soviet missiles and warheads were so big was because thy lacked accuracy. Against a hardened target that can be important even for a nuke. More accurate nukes can be smaller. Smaller nukes let your missiles carry more of them, and they can be fitted on smaller missiles.
The smart countermeasure would be to monitor the monitoring stations and be ready to destroy them at no notice.
If a nuclear strike is launched the system would only really need to provide high accuracy for about 30 minutes. I doubt there is enough drift in that time to make blowing the stations worthwhile. (And who would want to be on the demo team that had a 15 minute notice, at most, for blowing up the station on order, 24x7x365?) If you still wanted to blow up the stations in the event of an attack, you would probably have to do it within 10 minutes of the alert to make it worthwhile. If it turns out the alert was a false one and you blew up the stations, and no doubt killed the Russian operators, the Russians would be very cranky. It might even start a real war.
Re:Why did they ask? (Score:5, Interesting)
What prevents them from sticking 5 RF receivers in each of the russian consulates. Or indeed, paying for a couple of dozen boxes on roofs in the USA hooked to an internet connection.
Roofs (and even buildings, for that matter) are much too wobbly for reference-precision GPS
signal calibration. Stations like this are directly anchored to bedrock, preferably with minimal
seismic activity (that includes even not-so-nearby roads) and with a full-sky view.
I doubt that any of the official russian presences satisfies those constraints.
Note that I'm not saying clandestine (or rather "undeclared" - I don't see how anyone would need
permission to run a non-broadcasting monitoring station on private ground) are impossible or don't
exist, just that urban locations and building roofs wont work.