Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast
Seeking a better life for one’s children tends to be a powerful motivator for people. The promise of a better life has driven a lot of people to get on a boat and sail to the United States over the last few hundred years. As a natural born citizen, I benefit from them all, from the cleverest inventor to the humblest fruit picker. We got folks in power right now trying to abolish it, and look how it’s going for us.
You sound, to me, like a Republican.
You’re getting a 10 ohm resistor and liking it.
It almost certainly have been trained partially on r/anarchychess so it’ll probably try to play pop tart to king’s bishop 3.
So…let’s actually set up a pretend scenario here. Pretend. We are pretend red teaming here; any resemblance to actual terrorist plots living or dead is purely coincidental.
Let’s pretend our terrorist cell is going to spit up, travel to 10 places around the United States, and we’re going to do a coordinated strike on 10 government buildings. Probably the smartest thing to do is just…do it at a planned time and not communicate after we split up. But for some convoluted Ocean’s Umpteen reason we need to communicate and coordinate. I see 3 possible scenarios here:
In all three cases, the internet is the better tool for this.
You are correct in that it is difficult or impossible to remotely detect radio receivers, no matter what the BBC tells you. There’s no machinery making a log of who accesses what over analog radio. But the realities of radio equipment and propagation are going to eat into that advantage somewhat.
If we’re talking truly coast-to-coast, you’re going to need HF. MF/longwave won’t reach far enough, you need skywave propagation, and you get that on HF…mostly at night mostly during favorable sunspot activity.
I bet you’re imagining most of the team using one of those handheld commodity shortwave receivers that does AM/FM and shortwave, about the size of a pencil case with one of those telescoping whip antennas. That might do for 1 and 2, people hear hams on those sometimes.
The bosses transmitter would need to be a reasonably serious bit of kit. At the very least something like an Icom 706 mobile HF rig plus power supply and at least a two element yagi for 20 or 40m. This is an antenna that’s 30 to 60 feet wide. Hams do routinely make do with less, but when you’re talking to someone with those crappy little antennas, probably inside a building, I’d want to focus my beam at least a bit. A wire in a tree ain’t gonna do.
Oh, and, let’s say Boss is in Washington DC. It’s possible he can make himself heard in Los Angeles but not Wichita, because the “optics” of the ionosphere doesn’t bounce his signal down to the ground in the middle of the continent.
One communique of “Baker this is Oven: Preheat complete, insert the bread. Repeat: Insert the bread.” might not be noticed. Or some ham somewhere will hear it and go “What the hell, who’s horsing around?” If you don’t transmit again, you’re probably not going to be direction found. But that big radio tower you’ve got is a weird thing to have.
If you need to make routine transmissions, well now you’re going to have to try some steganography crap. They did recently relax the baud restrictions on HF, but you’re still talking about 2.8kHz of analog bandwidth that MIGHT get through. It’s gonna look really weird if you’re repeatedly sending digital pictures to…no one in particular on a regular basis. Now, to blend in, you’ll need some genuine callsigns, because the FCC amateur radio license database is a matter of public record. You use a bogus callsign and you’ll be found out. If you’re transmitting a lot, people will find you, possibly out of curiosity.
Especially if you’re talking about everyone in the terrorist cell communicating, well now EVERYONE has to have an amateur radio license from the government, and fairly large, fairly conspicuous radio hardware. There have been spies caught with shortwave radio equipment, and said equipment was used as evidence against them. Entering the US with a smart phone and laptop is utterly normal, entering the US with a shortwave radio is weird.
OR
Get accounts on Reddit, and post cat memes. Compared to sitting around listening to static on an HF set, that looks way more normal these days. Yes, there probably is a log of what IP addresses sent and received what, but it’s really easy to make two-way secret communications look like perfectly legitimate traffic. The equipment required doesn’t draw as much attention. Keep the steganography subtle or a matter of “which picture I post” and not doctor them at all, well now it’s 100% indistinguishable from people having casual fun. Some guy posts a picture of an orange cat, it gets 30,000 views 975 likes and 75 comments, and ten IRS buildings explode. Do you think the authorities make the connection to the cat meme in the first place?
xXx-=The_Mouse_Sl@yer_69=-xXx
Meowssolini
Karen the Paranoid Android. “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very litigious.”
