Subject: [NEXTEL-1] New Technology Aids Military, Journalists in the War-

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 14:23:04 -0500

New Technology Aids Military, Journalists in the War-

Advances in digital technology have allowed US military and journalists
overseas greater ease in communication and strategic planning. Since Desert
Storm, the Department of Defense has been planning for a “netcentric war” in
which sensors, communications devices and weapons are linked in a seamless
digital network that boosts military effectiveness. These include delivery of
digital images from surveillance satellites and spy-planes, computers capable
of transmitting position and a networked tracking system using Wi-Fi bar code
scanners and handheld computing systems to track soldiers’ supplies such as
fuel and ammunition. Journalists are toting hand-held devices and small
satellite phones for clear, instant communication. According to one
representative at CBS News, technology has allowed news gatherers to go live
from wherever and whenever they want.

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March 24, 2003

Improved Tools Turn Journalists Into a Quick Strike Force

By AMY HARMON

s an NBC correspondent based in northern Iraq, Fred Francis is not finding work, or life,
easy right now. But things
would be a lot harder without his compact satellite dish, which at 140 pounds is about 800
pounds lighter than the one he
lugged into Panama during the 1989 United States invasion and spent five hours setting up
as the fighting went on a half-mile
away.

A prototype that was inspired by NBC's frustration with the jerky videophone pictures from
the war in Afghanistan, the small
dish lets Mr. Francis travel light, set up in 20 minutes and send home decent video. As
ABC's larger dish blew off the roof of a
nearby hotel one night last week, Mr. Francis snuggled with his compact model on a
sheltered balcony.

"When you're in dumps like this one, the one thing you want is communication," said Mr.
Francis, whose equipment also
provides him with high-speed data lines and two-way video so he can help edit his stories
and watch the "Today" show.

"This is the best thing I've ever worked with," Mr. Francis said in a telephone interview.

Reporters covering the war in Iraq are at one with their technology as never before.
Television reporters are toting hand-held
video cameras and print journalists have traded the 70-pound satellite phones of the 1991
Gulf War for svelte models that can
be held up to their ear. High-speed Internet lines in the desert and more satellites in
the sky mean journalists can make a
connection almost anywhere. As the conflict unfolds, they are tapping into the global
communications grid regularly.

News gatherers say the smaller gadgets and bigger bandwidth have broadened their reach in
a way that is sure to change how
people perceive the war. Just as television forced the world to confront graphic images of
war for the first time during the
Vietnam War, today's digital devices are beginning to provide a more intimate and
multifaceted view of the war in Iraq than
would have ever been possible before.

"Technology has advanced to the point where the only limitation is in the imagination of
the correspondent," said Frank
Governale, the vice president for operations at CBS News. "Given access by the military
and willpower of the people, we can
pretty much go live from wherever we want. It's a scary thought."

The most easily identifiable form the technology is taking at the moment is perhaps the
least impressive — the ubiquitous live
videophone reports from television correspondents scattered in remote locations in the
region. Today's more powerful satellite
phones and particularly the ability to link them together to double the transmission speed
makes such reports possible. But the
speed is still limited, and the live reports leave no time to compress the large video
files into the tidy digital bundles that, when
unpacked at the other end of the pathway, would produce something better than the grainy,
jerky pictures that characterized
coverage of the Third Infantry Division's mechanized dash across the desert.

"We like to refer to it as `edgy,' " said Dick Tauber, vice president for satellites and
circuits at CNN. "It doesn't look great, but
we'd rather have them be able to be live and be mobile."

Some media critics say the technology's potential benefits can be undermined by the
pressure it places on reporters to be filing
continually simply because it is possible to do so. As with any technology, the way the
news media chooses to use their new
capabilities will determine how much insight they actually provide to the public.

"This technology is a double-edged sword," said Orville Schell, the dean of the journalism
school at the University of California
at Berkeley. "The danger is you get a lot of communication and not necessarily that much
information."

