Computer hackers plan to protect the internet by launching own satellites

By Muriel Kane - RAW Story
Friday, December 30, 2011

Forget science fiction — this one sounds like pure fantasy — but hackers at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin are dreaming of creating their own network of communications satellites and ground stations to forestall any attempt to control the internet.

They’d also like to put a hacker on the moon by 2035.

According to the BBC, hacker activist Nick Farr began calling for contributions to the Hackerspace Global Grid last August, spurred on by threats of online censorship such as that posed by the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The technical obstacles to such a plan might seem daunting. The BBC points out that “hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit – usually only for brief periods of time — but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.” Participants in Farr’s project, however, believe that the tracking problem would be easy to address given sufficient funding.

The Chaos Computer Club, which was founded in 1981, has been a center of support for transparency, freedom of information, and the hacker ethic, and its annual congress is Europe’s largest hacker event. The CCC is best known for its hacks carried out to demonstrate security flaws, but now it appears to be turning into a center of hardware tinkering as well.

As described by the BBC, “When Mr Farr called for contributions to Hackerspace, Mr [Armin] Bauer and others decided to concentrate on the communications infrastructure aspect of the scheme. … In the open-source spirit of Hackerspace, Mr Bauer and some friends came up with the idea of a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.”

“It’s kind of a reverse GPS,” Bauer explained. “GPS uses satellites to calculate where we are, and this tells us where the satellites are.”

Satellite Imagery Shows Shell Nigerian Spill Worse Than Reported

Monday, December 26, 2011 by TalkingPointsMemo

by Emily Gertz 

 

A Shell deepwater drilling site off the Nigerian coast that the company reported leaking on Wednesday may have spilled up to 2.4 million gallons, according to nonprofit environmental satellite monitoring group SkyTruth.

 
ESA Envisat radar satellite image showing a major oil spill in the waters off the coast of Nigeria, via SkyTruth. If so, that’s far worse than indicated in statements made so far by Royal Dutch Shell, which has put the amount of oil leaked at the Bonga offshore site at “less than 40,000 barrels,” (1.7 million gallons).

“That could mean anything from 1 gallon to 1.7 million gallons,” John Amos, founder and president of satellite-imaging nonprofit SkyTruth told TPM.

Oil must be at least 1 micron (1/1000th of a millimeter) thick to be seen from a satellite, according to Amos. The visible rainbow sheen, he says, means that the oil could be anywhere from .3 to 10 microns thick, depending on two different sets of guidelines.

Amos used an image from a European Space Agency radar satellite (the ASAR instrument) to determine that as of mid-week, the spill covered an area of 923 square kilometers (356 square miles).

So if the spill is 5 microns thick—the estimate where the two sets of guidelines intersect—the oil would add up to around 1.2 million gallons, Amos said.

Shell has stated that the spill’s thickness is mostly less than 1/100th of a millimeter, or 10 microns, a statement which leaves a big data gap as well.

“If the whole slick is, on average, 10 microns thick, that’s 2.4 million gallons,” Amos said.

Reached for comment, Shell did not acknowledge SkyTruth’s estimate, and and would only reiterate the 40,000 barrel figure.

On Saturday, Shell released an updated, upbeat statement assuring observers that the spill had been contained and was shrinking thanks to the use of dispersals. As the company’s statement reads: “Current estimates based on over flights indicate less than 10,000 barrels of oil remain on the surface of the water.”

The Bonga spill took place Tuesday, December 20, when oil was being transferred between storage ships. The ordinary production capacity of the field was 200,000 barrels a day, and 10 percent of Nigeria’s overall monthly oil production, according to Reuters.

Presumably, Shell would know how much oil it started with on the day of the spill compared to how much remains, according to Amos.

“We have a lot more to hear from Shell about what actually happened at this site,” Amos told TPM.

Shell has been using floating production and storage offloading, or FPSO technology at the Bonga oilfield, “in which crude oil is piped to floating, mobile tanks, usually converted supertankers, rather than fixed platforms. Shuttle tankers collect oil from the FPSO and carry it to market,” as Wired reported earlier this week.

FPSO is a much cheaper way for an oil company to drill offshore, compared to setting up a drilling platform.

In addition, Shell has reported several oil spills off the coast of Nigeria since it began operating there in 2002, which it blames on sabotage and theft.

Amos believes Shell has a big incentive to be more transparent about the Bonga spill: the company recently received the Obama adminstration’s conditional approval to drill in the Arctic.

“If they weren’t honest [about the Bonga oil spill] and it was discovered they weren’t, I think that would make our government less likely to ease up on drilling restrictions in the Arctic,” he says.

Another recent Shell update states that “survelliance and aerial photos” show the spill breaking up, and that it has not reached the Nigerian coast. SkyTruth hasn’t been able to confirm or debunk this statement so far.

Amos believes Shell has caught on that groups like SkyTruth are using remote sensing to monitor its operations and vet its public statements.

For proof he points to a statement on Shell’s web site, posted after Amos blogged about the size of the Bonga oil slick, stating that while the spill’s extent, “as seen on satellite images, is very large, it’s also very thin.”

Says Amos, “The days when this stuff was so expensive and techie that only oil companies had access to it are over.”

Satellites Orbiting Earth by Country

Cops Don't Need Warrants to Plant GPS on Cars, Federal Court Says

by Caleb Johnson on August 28, 2010

A federal judge in California recently ruled that police can place a GPS on a person's car without his or her knowledge without seeking a warrant. CNN reports that Juan Pineda-Moreno's appeal was rejected for the third time in early August by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers nine West Coast states. Pineda-Moreno claimed that Oregon DEA agents had violated his privacy by sneaking onto his property and placing a GPS tracker on his Jeep, due to their suspicions that he was growing marijuana. To support their case against Pineda-Moreno, prosecutors used data culled by the device, such as the latitude and longitude of where the Jeep had been driving and how long it had stayed at those coordinates.

While Pineda-Moreno will continue serving his 51-month sentence, not everybody agrees with the court's ruling. "The vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel's ruling," Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his dissent of the case. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told CNN that the ruling was "Orwellian."

This comes less than a month after a D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that police should attain a warrant before engaging in GPS tracking. The opposing Ninth Circuit ruling suggests the constitutionality of warrentless GPS tracking will be tested in the Supreme Court. In some ways, using a GPS to track somebody isn't much different than parking down the street and tailing them. The notion of remote monitoring doesn't make this "Orwellian," but the ease with which the system could be abused definitely crosses into dangerous Big Brother territory.