Russia "is now challenging the United States' long-standing supremacy in space and working to exploit the U.S. military's dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting."

That's the argument made in The Bulletin by a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who writes about technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs (in an article shared by Lasrick). Moscow is developing counter-space weapons as a part of its overall information warfare strategy. For example, Russia just tested an anti-satellite missile system designed to destroy satellites in low earth orbit. Moreover, military leaders in Russia view U.S. satellites as the key enablers of America's ability to execute rapid, agile, and global military operations; they are intent on echoing this success and modernizing their own military satellites to more effectively support Russian forces.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries with space programs has markedly increased. Many of them are actively developing space weapons. China, for example, has an operational ground-launched anti-satellite system, according to the U.S. intelligence community. India successfully tested its own space weapon in 2019. France announced that it will launch a series of armed satellites. Even Iran is believed to be able to develop a rudimentary anti-satellite weapon in the near term... Space systems are essential for warfighting on Earth and the large growth in the number of countries fielding space weapons means the likelihood that outer space will be transformed into a battlefield has increased... Russia is the only country, however, that is reportedly approaching U.S. satellites in an aggressive manner...

Moscow's destabilizing behavior could prompt the United States to take a more aggressive posture in space in the future... Russia has been taking advantage of the lack of international consensus on what constitutes acceptable behavior in space... It seems clear that Russia is likely testing how the United States and its allies might react to aggressive space behaviors and is gaining important insights into American national security space capabilities...

In 2019, former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said that at some point, the United States needs the ability to "hit back." Russia's destabilizing actions in space could, therefore, fuel a dangerous arms race in space.

stikves shares a report from Engadget: Last December, a Saudi Arabian cadet training with the U.S. military opened fire at Naval Air Station Pensacola, killing three soldiers and wounding eight others. The FBI recovered two iPhones, and after failing to access their data, asked Apple to unlock them. The company refused, but eventually the FBI unlocked at least one of them without Apple's help, and discovered substantial ties between the shooter and terrorist group al Qaeda. U.S. Attorney General Barr suggests forcing Apple to take action in the future, saying "...if not for our FBI's ingenuity, some luck, and hours upon hours of time and resources, this information would have remained undiscovered. The bottom line: our national security cannot remain in the hands of big corporations who put dollars over lawful access and public safety. The time has come for a legislative solution."

The Space Force, the newest military branch, now has an official flag. President Trump unveiled the flag at an Oval Office ceremony Friday where he also signed the 2020 Armed Forces Day Proclamation. NPR reports: The flag design comes from the seal of the Space Force, which was approved by the president in January. It sparked some Star Trek fan outrage for what some people have called its similarity to a logo in the science fiction franchise. According to the White House, the dark blue and white of the flag is meant to represent the "vast recesses of outer space" and includes a elliptical orbit with three large stars meant to symbolize the branch's purpose: "organizing, training and equipping" Space Force troopers, in the language of the Pentagon. The Space Force was created in part to protect strategic American space infrastructure, including communications, navigation and spy satellites, from adversaries such as Russia and China.

"As you know, China, Russia, perhaps others, started off a lot sooner than us," Trump said. "We should have started this a long time ago, but we've made up for it in spades. We have developed some of the most incredible weapons anyone's ever seen. And it's moving along very rapidly." Trump teased what he called a new weapon that could attack at such a high speed it would overwhelm an enemy's defenses. "We have, I call it the 'super-duper missile.' And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now," Trump said. It wasn't immediately clear what missile the president was describing, but the U.S. and other advanced powers are known to be developing new hypersonic weapons, designed to race at many times the speed of sound.

The newly-created U.S. Space Force has released its first recruitment video, CNET reports: In a video posted Wednesday to Twitter showing rockets, mission control-types rooms and U.S. Space Force members in spacesuits, a voice-over says, "maybe your purpose on this planet isn't on this planet." Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said during a livestream Wednesday that so far recruitment hasn't been a problem for the Space Force. "There's been an avalanche of applicants." This sixth branch of the US military was established in December 2019 and will be operational by mid-2021.
CNET notes the video appeared "a day after Netflix dropped a trailer for its upcoming comedy Space Force. And the leader of the U.S. Space Force says he's looking forward to the Netflix comedy co-created by Steve Carell.

"The one piece of advice I'd give to Steve Carell is to get a haircut," Gen. Jay Raymond, the U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations, said Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Space Foundation. Raymond is bald, and joked that Steve Carell is "looking a little too shaggy if he wants to play the Space Force chief."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said.

