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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 k

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.

jand 4y ago
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.
ISL 4y ago
If the goal was to state that potentially-ITAR technology cannot be hosted at GitHub nor sold to consumers, that message was received loud and clear.
- kragen 4y ago
  we've already been through this with crypto in the bernstein case code is speech in the us the 1st amendment protects your right to publish code selling to consumers is a different case of course disclaimer, i'm not related to krakenrf
twawaaay 4y ago
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.
- hobs 4y ago
  I read multiple times during the invasion of Iraq that the opposite was true, that engineers greatly were over-represented in terrorist cells - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Man, that's an interesting read > 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 https://web.archive.org/web/20220106004629/https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220106004629/https://www.nytim...
  - ksidudwbw 4y ago
    If a foreign country invades you it pisses allot more than radicalists off
  - MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 4y ago
323 4y ago
What are the supposed dangers? 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.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600484445946/Silent-Sentry-Passive-Radar.html https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600484445946/Silent-Sentry-Pa...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ethbr0 4y ago
  The dangers are the capability to intercept stealth cruise missiles. Which appear to be the future weapon du jour for degrading integrated AA systems from outside A2/AD bubbles.
  - myrryr 4y ago
    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.
    - nradov 4y ago
      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.
- toss1 4y ago
  Not just supposed dangers — real danger. 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.
prpl 4y ago
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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  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.
  - blamazon 4y ago
    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] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Observatory [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter [4]: https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven/ https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven...
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      > 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...
nimbius 4y ago
>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.
- nradov 4y ago
  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.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  The world you believe exists, doesn't. > 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Tr... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Conventio...
derefr 4y ago
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.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > 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...
- osmarks 4y ago
  If they were particularly consistent about this, they would have to watch a lot of electrical engineers.
- jojobas 4y ago
  You can't copy-paste controlled precursors. Making knowledge illegal (a la nuclear "born secret") is a dead end. I'm pretty sure these guys would email their stuff to anyone who asked still.
areyousure 4y ago
In case anyone is curious, I believe the acronyms used here are the following: SDR: software-defined radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio CFAR: constant false alarm rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate RTL-..: a prefix (likely standing for "RealTek Limited") used by Realtek in its chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA DVB-T: digital video broadcasting — terrestrial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T

jand 4y ago

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.

ISL 4y ago

If the goal was to state that potentially-ITAR technology cannot be hosted at GitHub nor sold to consumers, that message was received loud and clear.

kragen 4y ago
we've already been through this with crypto in the bernstein case code is speech in the us the 1st amendment protects your right to publish code selling to consumers is a different case of course disclaimer, i'm not related to krakenrf

twawaaay 4y ago

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.

hobs 4y ago
I read multiple times during the invasion of Iraq that the opposite was true, that engineers greatly were over-represented in terrorist cells - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Man, that's an interesting read > 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 https://web.archive.org/web/20220106004629/https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220106004629/https://www.nytim...
- ksidudwbw 4y ago
  If a foreign country invades you it pisses allot more than radicalists off
- MSFT_Edging 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago

323 4y ago

What are the supposed dangers? 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.

hutzlibu 4y ago
https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600484445946/Silent-Sentry-Passive-Radar.html https://m.alibaba.com/product/1600484445946/Silent-Sentry-Pa...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ethbr0 4y ago
The dangers are the capability to intercept stealth cruise missiles. Which appear to be the future weapon du jour for degrading integrated AA systems from outside A2/AD bubbles.
- myrryr 4y ago
  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.
  - nradov 4y ago
    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.
toss1 4y ago
Not just supposed dangers — real danger. 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.

prpl 4y ago

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.

dylan604 4y ago
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.
- blamazon 4y ago
  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] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Observatory [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter [4]: https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven/ https://raoulpop.com/2012/04/15/chasing-rfi-waves-part-seven...
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > 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...

nimbius 4y ago

>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.

nradov 4y ago
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.
ethbr0 4y ago
The world you believe exists, doesn't. > 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. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Tr... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Conventio...

derefr 4y ago

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.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> 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...
osmarks 4y ago
If they were particularly consistent about this, they would have to watch a lot of electrical engineers.
jojobas 4y ago
You can't copy-paste controlled precursors. Making knowledge illegal (a la nuclear "born secret") is a dead end. I'm pretty sure these guys would email their stuff to anyone who asked still.

areyousure 4y ago

In case anyone is curious, I believe the acronyms used here are the following: SDR: software-defined radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio CFAR: constant false alarm rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate RTL-..: a prefix (likely standing for "RealTek Limited") used by Realtek in its chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realtek 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA DVB-T: digital video broadcasting — terrestrial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T