Still, Mr. Schell, who began his career writing columns for The Boston Globe from
Southeast Asia in the mid-1960's, said he
well recalled the drawbacks of having to stay within the range of a telex machine, which
was the way most print reporters filed
their stories back then. He noted the subsequent transition of tools for war
correspondence — from telex, to telephone dictation,
to fax and most recently to e-mail messages and ever more portable satellite phones. "It's
like those charts of evolution that begin
in the water with slime."

Don Podesta, the information technology editor for The Washington Post, said the sharp
decrease in the size and expense of
satellite phones had resulted in more plentiful and nuanced stories than in the Persian
Gulf war of 1991 — and not only because
this time "embedded" reporters are allowed to travel with the troops.

"We're getting a lot of very rich 18-to-20-inch vignette stories about life with the
troops," said Mr. Podesta, who was a foreign
assignment editor during the 1991 gulf war. "Those were hard to get in telex days when we
didn't have a satellite phone for every
reporter, let alone two or three."

M. L. Lyke, a reporter for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer who is aboard the Abraham
Lincoln, an aircraft carrier in the Persian
Gulf, is filing Web journal entries known as Web logs, or blogs, for the newspaper's Web
site as well as feature stories for the
paper. Kevin Sites, a reporter for CNN, took advantage of audio technology that enabled
him to dictate Web log entries that
were automatically transcribed and posted on Kevinsites.net, although he suspended the
site when CNN asked him to stop on
Friday.

"Covering a war for CNN and its 35 international networks and services is a full-time
job," a CNN spokeswoman said, "so we
asked Kevin to concentrate only on that for the time being."

Reporters traveling with military forces are sometimes prohibited from using their
satellite phones, which can give away their
location.

But technology is also blurring the lines between professional journalists and the wide
range of participants and observers who
are recording and publishing their impressions on the Web. One widely-read blog is "Where
Is Raed?" written under the
pseudonym Salam Pax by someone who said in an e-mail message that he is a 28-year-old
architectural engineer in Iraq.

"On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering," he wrote in his most recent
posting on Friday. "My youngest cousin
was muttering `what shame' to himself, yes it is better for them to do that but still
seeing them carrying that white flag makes
something deep inside you cringe."

Perhaps the most important new technology in television journalism's arsenal is for
reports that are not live, and where reporters
do not have access even to the kind of miniature dish that Mr. Francis carries around.

Informed by the military that their two-member "embedded" teams would be able to take only
the equipment they could
personally carry, many television news operations have provided their reporters with a
compact kit — one that enables them to
capture, edit, compress and send video with a small digital camera, a laptop computer and
a satellite phone.

For Don Dahler and Jay Weiss of ABC News, that means the ability to travel anywhere with
the 101st Airborne Division,
currently in Kuwait. A profile the two produced on Thursday of the day in the life of a
sniper was broadcast on Friday. The
technology is turning reporters and camera operators into producers and editors, making
often painful judgments about what to
include.

Their two-and-a-half minute piece took four hours to compress and send. But the video
quality from such setups is good, and
the reporting can get quickly out to the world.

"The fact that we can file stories at all without a dish or having access to a dish is
stunning to me," said Mr. Dahler, who had
envisioned delays of days or even weeks when he first learned of the conditions of being
placed with a unit. "We have made a
quantum leap in our ability to conduct journalism," he said in a telephone interview.

Of course, there have been some snags with all the cool new gadgetry. Cameras are breaking
down, crucial e-mail messages are
bouncing back, software has bugs, and connecting the right satellite phone to the right
laptop is often far more complicated than it
seems it should be.

Then there is the military technology to contend with. An e-mail message from Vincent
Laforet, a photographer for The New
York Times assigned aboard the Abraham Lincoln, to his editors last week described
climbing up on the wind-whipped
superstructure of the carrier to get a satellite signal, only to have it drop every time a
jet landed or took off, which was
approximately every 37 seconds. Mr. Laforet said he was having better luck filing pictures
at 3 or 4 a.m. "in total darkness and
with the satphone on a ledge over the ocean and me on the metal floor."

Sharri Berg, the vice president for news operations for Fox Television, said it was a good
thing that so much of the equipment
the networks' correspondents are using are souped-up consumer products, not much different
than the video cameras commonly
used to shoot weddings. That means they can be replaced without too much expense —
although reporters do not have much
room for backups.