The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved."

"Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records. But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient. Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. "It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it."

But the nation's governors -- who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding -- said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus. "All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing." Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God." Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success -- even if the beds sit empty.

A Microsoft executive urged Amazon Web Services to "stand down on its litigation" opposing the award of the military's lucrative JEDI commercial cloud transformation contract, arguing the ongoing legal and administrative challenges are keeping the best tools out of the hands of U.S. warfighters. From a report: The statement from Frank Shaw, Microsoft's corporate vice president for communications, came in response to Amazon's latest attempt to compel a re-evaluation of the potentially $10 billion contract won by Microsoft -- a protest filed Monday directly with the Pentagon. The Defense Department's "decision to source a Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to deliver the latest advancements in enterprise cloud could be a great step forward," Shaw said. "But only if Amazon gets out of the way." Shaw repeated Microsoft's now-common refrain against AWS: the cloud market leader bid too high, and it is now looking for a "re-do." "This latest filing -- filed with the DoD this time -- is another example of Amazon trying to bog down JEDI in complaints, litigation and other delays designed to force a do-over to rescue its failed bid," he said.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) published last week a security assessment of today's most popular video conferencing, text chatting, and collaboration tools. From a report: The guidance contains a list of security criteria that the NSA hopes companies take into consideration when selecting which telework tool/service they want to deploy in their environments. The NSA document is not only meant for US government and military entities but the private sector as well. The idea behind the NSA's initiative is to give military, public, and private organizations an overview of all of a tools' features, so IT staff don't make wrong decisions, expecting that a tool provides certain features that are not actually living up to the reality. Per the NSA's document, the assessed criteria answers to basic questions like:

Does the service implement end-to-end (E2E) encryption?
Does the E2E encryption use strong, well-known, testable encryption standards?
Is multi-factor authentication (MFA) available?
Can users see and control who connects to collaboration sessions?
Does the tool's vendor share data with third parties or affiliates?
Do users have the ability to securely delete data from the service and its repositories as needed (both on client and server-side)?
Is the tool's source code public (e.g. open source)?
Is the service FedRAMP approved for official US government use?

Long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam quotes Interesting Engineering: The United States Space force now has offensive power, though it might not be the massive orbiting weapons system that you're envisioning.

The new weapons system delivered to the space force is a jammer type array that can prevent military or intelligence combatants from accessing their military satellites. This functionality allows the space force to neutralize orbiting satellites in a matter of minutes.
The International Business Times adds that "In a previous report, the U.S. identified Russia and China as potential threats to the country's presence in space.

"The U.S. Space Force's recently confirmed that it already has 16 units of its new ground-based offensive weapon system. The agency also reported that it has already started working on the system's successor..."

With a little help from Peter Thiel's controversial company Palintir, America's Department of Health and Human Services is building a powerful new tool to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Verge reports: The tool, which is reportedly called HHS Protect Now, is already up and running as of April 10th and it helps officials compile reports on the coronavirus' spread through the U.S. by collecting data from state and local governments, healthcare institutions, and colleges. It is unclear what exactly this data is, where it comes from, or how it's being used. It's also unclear if Palantir is the sole technology provider of the tool, or if other partners are involved...

According to a new report from The Daily Beast, here's an at least partial description of the kind of data we're talking about here:

HHS said it has 187 data sets integrated into the platform, with inputs that include hospital capacity and inventories, supply chain data from the government and industry, diagnostic and geographic testing data, demographic statistics, state policy actions, and coronavirus and flu-like emergency department data. The spokesperson also said HHS was relying on "private sector partner contributions of data."

"We are using the data aggregated... to paint a picture for the Task Force, and state and local leaders to show the impact of their strategic decisions," the HHS spokesperson told The Daily Beast in a statement... HHS Protect Now was intended to become the "the single source for testing data by April 20th," according to an internal Trump administration document obtained by The Daily Beast, though it's unclear if that's now true. Currently, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, is making use of data the tool aggregates, and that data and Birx's presentations are factors for how Trump and his administration plan to reopen parts of the country, The Daily Beast reports.
The article notes Palantir is controversial "in part because it has provided profiling tools to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and because it generally operates with extreme secrecy and with little oversight regarding the tools and data it provides to military operations, governments, and hedge funds."

Earliest this year Palantir claimed the #4 spot on Slate's list of the 30 most evil tech companies, because, they wrote, "almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel."

Today is Anzac Day, a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand for those who served, marked on the anniversary of the 1915 campaign that led to the first major casualties for Australian and New Zealand Army Corp forces during World War One.

"More than 87,000 Turks died, along with an estimated 44,000 men from the British Empire and France, including 8,500 Australians and nearly 3,000 New Zealanders," remembers the BBC, "one in four of the Kiwis sent to Gallipoli."

Taking special note is free and open source software engineer Daniel, who is also a Debian developer, who writes: In 1981, the movie Gallipoli made the career of Mel Gibson. In 2018, The Guardian lamented that Australia had reached peak Anzac after committing $500 million to expand a war memorial.

At the other end of the spectrum, a group of students in Kosovo organized a very low-budget Remembrance Day hackathon in 2019 and it has now been used as the foundation for a data-driven online Anzacathon while traditional memorials will remain closed due to coronavirus.

The video helps us reflect not only on the legacy of the Anzacs but our own plight today.
Living in Europe, Pocock describes the origins of the project. "Last year I had asked myself: are there any sites where there is only one Australian casualty, where nobody has visited them for Anzac Day?"

The activities list on the Anzacathon page now suggests updating its list of lone Anzac graves around the world, by sharing your own information from the Anzac honour roll of your school, village, company, or club.

Tilley, an amateur radio operator living in Canada, found a "zombie" military satellite that was supposed to shut down in 1972. NPR reports: Recently, Tilley got interested in a communications satellite he thought might still be alive -- or at least among the living dead. LES-5, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, was launched in 1967. Tilley was inspired by another amateur who in 2016 had found LES-1, an earlier satellite built by the same lab. What was intriguing to him about LES-5 was that if it was still working, it might be the oldest functioning satellite still in geostationary orbit. By scouring the Internet, he found a paper describing the radio frequency that LES-5, an experimental military UHF communications satellite, should be operating on -- if it was still alive. So he decided to have a look.

"This required the building of an antenna, erecting a new structure to support it. Pre-amps, filters, stuff that takes time to gather and put all together," he says. "When you have a family and a busy business, you don't really have a lot of time for that," he says. But then came the COVID-19 pandemic. British Columbia, where Tilley lives, was on lockdown. Like many of us, suddenly Tilley had time on his hands. He used it to look for LES-5, and on March 24, he hit the ham radio equivalent of pay dirt. While Tilley thinks it may be possible to send commands to the satellite, the MIT lab that built LES-5 didn't comment on the matter when NPR inquired.

As coronavirus infections tore across the U.S. in early March, a Silicon Valley executive called the survival shelter manufacturer Rising S Co. He wanted to know how to open the secret door to his multimillion-dollar bunker 11 feet underground in New Zealand. From a report: The tech chief had never used the bunker and couldn't remember how to unlock it, said Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Co. "He wanted to verify the combination for the door and was asking questions about the power and the hot water heater and whether he needed to take extra water or air filters," Lynch said. The businessman runs a company in the Bay Area but lives in New York, which was fast becoming the world's coronavirus epicenter. "He went out to New Zealand to escape everything that's happening," Lynch said, declining to identify the bunker owner because he keeps his client lists private. "And as far as I know, he's still there."

For years, New Zealand has featured prominently in the doomsday survival plans of wealthy Americans worried that, say, a killer germ might paralyze the world. Isolated at the edge of the earth, more than 1,000 miles off the southern coast of Australia, New Zealand is home to about 4.9 million people, about a fifth as many as the New York metro area. The clean, green, island nation is known for its natural beauty, laid-back politicians and premier health facilities. In recent weeks, the country has been lauded for its response to the pandemic. It enforced a four-week lockdown early, and today has more recoveries than cases. Only 12 people have died from the disease. The U.S. death toll stands at more than 39,000, meaning that country's death rate per capita is about 50 times higher.

The underground global shelter network Vivos already has installed a 300-person bunker in the South Island, north of Christchurch, said Robert Vicino, the founder of the California-based company. He's fielded two calls in the past week from prospective clients eager to build additional shelters on the island. In the U.S., two dozen families have moved into a 5,000-person Vivos shelter in South Dakota, he said, where they're occupying a bunker on a former military base that's about three-quarters the size of Manhattan. Vivos has also built an 80-person bunker in Indiana, and is developing a 1000-person shelter in Germany. Rising S Co. has planted about 10 private bunkers in New Zealand over the past several years. The average cost is $3 million for a shelter weighing about 150 tons, but it can easily go as high as $8 million with additional features like luxury bathrooms, game rooms, shooting ranges, gyms, theaters and surgical beds.