“‘Can I manage a vending machine?’ Can I manage a vending machine? Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’re asking me to manage a vending machine. Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”
Actually I like that one.
You know that cute thing vets do when they come out to the waiting room and call the cat’s name?
They won’t do that if you name your cat “Shithead”.
I can think of two adventures you’ll be going on a lot: Sunburn and wave slosh. Meh.
I think this is the left-handed way.
Depends on the kind of “lost at sea”
In a perfectly functioning oceanworthy boat stocked with food, but the GPS fell overboard and I have no idea where I am so I’m going to sail West as much as I can until I hit land, then sail counter-clockwise around the coast until I find something I can identify or someone I can ask? Sure let’s go.
Ship sank, I’m alone in an inflatable raft with a flare gun and a blinkenlight? Nah you go ahead.
Well on some popular image board like one of the hundreds of cat subs on Reddit, how do you identify a “listener” who is looking for a particular user to upload a picture of an orange cat? Thousands of people will view that post perfectly innocently.
“Misogyny” is anything that a feminist doesn’t like. Depending on the feminist, the grocery store being out of cinnamon raisin bagels is misogynist, because she wanted cinnamon raisin bagels.
Frankly there are probably a lot of people who need to see their retirements go away and they need to spend their golden years in the mines. They need to have their elderly assholes penised apart for voting for this shit for decades.
No I think it’s going to have to involve large numbers of perforated colons. Consequences should be physical.
Who said we’re paying to house prisoners? The US constitution permits enslaving convicted felons. They’re all going to the mines. They will WORK or be mutilated.
I don’t, I have no stock portfolio at all. You’re probably right there’s a lot of bullshit that goes on in the financial world that I would put a pretty swift end to. Hell, “money market” bank accounts and such are probably somehow attached to the stock market.
If I understand correctly, a mutual fund is basically a bunch of people invest in a bunch of stocks managed by a professional stock guesser such that it’s almost certainly going to do at least kind of okay. Yeah I’d either outright end that practice or heap a LOT of liability on the stock guesser and a bit on the members.
You invested in a mutual fund, and one of the 60 stocks in the portfolio was Locktheon, and Locktheon just released a chemical weapon killing an entire small town? Your stock broker is now a slave of the state and will die in the mines, you and everyone else who is a member of that mutual fund owe 1000 hours community service each. We’re going to have a highway system so clean you can eat off it.
I’ve got a better idea: Make stockholders criminally liable and eligible for prison/execution for the crimes committed by the companies they invest in.
Oh, PharmaCorp knowingly put a medication in to production that causes baby’s brains to catch fire? Every single investor in PharmaCorp is gonna serve three consecutive life sentences in Rapesburg-Asspain penitentiary.
Wipe out a few generations of the upper class by getting a couple mass first degree murder convictions to stick and the problem will sort itself out.
Oh the legal system is pretty good at deciding intent, I mean what’s the difference between manslaughter and murder?
Thing is, it’s not like there’s radio police that are going to pull you over for encrypting. Other hams might turn you in if you’re being annoying. If you send an encrypted email over Hamlink once, or say something like “Beefy Burrito this is Enchilada, the tamales are in the basket” on 33cm once, probably nobody’s gonna notice.
There’s only ~3.7MHz worth of bandwith on the HF bands, another 4MHz on 6m. There’s a lot of attention on the bands that propagate. If you want to secretly communicate with people, use Reddit, or the Fediverse.
You know r/kitty? One of a trillion cat subreddits that had a gimmick that the only written word allowed was “kitty.” All post titles and comments had to consist only of “Kitty.” Arrange with the leaders of the other terrorist cells you’re working for that if u/chudmuffin posts a picture of an orange cat, we attack at dawn, and if he posts a picture of a grey cat, lay low they’re onto us.
Encryption is legal and standard on the internet, where there’s many orders of magnitude more traffic than on the ham bands. I can’t send an encrypted email over Hamlink with a license, but I can host a Tor site without one.
Electronics engineering is a bit beyond my scope; as an electronics hobbyist or field repairman you’re gonna get the closest I have in my kit at the time, I’ll probably get within an order of magnitude of the spec unless it’s somehow very damn critical or the schematic calls for one of the oddly common oddly specific values like 220 ohm.