"We're sending them with plenty of plastic bags and Q-Tips," Ms. Berg said. "It's amazing
what a couple of granules of sand can
do."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/24/business/media/24TECH.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

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 Updated 3/21/2003 9:36 AM

Satellite phones in Iraq could
become beacons for U.S. bombs

By The Associated Press

If landline and mobile phone networks in Iraq get
wrecked in a U.S. attack, expect a spike in
satellite phone usage.

But with U.S. signal interceptors targeting
satphone transmissions to locate Iraqi military
commanders, analysts worry that phone calls
from civilians could appear as beacons for
bombers.

The U.S. military won't discuss how precisely it
can track people based on their satphone
signals, and the satellite phone companies say
they don't know. But military and intelligence
experts say U.S. targeting technology is not just
possible, it's getting better.

"Any satellite telephone is an emitter," said Loren
Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington
Institute in Arlington, Va. "By detecting the
emissions, it should be possible for U.S.
intelligence to localize desirable targets."

But distinguishing friend from foe based on a
signal alone could prove difficult, he said.

"It's just yet another thing journalists now have to
take into account," said Kate Adie, a British
Broadcasting Corp. radio journalist awaiting
assignment in Iraq.

In Qatar, Central Command spokeswoman Maj.
Rumi Nielson-Green said the U.S. military's
focus is on structures and equipment — not
smaller targets such as individuals.

But she would not discuss the U.S. military's
capabilities and could not rule out the possibility
that noncombatants could be fired upon by
mistake.

U.S. military officials have urged journalists and
other foreign civilians to leave Iraq for their own
safety.

Iraq's Information Ministry estimates that 300
foreign journalists remain in Baghdad. That does
not include those outside the capital, whether
traveling with U.S. forces or independently.

Major satellite telephony providers Inmarsat of
London; Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and
Iridium Satellite
of Arlington, Va., saw subscriptions and usage rise alongside the prospect of a U.S.
invasion.

On Tuesday, Inmarsat said it was activating a fifth satellite to help ease congestion
caused, in part, by
transmissions of news video.

If it wanted to ensure that it was not targeting noncombatants, the U.S. military could
ask satellite phone
providers for help. After all, the companies must locate subscribers to bill them.

But providers say their technologies aren't precise enough to pinpoint a caller's location
closer than a few
miles.

In the case of Iridium, chief technology officer Mark Adams said the system can get no
closer than an
area the size of Arizona.

Thuraya's phones are tied to global positioning technology and accurate to within 100
meters. But
company chairman Mohammad Omran said subscribers must activate the GPS function on their
phones in
order to be tracked.

That leaves the U.S. military, itself a major Iridium client, to rely on eavesdropping or
identifying unusual
frequencies or call patterns, analysts say.

Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency analyst now with the Electronic Privacy
Information
Center, said U.S. spy agencies listen to phone signals using satellites, aircraft, ground
stations and even
specially equipped Humvees.

Processing those signals and making use of them is more challenging.

Satellite calls generally carry some sort of identification number, which gets matched to
a phone number in
company databases. If U.S. intelligence officials can match the ID number to a person,
they can monitor
the call — assuming they can break any encryption used.

Eavesdroppers can also pinpoint a caller to within several yards — better than phone
companies can. The
process, called triangulation, typically involves narrowing a signal's source by measuring
its intensity from
at least three locations — for instance, three surveillance planes, or one making three
passes.

But al-Qaeda operatives haven't made it easy for U.S. airborne snoops, and it's not likely
Iraqi generals
will, either.

Al-Qaeda operatives change phones often and keep calls short to discourage tracing, said
intelligence
expert and author James Bamford. And phone IDs aren't always static. Iridium's changes
with every call
to prevent fraud.

Even if a desired target is located, weapons may not be marshaled in time.

You're going to have to move like greased lightning," said Martin Streetly, editor of
Jane's Electronic
Mission Aircraft in London. "You are going to have the sequence of detection,
identification and then
calling in a strike."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/iraq/2003-03-21-sat-phones_x.htm

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