"Now is the perfect time to make Jetson's cars real," says the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics.

Breaking Defense reports: 'Flying cars' using electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology could be in full-up production for Air Force use in moving cargo and people within three years, says Air Force acquisition head Will Roper. Such a capability, Roper enthused, would give the U.S. military the ability to undertake missions "in three dimensions that we normally do in two," giving the services "much greater agility." This is why the Air Force program for investing in commercial firms now pursuing eVTOL vehicles is called "Agility Prime," he noted.

The Air Force will take a first look at vendor offerings in a virtual pitch event at the end of the month, with a focus on small eVTOL vehicles that could be used for missions involving transport of only a few people... Roper added that he expects that granting commercial producers Air Force safety certifications and allowing them to rack up flying hours under Agility Prime "will really help accelerate domestic use of these vehicles and [allow some companies to] get FAA certification sooner that it would have come if we had not interjected ourselves into the market...."

Agility Prime is designed as a "challenge" where eVTOL vehicle makers compete in a series of demonstration that ultimately could result in a contract for full-scale production.
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger explains that they're looking for "a 100+ MPH vehicle that can go for at least 100 miles, with the ability to carry up to eight people."

"If Slashdotters have something in their basements upon which they have been working, get your flying machines ready because prototypes must be able to take flight by December 17th."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is set to approve a new 5G cellular network despite claims from the Department of Defense that it will interfere with Global Positioning System (GPS) services. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today asked fellow commissioners to approve an "application to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band that would primarily support 5G and Internet of Things services." The application is from Ligado, formerly known as LightSquared, which for nearly a decade has sought permission to build a wireless network using frequencies near those used for GPS. A previous failure to obtain FCC approval helped push LightSquared into bankruptcy.

The FCC said its draft order would "ensure that adjacent band operations, including GPS, are protected from harmful interference." Pai said the FCC has "compiled an extensive record, which confirms that it is in the public interest to grant Ligado's application while imposing stringent conditions to prevent harmful interference." He continued: "Although I appreciate the concerns that have been raised by certain Executive Branch agencies, it is the Commission's duty to make an independent determination based on sound engineering. And based on the painstaking technical analysis done by our expert staff, I am convinced that the conditions outlined in this draft order would permit Ligado to move forward without causing harmful interference. For example, the draft order would authorize downlink operations at a power level that represents a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application." The base-station power reduction is "from 32dBW to 9.8dBW," and Ligado committed to a 23MHz "guard-band using its own licensed spectrum to further separate its terrestrial base station transmissions from neighboring operation," the FCC said. "As such, Ligado is now only seeking terrestrial use of the 1526-1536MHz, 1627.5-1637.5MHz, and 1646.5-1656.5MHz bands."

Ligado isn't competing directly against the big telecom giants. Instead, the company "plans to deliver custom private networks for industrial firms, service for [IoT] devices and unmanned systems, and connectivity for other business and government use cases," reports Ars. "Ligado could also supply capacity to the major wireless carriers."

Slashdot reader and managing director of Adafruit, Phillip Torrone, a.k.a. ptorrone, writes: Tom's Hardware talked to Adafruit about what it's like to switch from selling tech to selling protective gear, and when hobbyists can expect things to return to normal. In March of 2020, Adafruit was deemed an essential service and business for critical manufacturing in NYC by executive order 202.6, making face shields and making/shipping critical components and electronics for COVID-19 related efforts and testing. "We've always needed to make essential electronics for people," Torrone said, stressing that this isn't new for them. "When this hit, there was a very specific short term need. And that was for face shields. And because we have 3D printers, we have laser cutters, we have production capabilities, [when] New York City put out the call, our name came up right away because that's one of the things we do."

On top of that, "we can make components for ventilators," Torrone added: "We can make components for the fast track FDA medical devices that people are trying to get out as fast as possible, from testing equipment to you name it, any type of temperature sensing or pressure sensing...We make electronic components that are used in many, many things. So no matter what, we would still need to be making those components for medical devices...electronics are electronics, so this temperature sensor that we used to use for other things, is going to be used for this now. This barometric pressure sensor, or that barometric pressure sensor [is going to be used for other things]...So for us, it was like 'Oh, this is just going in a different type of box for different types of application.'"

Since Adafruit's shift to essential medical and protective gear, the company's other products are now shipping out on a "when we can do it" basis. Tom's Hardware notes that the company "is still selling to select university and military researchers, but all others will have to wait until an unspecified time in the future to buy their usual Adafruit tech." Thankfully, Torrone says the customer response to the delay of normal business has been largely positive. "We've always been a good cause and a good business with a really good community. So our customers said, 'I'm still going to order and just ship it when you can.' So for regular orders for our customers, they've been fantastic."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Internal confidential documents belonging to some of the largest aerospace companies in the world have been stolen from an industrial contractor and leaked online. The data was pilfered and dumped on the internet by the criminals behind the DoppelPaymer Windows ransomware, in retaliation for an unpaid extortion demand. The sensitive documents include details of Lockheed-Martin-designed military equipment -- such as the specifications for an antenna in an anti-mortar defense system -- according to a Register source who alerted us to the blueprints. Other documents in the cache include billing and payment forms, supplier information, data analysis reports, and legal paperwork. There are also documents outlining SpaceX's manufacturing partner program.

The files were siphoned from Visser Precision by the DoppelPaymer crew, which infected the contractor's PCs and scrambled its files. When the company failed to pay the ransom by their March deadline, the gang -- which tends to demand hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to restore encrypted files -- uploaded a selection of the documents to a website that remains online and publicly accessible. Visser is a manufacturing and design contractor in the U.S. whose clients are said to include aerospace, automotive, and industrial manufacturing outfits -- think Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Tesla, Boeing, Honeywell, Blue Origin, Sikorsky, Joe Gibbs Racing, the University of Colorado, the Cardiff School of Engineering, and others. The leaked files relate to these customers, in particular Tesla, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and SpaceX.

Turkey will require foreign social media companies with high internet traffic to appoint a representative in the country to address concerns raised by authorities over content on their platforms, a draft law seen by Reuters showed. From the report: Companies that do not comply with the new measure could face having their bandwith halved after 30 days by court order, and then slashed by 95% if they hold out another 30 days, it said. The law will apply to social media networks accessed by more than 1 million people daily from Turkey, the draft law said. Ankara strictly polices social media content, especially during periods such as military operations and the current coronavirus pandemic. In the three weeks to April 6, more than 3,500 social media accounts were reviewed, 616 suspects were identified and 229 were detained for "provocative" social media posts, according to the Interior Ministry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On April 2, Twitter took down a pro-United Arab Emirates network of accounts that was pushing propaganda about the coronavirus pandemic and criticizing Turkey's military intervention in Libya. Previously tied to marketing firms in the region, parts of this network were removed by Facebook and Twitter last year. The network was made up of roughly 9,000 accounts, according to disinformation research firm DFRLab and independent researcher Josh Russell. Although it promoted narratives in line with the political stances of the governments of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, its origins were unclear.

Many Twitter handles contained alphanumeric characters instead of names, and many did not post photos. Accounts that did have profile pictures often used images of Indian models. One video pushed by the fake accounts voiced support for the Chinese government during the peak of the coronavirus outbreak in China in February. The video remains online, but lost over 4,000 retweets and likes after the takedown. The video now has four retweets.

The bot network also amplified a video of a woman thanking the government of the UAE for transporting Yemeni students out of Wuhan, China. Today, that video, which is also still online, went from having nearly 4,500 retweets to having 70. Spreading propaganda about the coronavirus didn't seem to have been the network's focus. The accounts, some of which posed as journalists and news outlets, amplified an article about the UAE government's disapproval of the Libyan prime minister and boosted criticism of Turkey's support of militias in Libya.

An anonymous reader quotes Space News: The space surveillance radar site known as the Space Fence is ready for use after five years in construction, the U.S. Space Force announced March 27. The $1.5 billion Space Fence — located on Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands — is a ground-based radar system that tracks satellites and space debris primarily in low Earth orbit...

The Space Fence can track tiny objects as small as a marble. It also provides a search capability for objects at higher orbits. Data from the Space Fence will feed into the military's Space Surveillance Network. The Space Surveillance Network tracks about 26,000 objects. The addition of the Space Fence will increase the catalog size significantly over time, the Space Force said in a news release... "Space Fence is revolutionizing the way we view space by providing timely, precise orbital data on objects that threaten both manned and unmanned military and commercial space assets," said Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond.