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During the cold war, NATO developed a military doctrine of communications warfare.

Consider when you are facing overwhelming enemy numbers, such as the massive Soviet tank armies parked in the Ukraine, just waiting for the go signal to roll into Western Germany, the value of being able to fuck up the communications of such an army.

You see, moving a massive army is difficult. It's the logistics. Fuel has to be delivered, and supplies, and only so many units can cross so many bridges in a given hour. Only so many units can pass down any given road per unit of time.

Issuing false orders into the enemy ranks sends troops in the wrong direction, and this creates traffic jams and other chaos. When your own forces are smaller, you can use them to defeat larger enemy forces in a piecemeal manner, by only fighting a smaller portion at a time. This is NATO's land warfare doctrine. Build a better tool rather than a bigger one, and deploy it carefully against selected targets.

It works. Back to the communications, NATO has military units that jam, intercept, monitor, and imitate enemy communications. Computers have made the voice imitation part much easier. Sound wise, any voice can be made to sound like any other voice. After that you only need the speech pattern, common phrases, etc. There are troops that practice sounding like specific individuals in the enemy command structure. Most NATO countries have such military units, as do NATO allied countries.

During the battle, Commander Bob suddenly starts issuing new orders. The men receiving those orders have talked to Bob for years. They know his voice and how he speaks. They will testify it was Bob who issued the new orders. Orders which resulted in the failed attack that afternoon. It doesn't even matter that the enemy figures out what is happening, because if reliable commands cannot be issued, the army cannot move. An immobile army is a useless army. Furthermore, it is a sitting duck for air power.

So, on 911, phone calls were made that were impossible to make, to people at home who swear they talked to their relatives on those planes. Who had the technical capabilities to do that? Probably the same people who could paint cruise missiles to look like passenger airliners and fire one into the Pentagon.

During the cold war, NATO developed a military doctrine of communications warfare. Consider when you are facing overwhelming enemy numbers, such as the massive Soviet tank armies parked in the Ukraine, just waiting for the go signal to roll into Western Germany, the value of being able to fuck up the communications of such an army. You see, moving a massive army is difficult. It's the logistics. Fuel has to be delivered, and supplies, and only so many units can cross so many bridges in a given hour. Only so many units can pass down any given road per unit of time. Issuing false orders into the enemy ranks sends troops in the wrong direction, and this creates traffic jams and other chaos. When your own forces are smaller, you can use them to defeat larger enemy forces in a piecemeal manner, by only fighting a smaller portion at a time. This is NATO's land warfare doctrine. Build a better tool rather than a bigger one, and deploy it carefully against selected targets. It works. Back to the communications, NATO has military units that jam, intercept, monitor, and imitate enemy communications. Computers have made the voice imitation part much easier. Sound wise, any voice can be made to sound like any other voice. After that you only need the speech pattern, common phrases, etc. There are troops that practice sounding like specific individuals in the enemy command structure. Most NATO countries have such military units, as do NATO allied countries. During the battle, Commander Bob suddenly starts issuing new orders. The men receiving those orders have talked to Bob for years. They know his voice and how he speaks. They will testify it was Bob who issued the new orders. Orders which resulted in the failed attack that afternoon. It doesn't even matter that the enemy figures out what is happening, because if reliable commands cannot be issued, the army cannot move. An immobile army is a useless army. Furthermore, it is a sitting duck for air power. So, on 911, phone calls were made that were impossible to make, to people at home who swear they talked to their relatives on those planes. Who had the technical capabilities to do that? Probably the same people who could paint cruise missiles to look like passenger airliners and fire one into the Pentagon.

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[–] • 0 pt

Cellular phones work just fine on planes, even in 2001. Those would have been AMPS service, TDMA, or CDMA service. You could make TDMA device calls in places nothing else worked, and AMPS was everywhere. It's likely people were making those calls because fuck that, you're going to die, what will they do - fine you?

This is a story told to me by a crusty old engineer during my tenure at Ma Bell. The reason that cellular wasn't allowed on planes during the early days (other than the hassle of having to listen to chatty Kathy yell into her device about inane shit for four hours,) was that the billing was a nightmare. Before most of the cellular service was consolidated into big carriers, there were hundreds of little ones. At several hundred miles per hour, you could potentially go through hundreds of carriers on a flight. Handoff was a nightmare, and billing and even bigger one.

It's just carried through all these years. Avionics interference is a minor concern, the aircraft fly through higher power broadcast items all the time, and your 500mW device isn't enough to blow a nose.