Link: Mobile blocking helicopter to trail Bush in Sydney | The Register
Interesting news has emerged this afternoon about a plan to block mobile phone calls during US President George W. Bush’s trip to Australia.
Conjecture around the phone-jamming helicopter has arisen as a result of its appearance in attendance on Mr Bush at the 2005 APEC summit in South Korea. Reporters covering the conference said that a Black Hawk chopper would shadow the presidential motorcade, and as it passed overhead mobile phones would lose touch with the local network.
More at the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
What a load of rubbish, by announcing it to the world they are simply advising any would-be assassins that cellphones aren’t a viable method of detonation and to use something else.
What they are really saying is that George Bush is more important than your phone calls.
George Bush is more important than your ability to call the emergency services.
I, personally, disagree.
Or, conversely, that the terrorists would do a spectral analysis of the jamming interferance being used (wideband noise between approx. 800MHz-1GHz, 1.8-1.9GHz and 2-2.2GHz would do it) or possibly targetting the GSM/TDMA control/paging chanels to prevent calls being made/received – ahhh, but in CDMA/WCDMA systems the control/paging channel is a ‘virtual’ channel amongst all the others with its unique orthogonal code (codes, not channels sparate CDMA system calls, so can’t pick that one out)
So instead, you just set your bomb to detonate or gas canister to vent when a decent amount of wideband noise was detected. Much cheaper/easier to do.
Or, install a ‘prat in an SUV’ detector.