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Al Qaeda 9/11 On Satellites
Experts are warning that al-Qaeda has the desire -- and the knowledge -- to take out satellites. Dawn Rae Downton reports on the devastating impact such an attack would have on business, communications -- and the American military.In May, 1998, mortally wounded by contamination on a printed circuit board, Galaxy IV failed as it sat in geostationary orbit over the middle of the Western hemisphere. Ninety percent of the pagers in the U.S. and Canada -- 45 million of them -- fell silent instantly, including the pagers of volunteer firefighters and doctors on call. CBS, Reuters and UPI lost their news feeds; gas-pump credit card readers and ATMs stopped working from St. John's to San Diego. It was up to a week before most users were back on line. This is what happens when a single "bird," one of several hundred up there, bites the dust. Imagine the chaos when they all fail at the same time. Security experts say that al-Qaeda has imagined just that. It's not so hard to interfere with satellites, and especially to destroy them. Sooner or later, the experts think, al-Qaeda will have our birds in its sights. While communications satellites alone generate $50-billion to American industry and $120-billion worldwide, money's not the object here. Catastrophe is the goal, since without satellites we'd be nowhere, literally, with our security compromised. Satellites allow us to use our cellphones -- and give the U.S. government access to every call. (Ottawa has similar access to each call made in this country, but is prohibited from using it without court permission.) Geostationary satellites distribute our TV signals, tie together financial institutions, monitor weather. Commercial communications satellites do just about everything -- for instance, one was used until 2000 by Osama bin Laden himself (his phone number was 00873 6825 05331). Without commercial satellites, couriers can't deliver and grocery stores don't get stocked. U.S. military commanders use Iridium satellite phones to call out from the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan (as well as the myriad of places the U.S. military says they're not). These 66 satellites zipping around the earth every 100 minutes in a relatively low orbit of 775 kilometres were originally a worldwide cellphone network owned by Motorola. Launched in 1998, Iridium promptly went bankrupt for lack of subscribers. The U.S. Department of Defence is now its heavily dependent prime user, and an Iridium failure would confound troops overseas. (Anyone can buy an Iridium phone, which can be used like a cellphone anywhere in the world, but at $1,000 a phone and $5 a minute, most people buy cellphones instead.) American spy satellites watch around the world, and look down on us right here at home. Echelon, satellite-based and operated by the National Security Agency, gives the United States the capacity to monitor every cellphone conversation and e-mail exchange in the world. The last July 21 London bomber to be apprehended was traced by cellphone calls to Italy, where he was picked up. Posted by: Captain America 2005-08-23 |
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