I’m in the same industry, and find these attempts of constraining technology through secrecy extremely naive by our legislators.
I’d wager that if you already know how to operate an SDR, you properly will have little trouble with the fairly simple algorithm of measuring phase differences, filtering, CFAR etc. to make a passive radar. Synchronizing a bag of RTL-SDRs with a common oscillator is a trivial soldering task.
The cat went out of the bag the second SDRs jumped from DARPA R&D to DVB-T commodity.
That aside having a passive radar breadboard is not the same as a high-end passive radar where frequency/phase stability, use of wideband multi-source emitters, ultra-low noise amplifiers and N>>2 channels for increased angular resolution are integrated in an operational system. These systems that actually works, should be controlled.
>These systems that actually works, should be controlled.
Why? to know your enemies and friends share this technology is to succor temperment in your foreign and domestic political and military policy. in other words: Parity encourages clarity. That the United States specifically sees "technological advantage" as a blank cheque to blow up things and people it does not like.
to put it short, the reason we dont park aircraft carriers near china, or mine their ports as we did Nicaragua, is due to a technological parity that forces our statesmen to sobering and challenging political discussion.
learning radar means empowering nations to guard their airspace and detect an adversary, an achievement the US will fight to keep many other nations from gaining as it would see their exodus from the duly designated "evil countries" list.
Radar is an interdisciplinary adventure in electrical engineering and the material sciences as well as the further reaches of mathematics and physics. it is an enriching pursuit that enables independence and growth through learning and mastry. its uses are not strictly warlike, much to the scorn of ITAR.
> to know your enemies and friends share this technology is to succor temperment in your foreign and domestic political and military policy.
Any modern superpower will jealously guard strategic military technologies.
Ergo, any country openly sharing their own will be faced with an adversary who doesn't, who will then have an advantage.
Furthermore, if you follow your line of reasoning to its end, we should dissolve the NNPT [0] and BWC [1], which would result in a much more dangerous world for everyone...
Now where the line is on what technologies fall into and outside of this delineation is a fair argument. And, I'm tempted to say, should often be at the mercy "of what's available commercially internationally" (in this case, cat seems out of the bag).
But saying that democratizing access to military-applicable technologies has a restraining effect on military adventurism doesn't seem like a cohesive argument.
> Any modern superpower will jealously guard strategic military technologies.
Parts of it will, probably. But societies aren't homogeneous, and modern ones in particular are interwoven in ways that produce behaviors at odds with protectionism.
> But saying that democratizing access to military-applicable technologies has a restraining effect on military adventurism doesn't seem like a cohesive argument.
Ukrainian combatants use of commercial drones and anti-tank shells might be a great example of how this argument is 100% cohesive. If a neighbor has the parts and ingenuity to craft weapons upon threat...maybe you try to play nice with them and their toys instead lest those toys turn deadly.
Moreover, what they are doing is 'very crude' and the higher end drones, equipment, targeting, munitions are not available to them largely because that information is guarded.
The Russians are not morons, but, they are not just missing the parts, they are behind on cutting edge issues. Not all, but many. Yes, the are 1st-class in that some of their gear is leading, but not that much of it. Iran, even more so. There is a ton of know-how they do not have in addition to the missing parts/industrial base/budget etc.
Legalize nukes. Bro, just give me your phone password and I'll give you mine. We should all just share all of our information and be friends. Information wants to be free.
I guess you are talking about GitHub "stealing" code for its copilot service.
They didn't "free" anything. All the code they took is publicly available, they just took it and included it into proprietary software. And part of the code they took is under a license (GPL) that essentially says "you can do what you want with the code, as long as you share what you are doing with it", and they don't. Copilot is not public. Not only that, but by potentially suggesting snippets of GPL code in projects that are not open source, they encourage others to do the same.
Also, I know this is a cheap putdown but it illustrates the fundamental problem with "deregulate everything!" notion. Humans are horrible at tempering emotions and optimize for short-term gain. If humans could self-control with guns everywhere, then they could just as easily avoid obesity, alcoholism, environmental catastrophe, road rage, wars, and so on. We could just will ourselves to do the right thing every time. Except obesity only hurts ourselves, whereas guns can hurt many others.
Not to go too far off topic, but as an ex-military person and a weapons owner who always carries concealed, I agree mostly with you. I don't think I would have always agreed, but American society has become extremely sick.
There are a multitude of issues going on and weapons probably aren't the only thing we should get rid of. I love a glass of wine or beer, but alcohol should probably go too. If we look at how many innocent people are killed every week by a drunk driver there is a case to be made. Good luck though - if you bring up banning alcohol to anyone in the US they will look at you like you are some kind of crazy person.
I offer no good solutions as I realistically see none, but will continue to teach my kids to treat others with kindness, along with proper decision-making and understanding the consequences of one's actions.
We’ve been down this road before. Also, it’s been my understanding that prohibition is what solidified the diseased attitudes of the violence organized crime in the US.
The US Navy routinely sends aircraft carriers and other warships near China. They are obviously not parked; a carrier has to sail into the wind to conduct flight operations.
Further, how do you even define "enemy" when it comes to how modern products get built?
An engineer who is a citizen of country A, but works in country B for a company whose headquarters is in country C, builds a product that gets used by a warrior of country D's army, stationed in country E.
Which country-to-country enemy relationships count when determining whether the engineer is supporting "his enemy"?
Indeed, and beyond that, you are restricted from even DISCUSSING of SENDING any info to any party that is not authorized under the Joint Certification Program (JCP), and there are databases to check whether a person or program is authorized
It is sad to see all these upstream comments that are plainly ignorant and advocating either some ideal of free info exchange, or that it is not possible to contain the info because once it is in the commercial domain, everyone must have it.
While it is almost certain that there will be some leaks in almost any containment system, it is a massive fallacy to assume that therefore all efforts to contain tech transfer are futile. I've literally watched as likely agents from adversary nations attempted in public forums to get even mid-level tech info in my field. It all seemed very collegial until the source of the requests was noticed to be Iran and they were shut down.
Yes, this does often result in 'false positives' and restrict technology transfer to a harmless person. Maybe that guy really was just some student trying to learn (or, more likely, he was well funded and trying to get info for their drone program which is literally at this moment killing people in a democratic nation).
Too bad — the possible benefit isn't even in the same orders of magnitude from the potential harm. The expansionist authoritarian nations (Russia, Iran, China, NK, etc.) are literally waging war against the democracies of the world. We need to treat it as such. Yes, there are sincere colleagues behind those borders. The best we can do is to help them escape their awful governments. Helping them, and their awful governments advance only increases the risk that those awful governments will also rule us.
What about the many things that do not fall under ITAR? The NSA recently awarded[1] a $10B contract to Amazon Web Services. I don't think AWS was built entirely by Americans. US military routinely purchases commercial off the shelf products and services, and I doubt there is any effort to ensure they all were made entirely by US Citizens.
I work along side of Russians, Iranians, and Chinese teammates (no North Koreans, to my knowledge). I wonder how they would feel if my company decided to sell their widgets or services to the US Military, where those things could plausibly be used against their own families?
AWS has a dedicated environment (GovCloud) for US government use. Only US citizens and green card holders are eligible to be granted access to it.
They don't (in my personal experience) seem to be concerned about the nationality of the developers – but if the developer is non-US, they won't be able to gain any access to the production instance. They have to hand the app over to a US person who will be responsible for installing/configuring/operating it. Sometimes (especially when there is a problem), the non-US developer may be telling the US SRE/sysadmin/etc what command to type, but still a US person has to be the one doing the typing.
And that's just non-classified systems, for classified systems the rules are even tougher. I remember once a colleague was writing some code on a classified project (actually for the Australian government, but this story could just as easily have happened in the US) to call some API, he told me he was having some problems. I asked him if he could show me his code. "Sorry, I can't, it is classified." "How can your code to call that API be classified?" "Everything we write while on-site is automatically classified, and trying to get it declassified is too hard". He agreed he'd go home, and rewrite the problematic code from memory, and then give that to me. In the process of doing so, he worked out what he was doing wrong, he didn't need my help in the end.
Indeed, there is plenty of stuff that is non-ITAR. ITAR, AFAIK, is basically for more advanced tech.
There is also a set of information that is not classified, but is called Controlled Unclassified Information. That info, designs, drawings, specs, tech data, etc. is all controlled, even though it is not "classified". Same restrictions — must check first before communicating any of it to a non-US person or organization. It is a bit of a PITA when we need to make parts as a subcontractor that are CUI, but need to send those out for another process like painting or coating, to a non-JCP/ITAR-registered org. Funny that we can send the part, but not the drawings.
I'm sure there's plenty of nonclassified and non-CUI non-ITAR stuff. The first thing that comes to mind is clothing, food, basic transport vehicles, fuel, etc.
We tried to do passive radar for detecting high energy cosmic rays in 2009 (GNU Radio/USRP) that turned into passive-ish when the team brought a 20kW Harris NTSC Ch 2 (52Mhz) transmitter we decommissioned as part of the move to ATSC.
We had a hard time with cosmic rays (relativistic doppler is fun), but meteors, planes, and lightning strikes were common sources of unwelcome signal.
I spent an evening at a star party chatting with someone that spent a bit of time at the big radio facility on the east coast that is famous for having total radio silence in the area surrounding it. (too early in the morning to remember the name.) One of the stories was specific to listening to meteors from well past the horizon from where they were, and then talking to someone that was able to confirm them visually. This same individual was also previously in the military spending time playing with radars. The stories from that time were even more entertaining. Steering the beam to mess with the sheriff's car, and a few other stories that seemed so crazy I'm still not sure he wasn't just seeing what he could get us to believe.
That'd be the Green Bank Observatory[1], located within the US National Radio Quiet Zone [2] where radio emission is tightly managed. In the highest sensitivity zones near observation facilities, only diesel engines are allowed in motor vehicles as the spark plugs found in gas vehicles effectively constitute a spark-gap transmitter. [3][4]
> only diesel engines are allowed in motor vehicles
One would assume mechanical diesels at that, since the piezo injectors in common-rail systems require almost as big a bang as a spark plug.
Once I rescued a broken-down Citroën CX that had experienced a complete electrical failure, by removing the little brass slug from the injector pump and screwing the valve body back down, and then push starting the car. Pop the clutch in second and - clattaclattaclattaVROOOM, off it went.
Cue a hilarious 15 seconds or so where the power steering, suspension, and crucially braking system had absolutely no hydraulic pressure and I was piloting an unguided unbraked 5mph "missile" across the yard...
Haha, love the story. Always wanted one of those Citroen sedans. It sadly feels like that culture of being able to get out of a jam with one's car with a bit of simple mcgyvering disappears a bit more every day in modern times.
And yes, you're right, mechanical diesels only in the most sensitive areas. You can see some delightful photos of those in the blog post at [4] above :)
When I was a kid, my motor cycle had resistors in the spark plug wires that aged out and turned to a fine dust, I could not source replacements, either the resistor or the wires, so I replaced them with brass rod. It had a noticeable effect on TV reception over short distances.
Ha, that unlocked a memory of removing those resistors on my motorcycle to get more power. I did not get more power but when I explained what I did to the local mechanic I did get a valuable lesson in how combustion works.
I can think of turning drones into self-guided missiles, obviously intercepting from the front since they are slow, but you can track planes visually too.
And if this is to prevent foreign states, I'm sure in a couple years you'll be able to buy this stuff on AliExpress.
The saying the mil guys have about using active radar is "he who lights up first gets smoked". As in you turn on your radar, and it'll be a beacon seen in milliseconds, located in a few more milliseconds, and then receiving an incoming missile. Radar has to be passive, using ambient RF frequency 'noise', in any modern military operating theater to survive.
So, yes, keeping passive radar technology as maximally secret as possible among the world's democracies retains an advantage over the expansionist autocracies, which are increasingly belligerent, from Russia attacking in Europe, China making louder noises about attacking Taiwan (sending fighter jets to the shore today), NK launching missiles near Japan... yeah, we need to keep an edge.
Why not just separate the emitters and receivers a bit more, then?
Wouldn't it work to put some cheap drones or other hardware that "light up" and send nice pulses out for you to get info from that are far enough away from your real position, or am I missing something?
If they're cheap enough, it wouldn't be very worthwhile to destroy them I'd think. I mean it'd probably be in your interest to let them waste million dollar missiles on hundred dollar drones if you could get them to do so.
Or does something like this exist that I'm just unaware of?
You're getting dangerously close to an idea I had back in 1991, when I was working at the Defense Information Systems Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon. I talked to our security officer, and he put me in touch with a guy from the intelligence side of the house. I explained my idea, he said they already had something in that space, and that I shouldn't say anything more about it to anyone.
I never heard anything further on that subject.
To this day, it is one of two things I don't talk about.
It isn't my area, but I think you're on the right track.
Most radar systems have already (for decades, AFAIK) separated the emitter from the control panel with at least a long cable, so when the emitter gets smoked, at least the operators are more likely to survive.
The USAF & DARPA are already publicly working on aerially deployed drone swarms, and it would not surprise me in the slightest if a swarm of theater emitters was among the goals (but I've got no inside info to share).
That's not really accurate. Militaries continue to heavily use active radar despite the risks of detection. Passive radar has some potential use cases, but in many situations there won't be enough ambient RF energy to do target tracking precise enough to employ weapons. This particular applies at sea and in rural areas.
Modern low-probability of intercept radar obviates a lot of those concerns. Technology has advanced way beyond transmitting a steady sine wave on a constant frequency that is easy to detect and track.
Keeping passive radar technology secret from potential adversaries is certainly worth doing. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's some magical technology. In the real world it has only very limited value.
The other danger is, by removing the ability for people to experiment and understand the tech, we will lose out to places which can. They will have the engineers, and we will have effectively stopped ours from becoming so.
Defense contractors continue to devote huge resources to experimenting with and understanding all forms of radar technology. You just don't read about it on HN.
The dangers are to modern stealth aircraft like the F-35. They optimize the stealth to work in the ~5-20GHz range.
They are easy to pick up in the UHF and lower band, although at these lower frequencies much accuracy is lost.
This is how NATO lost an F-119 in Yugoslavia. The old Russian system used ~0.9GHz frequencies and a very large explosive warhead. That combined with operator skill and NATO being overconfident resulted in a loss of the aircraft, although not the pilot.
Disclaimer: not a weapons specialist. I'm not sure passive radar has much use as missiles and such. But it should be quite useful defensively (radar is useful for detecting fast moving incoming objects), so I don't think it's very justified to put it under arms control.
Drones for instance can be guided with off-the-shelf technology against slow moving targets.
I'm definitely not absolutely against arms control, the extreme case of course is nuclear proliferation. I think it's best to keep nuclear secrecy and try to break nuclear proliferation and even disarm countries as much as possible. It's just too dangerous, hopefully an unnecessary risk and unnecessary technology for a peaceful world.
It's very analogous to regulating certain common chemicals as "controlled precursors." It's not that the government wants people not to have these substances, or that they want to restrict their use in making useful, non-controlled substances; rather, it's that they want to know who has these chemicals, so as to be able to attribute and trace any controlled substances that might be produced.
In this case, they want to have a list of everyone who's playing around with radar systems, because any such person could — entirely just by taking the commonly-available tech and advancing their own private understanding from there — become a fully-fledged radar engineer, and build a system that could be interesting to terrorists et al.
> it's that they want to know who has these chemicals,
This is why we have the police around farms a lot, to see how safely the diesel and nitrate fertiliser is locked up. A legacy of the Republican violence of the 1970s to 1990s, when we had a lot of keen "amateur chemists" bimbling about in white vans at night...
It would be naive under the assumption that the intended goal is secrecy. If the goal would be simply "legislative control over a subject in case of unforseen events" it works exactly as desired.
DARPA R&D: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA
I think you naively underestimate the value of such skills and how easy it is to do this for some actors like terrorist groups. They do not have easy access to people like maybe you who are interested in it and internally motivated to do it. Because people at some intelligence, education and skill level are much less likely to join terrorist organisations.
People who join terrorist organisations are usually ones that do not have many other options.
The government knows they are fighting a loosing battle but the idea is to make it harder and delay development, not necessarily ensure the knowledge is not available at all.
> For their recent study, the two men collected records on 404 men who belonged to violent Islamist groups active over the past few decades (some in jail, some not). Had those groups reflected the working-age populations of their countries, engineers would have made up about 3.5 percent of the membership. Instead, nearly 20 percent of the militants had engineering degrees. When Gambetta and Hertog looked at only the militants whose education was known for certain to have gone beyond high school, close to half (44 percent) had trained in engineering
I mean consider how many engineers in the US work for either the government or a contractor for the government. Folks who studied Computer Engineering or electrical engineering, especially things like RF, control systems, high speed embedded systems, etc work mostly in the government space, as the private space has a small portion hardware/embedded and a large portion of web technology.
Many of those engineers create weapons. Deadly missiles, jets, drones, robots, and other tools to maintain military superiority.
And many of those completely ignore the implications of their career.
There seem to be two concurrent drivers there -- first, that Mideast terrorism tended to attract young men who lacked economic and social opportunities despite being credentialed, and, second, that engineering disciplines are overrepresented amongst persons holding rigid and authoritarian beliefs (a replicated finding, but it should be stressed that this does not indicate that most engineers are authoritarians!). See, e.g., Gambetta and Hertog, "Engineers of Jihad" (2018: Princeton University Press).
> Because people at some intelligence, education and skill level are much less likely to join terrorist organisations.
> People who join terrorist organisations are usually ones that do not have many other options.
Don't you rather believe that if the government makes life hard for engineers (legal redtape etc.), it makes such people who, as you claim, have many options more likely to choose the "become a terrorist" option because of their increased hate for the government?
> Don't you rather believe that if the government makes life hard for engineers (legal redtape etc.), it makes such people who, as you claim, have many options more likely to choose the "become a terrorist" option because of their increased hate for the government?
no, I'd imagine that mostly it's things like religion, having a foreign power occupy and invade your country, or having a military junta seize control of your government and displace the democratic processes.
like we even have statistics about this stuff, it's measured and we know what the answers are here. domestically it's alt-right extremism (neo-nazis and associated ideologies, with some religious extremism rolled in), followed by religious extremism, everything else is a rounding error. Internationally, true terrorism is pretty much only religious extremism. In cases like the iraq war or myanmar, it's people fighting the junta/occupying power.
like jeez what a HN answer that is... thinking that insufficient libertarianism and "too much red tape" is the cause of terrorism. absolute rorschach blot moment, those are the causes that YOU think could radicalize YOU.
Which is kinda sad, like, really? You could see yourself (ok, not "you" but hypothetically you could see ""other people"") killing over red tape? seriously? in the most libertarian nation on the planet?
man we live in a fucking society, don't we. one where people low-key think actual civil war, neighbor against neighbor, is better than red tape...
Correct. This is the original American ideology, persisting since the declaration of independence. If it seems absurd, you may wish to recalibrate your notions of absurdity to the prevailing reality.
You can order a reasonably good passive radar on Alibaba right now.[1]
The DVB-T/T2 Passive Radar (external radiation source radar) itself does not emit signals, but receives the echo signals of non-cooperative radiation sources (radio, television, communication base stations, etc.) reflected by the target for detection (as shown in Figure 1). The radar is composed of antenna, multi-channel receiver, and signal processor: the dedicated reference antenna receives direct wave signals, and the monitoring antenna array receives target echo signals; the multi-channel receiver amplifies the signals received by all antennas, performing frequency conversion and A/D sampling. The signal processor processes the output signal of the receiver, and outputs target information after reference signal purification, clutter suppression interference, matched filtering, target detection, parameter estimation and tracking processing. Unlike other passive detection systems, DVB-T/T2 Based Passive Radar(external radiation source radar) can achieve single-station positioning and speed measurement, and can detect more types of targets (can detect radio silence targets, such as autonomous cruise drones, birds and balloons), and is particularly suitable for applications where there are restrictions on electromagnetic radiation and high detection performance requirements.
Type of Target: Low-altitude targets such as drones, balloons, paragliders, and general aviation aircraft, including non-cooperative targets with radio silence
Detection Range Directional model: 5 to 10km (DJI Phantom 4), Omnidirectional model: 2 to 4km (DJI Phantom 4)
All suppressing this does is cut the US out of the market.
The radar knows where the plane is at all times. It knows this because it knows where the plane isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation.
Of course you can also get the following, if you have slightly deeper pockets.
Phase array X-band radar unit with electric azimuth/elevation mount and >10km range for UAVs, i.e. not limited to targets flying below 1000m. Can be set up to aim and trigger electronic countermeasures.
That's an emitter, not a passive radar. Operate one of those and someone will notice. The passive unit doesn't broadcast its existence.
Much to the annoyance of the USAF, passive radars can often see stealthed aircraft. The geometry part of stealth is minimizing straight-on reflections by reflecting them off in other directions. That works against single-location radars. But passive radar is using signals from other transmitters in other locations, so that trick doesn't work.
Is there overlap between these ITAR restrictions and mmWave radar coming to consumer Wi-Fi routers via IEEE 802.11bf in Wi-Fi 7 (2024)? There are open-source projects which demonstrate Wi-Fi Sensing on $20 Wi-Fi devices, no SDR needed, plus a handful of commercial products with Wi-Fi "motion detection". There are also several hundred public academic papers on the subject. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31561338#31563572
Edit1: is Wi-Fi (2.4Ghz+) radar excluded, due to limited range?
> (xxvii) Bi-static/multi-static radar that exploits greater than 125 kHz bandwidth and is lower than 2 GHz center frequency to passively detect or track using radio frequency (RF) transmissions (e.g., commercial radio, television stations); https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M...
Edit2: 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi can "see" reflections from moving objects through walls and other physical obstructions, at distances much greater than 0.2m from the obstruction.
> (xvi) Radar that detects a moving object through a physical obstruction at distance greater than 0.2 m from the obstruction;
The range on those would be minimal and trivial for any air-based weapons concerns. Definitely home privacy implications but they’re probably less of a concern for ITAR.
I can't help but think that the regulators have just triggered the Streisand effect in this case. The components cost for this type of system has sunk through the floor. As in the case of PGP, I suspect that development outside of the US will take place, and we'll end up having to "import" the very technology from "experts" outside of the US while the internal pool of experts move on to other less forbidden fruit. Thus we'll lose any leadership we had her in the US.
> "Mr. Zimmermann developed the software as part of his personal campaign to make it simple and inexpensive to send scrambled messages. Using such software is not restricted or illegal within the United States, but export control laws treat the software as a weapon and place strict prohibition on its export. The Government opposes the scrambling because it wants to be able to check on the activities of criminals overseas and hostile foreign governments. The Clinton Administration has retained strict controls on the export of data-coding software, and has been trying to create standards that would make it possible for law enforcement officials to gain access to scrambled conversations, whether by electronic mail or telephone."
Since the Pentagon started paying MIT to develop the technology during WWII, there has probably never been a time of no restrictions by the US government on the publication and the export of radar technology.
If you want to inquire into the effects restrictions on radar technology have had on US competitiveness, there's no need to look for lessons in the history of restrictions on a very different technology.
probably the effect restrictions had on radar technology 50 years ago when they were trying to restrict the export of (guessing) high-power radio amplifier tubes and ultra-low-noise amplifiers will be different from the effect restrictions have today when they are trying to keep people from explaining to each other how passive radar works and very similar to the effect they had 30 years ago when they were trying to keep people from explaining to each other how cryptography worked
This page references the github docs wiki for the project, which has also been altered to remove the Passive Radar page. Does someone have a clone of that to host as well? There was also an edit to remove a reference to a video on Youtube demonstrating the passive radar capabilties. That Youtube video has been deleted as well.
Combine this with news about how quickly Starlink mitigated Russian EW and the Pentagon's reaction(1). It looks like portions of the US Government have badly underestimated what people and organizations outside their circles can accomplish.
It's no surprise that their regulations aren't keeping up with how the open source SDR community has driven down the barrier to entry.
The “starlink defeated Russia EW” is mostly a PR stunt: Russia doesn't have air-born EW (not counting the one on their Orlan-10 UAV, which AFAIK isn't made for jamming, but for intel) so there's not much they can do: They can't jam the dishes because no air-born EW, and they cannot jam the satellites either because they are pointing their antenna away from the territories under Russian control.
Does anyone know what regulatory / legal hurdles they may be facing? Relevant Wikipedia article [0] is strangely silent on the topic, though my guess would be, this might be classified as military technology.
Could it be time for another Bernstein v US sort of case?
The idea that source code publication can be restricted (prior restraint) by classifying it as “arms” seems like an attempt at an end run around the bill of rights.
We spent a lot of years with export controls on a lot of things, and continue to have them on many pieces of software. Trying to do legal jujitsu to say “the code is speech”, especially given SCOTUSs current makeup, and the context of this being components of literal weapons systems… you’re not gonna get far IMO
This doesn't hold up if the software is baked into things that are undoubtedly protected by the 1st Amendment. What's going to happen if a music album uses ITAR technology?
Music has always been protected from the beginning of the Constitution and there have been zero (0) efforts to prevent its protection, while online code repos have only existed for about 30 years and don't have that same cachet yet.
This is a strange legal take. There is nothing about music that makes it special in the eyes of the law, it is speech like any other, subject to the same protections and restrictions as publishing a book. If you release an album containing nuclear secrets on Spotify, an injunction, removal and arrest will follow.
We don't actually know that this is true, because if you don't take the law literally like a lot of coders do, then that scenario isn't known to be possible because the format is a more explicit from of protected speech
The opposite is true. Constitutions ( plural ) protect the access to, and therefore the production.
This to the point that "protections" that don't contribute to primairily the access and secundairily to the production thereof could be deemed unconstitutional.
The krakensdr folks could take this fight for code-as-free-speech all the way to the supreme court.
Or they could delete the code, spend their time engineering instead of lawyering, secure in the knowledge a copy of the code is almost certain to end up hosted somewhere outside the US anyway.
Since the code is open source, any other person could publish the latest code dump as a book and attempt to go with the "free speech" arguments through the courts.
This is an interesting concept and thanks for bringing it to my attention. I wasn't aware of the case.
My take is it will be significantly more nuanced if it goes to a fight.
Bernstein v US is too blanket of a ruling to say "all code is 100% protected under free speech". It's like trying to argue "all speech is protected under free speech" - this is a gross misunderstanding. There are clear examples of things you cannot freely say - one of them being classified information[0]. Otherwise Snowden wouldn't have to fear anything (he absolutely does).
Like wise, saying all code is free speech is too obtuse. If my code was open source "puts classified_information_str" I'd be in lots of trouble.
Where this falls isn't up to me to decide - I'm not smart enough, but it's just not so clear cut.
There is (generally speaking) no prior restraint against publishing classified information in the United States. Snowden is in trouble for disclosing classified information that he didn't have a right to disclose by virtue of his employment. Anyone not so restricted can (generally speaking) publish any classified information they get a hold of, although they might be strongly discouraged from doing so for a variety of reasons.
It is like the situation with trade secrets - anyone can publish trade secrets except those who have a duty not to disclose them, and often they can as well once the secret becomes public knowledge.
There are, however, statutory exceptions for national defense information like plans to a military base or plans and specifications for certain weapons. In those cases it doesn't matter how you came into possession of the related documents you can't legally publish it anyway.
To add onto this, when it comes to "classified" information, it generally falls into two types:
1. Actual classified information (Secret, TS, SCI, SAP). This information is classified by people with clearances according to a set of guidelines and all information has to be more or less manually classified. If you were to independently produce this information (without knowledge or information from the classified project), you are legally in the clear to publish.
2. Restricted information (RD, FRD, SNM). Unlike with classified information, what is or isn't considered restricted is regulated by the DOE. Because of this, information can be "restricted at inception" which prevents it from being published regardless of how it was obtained or produced.
Point being that just because information isn't classified and you may have acquired it through independent means, you can still be restricted from sharing it because the US has deemed it "inherently dangerous" to national security.
Note: I don't think the code in question could by any stretch be considered RD or FRD.
That's sounds like nonsense. For transmitting signals I can understand that there needs to be some kind of order so the various low throughput bands can remain usable, but this is just receiving what anyone can read with an antenna and processing it a bit.
ITAR limits all kinds of things mostly arbitrarily.
Fast high resolution ADCs, which anyone can simulate using fast enough low res sampling (any serdes for modern buses) and some math. Thermal cameras can be sold up to a certain refresh rate but not higher.
It’s not really about the tech so much as it is about making it difficult and annoying to work around.
> ITAR limits all kinds of things mostly arbitrarily.
Yep and it’s incredibly broad. I used to work in one of those shooting ranges in Vegas where tourists go to shoot machine guns. We were told that anything more than “barrel pointed this way, this is the trigger” with a foreign national (which were a LOT of customers) could be construed as “training” and thus a potential ITAR violation.
We built a system with the most humanitarian application imaginable, helping people in need, and it was good. Turns out, it's hard to make money at that and the business people recast things into a new product that could suppress dissent in authoritarian countries, which they sold there. I'm positive it's been used to hurt people.
Ethically, all the people that make generic infra like roads or computers or sdr software are not responsible if someone else does evil with their product.
Because people enjoy tinkering with radio and these sorts of projects have become possible in the amateur space now that high quality Radio hardware is so cheap. I doubt the people who work on this have nefarious intent.
Smartphones are super useful for everyone, radar not so much.
That said would be nice to someone like google just added a layer on google maps of all objects you can track. There are companies that do all sort of tracking, just not as cheaply as this.
At a minimum, passive radar could be useful to augment more conventional types of cameras in a home security system, especially for someone with acres of land with a lot of trees, etc.
No one knew how personally useful radio transmission could be when it was in the exclusive domain of inventors and governments. Radar is not very personally useful yet. It has lots of non-military and non-professional applications that will open up as it becomes cheaper and more accessible.
Restricting code like this will make zero difference to governments or any motivated, well funded, capable group. It just hampers the rest of us.
I'm pretty sure he asked because it's not uncommon to see mmwave radar on flagship smartphones, especially on devices that don't have lidar. Many cars also have radar for parking assist or automatic parking.
Active illumination isn't always safe. Russians in Ukraine have (or at least at one point had) a conundrum where if they turn on the radar to detect incoming HIMARS missiles then the radar gets targeted by HARM missiles.
In a domestic authoritarian context, an herbal extract salesman could detect when illumination is shone on the house in preparation for a heist.
Well, you can still do it. You just have to dig a little for the code. And you can use Active radar. Commercial radar guns that are available for consumers, so there must be frequencies allocated to use this legally
(though if you build your own device, it won't have specific FCC certification, but if you operate with in the same parameters -- frequency and power -- you're extremely unlikely to be noticed or penalized.)
Being hosted on GitHub, it probably has already been cloned multiple times around the world. Although if I understood the device working principles, this isn't rocket science and the most difficult part is making a receiver in which multiple SDR are synchronized from a single source so that the phase difference between received signals can be accurately measured, which would be impossible by using separate tuners due to the high latencies and unpredictabilities of the USB hardware.
I wonder if the interest created by the Streisand effect alone might fuel the production of cheaper multi-SDR hardware in China, to have it then available through say Aliexpress. That would defeat the take down purpose in the most ironic way.
Why are developers still limiting themselves by posting their code on the clearweb in a manner they can be traced and held liable for? Host everything on Tor from a server outside USA jurisdiction and this should be a total non issue. Code is speech. It’s time to stop letting the government get away with trampling on our 1st amendment rights to free speech.
My failed startup operated in a similar space: SDRs & military applications. I dunno how people don't plan from Day 1 with a knowledge of Uncle Sam's heavy-handed export restrictions in their mind.
I was using existing open-source software as a basis (GNU Radio), all of my engineers were foreigners in their home countries, my SDRs and single-board computers were dual-use hardware from multiple other nations, and my company was in Hong Kong. All because I knew I primarily wanted to target foreign countries with behind-the-power-curve militaries, not the admittedly-huge US defense market with its obnoxious barriers to entry. If you operate in the US, just keep your stuff closed source until you can afford expensive lawyers to tell you what you can share.
> It’s time to stop letting the government get away with trampling on our 1st amendment rights to free speech.
That needs to be a legal fight, since classified information is specifically exempted from free speech, among a long list of other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitations). Moving to Tor might skirt the rules, but does little to challenge them, and won’t prevent any legal trouble for someone who gets caught. (It could make things worse, as it might demonstrate intent.) If you believe that free speech should be absolute, that needs to be litigated and voted for. Just remember Chesterton’s Fence: all the free speech limitations we have now have already been litigated and fought for. There are good reasons that freedom of speech is not absolute.
If someone independently invents something using the available resources at hand it shouldn’t be able to be considered classified or copyright restricted, if it was really that advanced and sophisticated then nobody should be able to discover it unless it leaks. If there’s no proof it leaked to the public in violation of a government employee’s oath then the information should be legal. In that case I agree anyone who leaks classified documents should be charged for treason. But there’s a major difference between a software developer accidentally inventing a banned algorithm and getting slammed with the full force of the government and secret information the government has being leaked.
I can agree with everything you just said, but there’s a bit of a misconception of what free speech means tied up in this. The government isn’t claiming ownership. Freedom of speech is a protection the government offers to protect citizens against itself, and the government defines what freedom of speech means. It’s probably best to leave copyright aside, introducing that now and mixing it up with free speech is going to muddy the discussion. This isn’t a copyright issue.
It doesn’t matter if I independently invent nuclear weapons, I’m still not currently allowed to open source them for other people, possibly in other countries, to use. That isn’t because the government thinks they own my ideas, it’s because the government believes that sharing information on how to build nuclear weapons is bad for us and threatens our safety. (Edit) BTW, it’s also important here to recognize that claiming “independent” invention is risky and problematic, if you received any benefit from your environment in the form of education, ideas, collaborators, parts, market conditions, etc. There are very few, if any, truly independent inventions.
Note I’m not making any arguments on whether ITAR should or should not be classified. What I’m pointing out is that that is what needs to be debated - whether ITAR is classifiable (or otherwise export controlled), and this isn’t otherwise an issue of free speech failing to be absolute. It’s a simple fact that freedom of speech is not absolute, and therefore demonstrating perceived abuses needs to be demonstrated based on the specifics of the case. Why should ITAR be declassified/open? That’s what needs to be shown.
> The government shouldn’t be able to classify scientific information that the public is able to discover on their own
It doesn’t matter if I independently invent nuclear weapons, I’m still not currently allowed to open source them for other people, possibly in other countries, to use.
It's funny you mentioned nuclear weapons. Nuclear design information is purportedly "born secret" in the United States (that is, purportedly restricted based on what it is, not where it came from).
However, the one time that this looked like going to trial, when a magazine called The Progressive intended to publish Howard Morland's article describing the operation of thermonuclear weapons in the 1970s and the DoE tried to stop them (United States v. Progressive, Inc.), the Government ended up backing down before a final resolution of the case. The article was published, but whether or not this prior restraint is legal is still undecided.
It is also worth noting that the argument for suppression leaned on the severe consequences up to thermonuclear war, something which the argument for suppressing passive radar technology is going to have a harder time with.
> the argument for suppression leaned on the severe consequences up to thermonuclear war, something which the argument for suppressing passive radar technology is going to have a harder time with.
Why would you assume radar needs the same justification as nuclear weapons, when there are lots of export controlled products and ideas already that aren’t justified by the specific or immediate threat of thermonuclear war, e.g., encryption, weapons, chemicals, software, etc.? That’s what ITAR is…
The Morland/Progressive story is quite fascinating. It’s worth pointing out that it happened more than 30 years after the original designs, after other countries had their own nukes, and the case was dropped due to all of the info Morland shared already being in the public domain. It’s not really an example of free speech winning against the government, and isn’t precedent for how we’re handling defense related technology today.
Why would you assume radar needs the same justification as nuclear weapons, when there are lots of export controlled products and ideas already that aren’t justified by the specific or immediate threat of thermonuclear war, e.g., encryption, weapons, chemicals, software, etc.? That’s what ITAR is…
The first amendment arguments in the case (and related cases like the Pentagon Papers) in part hinged on the immediacy and degree of harm to the United States that publication was likely to cause. "Thermonuclear war" is an easier sell in this balancing of concerns than "better radar".
It’s worth pointing out that it happened more than 30 years after the original designs, after other countries had their own nukes, and the case was dropped due to all of the info Morland shared already being in the public domain.
Not exactly. The Teller-Ulam design was about 26 years old at that point - it was first tested at Ivy Mike in 1952. The Soviets and British developed similar staged thermonuclear weapons over later part of the decade, the Chinese and French not until the late 1960s.
Morland and The Progressive argued from the start that the article was based on information in the public domain, when the DoE first came to them. The government on the contrary argued that the article contained still-secret information. The government then did say they were dropping the case because it was mooted by events, but dropping it did also avoid the risk of an adverse ruling - as I said, the legality of these kinds of prior restraints on publishing independently-derived material remains unclear.
> “Thermonuclear war” is an easier sell in this balancing of concerns than “better radar”.
Why? That doesn’t explain the entire rest of everything that is currently export controlled, right? Threat of Thermonuclear war is not the basis for the ITAR program.
Why? Because it's a more grave and imminent threat, and the jurisprudence around first amendment vs prior restraint against publishing of classified material is around balancing of concerns, with prior restraint justified in cases of "direct, immediate or irreparable harm to our Nation or its people". It's not a black and white line, the degree of harm matters.
"Everything else that is currently export controlled" has not been litigated (but note that we are only concerned here with limits on the export of expressive text, not for example actual armaments). The one case where restrictions on the export of software by ITAR was litigated - Bernstein v. United States Department of States (District Court of California) (1997) - the District Court ruled the regulations in question were an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech and issued a declaratory judgement preventing the government from enforcing the ITAR in question against DJB or anyone else seeking to use, discuss or publish his encryption code.
Oh I see what you mean now, thanks for the explanation. Yes I agree that when challenging in court whether some tech can be classified or not, then nukes are an easier sell than radar. I was more referring to what happens before that, how something becomes classified and/or export controlled by the government. It doesn’t have to be litigated in order to legally limit feee speech, while it does have to be challenged, litigated, and won in order to become free speech.
I'm not a fan of github for other reasons, but how the heck would your solution work for searchability and discoverability, two of github's largest values?
This could work for distribution but it's not a solution for shielding the developer(s). If you have already publicly published code with attribution I would not consider tor + forward pawns to be 100% invulnerable to forensics to determine authorship. So now you're looking at tackling code transformation without obfuscation to cover provenance, which sounds non-trivial.
(Your comment made me wonder if coPilot can also be used to fingerprint developers based on their existing code.)
Tracking anything you might track with an active RADAR, but without needing a permit to operate a RADAR emitter. The ability to track 'stealth' aircraft is just a niche. Similar techniques are used to measure atmospheric density (for meteorology) using the known signals from GPS satellites.
Maybe as a human presence detector for security, control of musical instruments, monitoring vital signs. In all those cases you probably don't want a radio emitter near other equipment (especially in a hospital). For security systems, say as a human presence detector, you may not want to advertise your security system has a radar sensor by broadcasting RF. I think there are some research papers on using passive radar for vital signs monitoring. Indoor localization would be a good use also.
I have the same question. Kraken's main product is a 400$ "software defined radio for applications such as radio direction finding and passive radar" [0].
At that price point they'd have to sell quite a few of these to make a living. So who's buying these, and what for?
They would do great in Ukraine right now for direction finding shitty Baofeng UHF radios ru have to use after their general embezzled funds for development of Azart system
>Interfax reports that the Deputy Chief of the General Staff and the most senior communications officer in the Russian military, Colonel General Khalil Arslanov, has been arrested for fraud in relation to the purchase of special equipment.
>The investigation isn't limited to 2.2 B RUB worth of theft, but also to fraud related to contracts for the Azart comm system built by NPO Angstrem JSC and Yaroslavl Radio Plant. Of 18 B RUB spent on the radios, 6.5 B RUB might have been stolen due to artificially high prices.
Yep, I have a Kraken and can confirm it is fantastic for DFing shitty Baofengs, especially when they're being used as HAMMER-style acoustic modems for something chatty. Practically the best possible scenario for easy DF. Perhaps logically, even though chirp spread spectrum isn't actually FHSS, it struggles a lot more with LoRA transmissions.
I bought one to play around with. I've located radio transmitters by driving around and used the passive radar to track cars on a highway and airplanes at an airport.
My local club does foxhunting activities but also has been trying to identify a set of transmissions meant to disrupt the repeater’s operation.
At least three members bought krakens at least in part to find the perpetrator. To me it’s a pretty interesting cat and mouse game. It seems like the illegal transmissions are mobile which has prevented success at stopping them.
Another user case is non-malicious interference. Sometimes something is radiating a strong harmonic because of a corroded connector, etc, and the source can be identified with doppler direction finding equipment.
Finding a culprit in a repeater war is a more difficult thing to do, because what do you do with the person once he's identified?
> because what do you do with the person once he's identified?
Hand the evidence over to the FCC. The FCC isn't going to proactively go after someone, but they're more than willing to take cases and issue fines if someone has already done most of the legwork.
$lastco (defense contractor) used something like that for localizing various EMF (cell phones, drone controls, RC remotes, and other potential IED triggers) as part of one of those "smart soldier" DARPA programs.
There's definitely demand in the defense-adjacent space.
The most often cited are things like the fire department figuring out which parts of a burning building have people in them, or a hospital noticing when a patient tries to get out of bed on their own.
You have a much more active imagination than I do.
Others have linked the code and an article about someone trying it out. What you can do with this is that you wave around two yagi antenna. You point one at a broadcast source and an other at something flying in the opposite direction from the broadcast source. If all the stars align and the system works you then get the range, and the dopler. The measured range is the full distance from the broadcast source to the object and back to you.
This is not a radar where the user gets a display full of tracks in front of them. One maybe one day might develop something like that from this core.
Even if it were a stealth radar like that it is very dubious how it would help a drug smuggling operation, or why they would bother with it at all.
> What you can do with this is that you wave around two yagi antenna. You point one at a broadcast source and an other at something flying in the opposite direction from the broadcast source. If all the stars align and the system works you then get the range, and the dopler.
This is one interpretation, but it's actually pretty reliable.
> This is not a radar where the user gets a display full of tracks in front of them
> If you don't need to be covert then you could just use active radar, right?
Passive radars can be used to track emissions sources of which you have no specific knowledge e.g. you're looking for a ship or rig, but you either don't want to ping it, or you are looking for its rough location, or you literally don't have the hardware for an active radar at the range involved.
All the details are here to do autotuning to the frequencies available to a KrackenSDR dependent on frequencies. This device and antenna go from 400MHz to 1.7GHz.
From what I understand, it was SDR[0] code which would allow using the antenna (possibly reconfigurable?[1]) into a passive radar aka a radar which tracks objects through their emissions (radio, bluetooth, wifi, ...) rather than emit electromagnetic waves and track their return.
The cat went out of the bag the second SDRs jumped from DARPA R&D to DVB-T commodity.
That aside having a passive radar breadboard is not the same as a high-end passive radar where frequency/phase stability, use of wideband multi-source emitters, ultra-low noise amplifiers and N>>2 channels for increased angular resolution are integrated in an operational system. These systems that actually works, should be controlled.