Police Report That White Supremacists are Attacking Cell Phone Towers
The goal is “to incite fear, disrupt essential services, and cause economic damage with the United States and abroad,” according to the report.
Anagha Srikanth, writing in TheHill.com, March 18, 2021
In more than one case, [white supremacists] succeeded in interrupting resources for law enforcement and emergency services personnel, according to the report, which lists several recent cases. One involved a neo-Nazi chat group whose “members strongly supported exploiting civil unrest in the United States by attacking the country’s infrastructure," The Intercept reported, while another was tied to the 5G conspiracy theory, which claims without evidence that the electromagnetic waves put out by 5G towers are harming peoples' immune systems and are responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.
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What's alarming is how easy... if you understand how such systems work... it is to cause degradation and damage to such communications systems. We saw a vivid illustration on Christmas Day 2020 when an "RV bomb" in Nashville, TN was detonated in front of a regional AT&T network hub and disrupted communications over a wide region.
A second vulnerability is one that's already reported here - jamming Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Signals from GNSS aren't just used for positioning. One of the signals available in GNSS systems is precision timing, which is used to synchronize multi-site wireless communications systems. The first generations of cellular communications systems used onsite precision timekeeping systems... which was expensive. As GNSS systems became more widespread, less expensive precision timekeeping systems were developed that used precision timing derived from GNSS.
Just like no one imagined that someone would detonate a RV full of explosives in front of an AT&T network hub... no one that decided to use GNSS-based precision timekeeping systems as a critical input to wireless communications systems imagined that the GNSS signals would be deliberately, maliciously interfered with.
Two decades ago, there were Federal Communications Commission (FCC) technical personnel in most states that could track down malicious interference within days at most. Now, there are a handful of FCC offices nationwide with that capability. Sometimes the FCC cannot be bothered to respond to malicious interference complaints.
Increasingly, Amateur Radio Operators are among the small pool of those with the skills to track down malicious interference to wireless communications systems. In fact, Amateur Radio Operators are probably the only group that practices those skills regularly, for fun, with their own equipment.
Good thing there's Amateur Radio... Yes?
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA