GPS JAMMING EXPECTED IN SOUTHEAST DURING MILITARY EXERCISE

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GPS reception may be unavailable or unreliable over a large portion of the southeastern states and the Caribbean during offshore military exercises scheduled between January 16 and 24.

The FAA has posted a flight advisory for the exercises that will require jamming of GPS signals for periods of several hours each day of the event. Navigation guidance, ADS-B, and other services associated with GPS could be affected for up to 400 nautical miles at Flight Level 400, down to a radius of 180 nm at 50 feet above the ground.

The flight advisory encourages pilots to report any GPS anomalies they encounter. Reports may be submitted using this online form.

AOPA reported on a similar event in the southeastern United States in 2019.

AOPA is aware of hundreds of reports of interference to aircraft during events around the country for which notices to airmen were issued, and we consider the risks to GA aircraft highly concerning.

In one example, an aircraft lost navigation capability and did not regain it until after landing. Other reports have highlighted aircraft veering off course and heading toward active military airspace—and the wide range of reports makes it clear that interference affects aircraft differently. In some cases, recovery from signal interference may not occur until well after the aircraft exits the jammed area.

In a January 2019 AOPA survey, more than 64 percent of 1,239 pilots who responded noted concern about the impact of interference on their use of GPS and ADS-B.

AOPA continues to advocate for officials to place more focus on efforts to address the well-documented safety concerns raised by such events.

Read the original announcement at AOPA.org HERE.

HERE is a link to an article by the Miami Herald, as well.

Courts Grapple with a Sea Change in Fourth Amendment Law After Carpenter v US: Year in Review 2019

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By Jennifer Lynch | 12/29/19

Last year, the Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in a case we’ve written about a lot, called Carpenter v. United States, ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects data generated by our phones called historical cell-site location information or CSLI. The Court recognized that CSLI creates a “detailed chronicle of a person’s physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years.” As a result, police must now get a warrant to access it.

In the year and a half since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Carpenter has been cited in more than 450 criminal and civil cases across the country. Carpenter caused a sea change in Fourth Amendment law because it expressly recognized that, under the right circumstances, we have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information we share with third parties and in our actions while we’re in public. The question courts began to grapple with in 2019 and will continue to address in 2020 is what those circumstances are.

Here are two areas where courts applied Carpenter outside the narrow scope of historical CSLI in 2019 and three where we expect to see further attention in 2020.

Real Time Location Tracking

In 2019, several courts looked to Carpenter in addressing the constitutionality of real-time location tracking. For example, in Commonwealth v. Almonor, police had a phone carrier “ping” the cell phone of a suspect in a murder case—surreptitiously accessing GPS functions and causing the phone to send its coordinates back to the phone carrier and the police. This real-time location data pinpointed Mr. Almonor’s phone to inside a private home. We, along with the ACLU, filed an amicus brief arguing that people have a constitutional right to privacy in their physical movements and in their location in the moment. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed, ruling that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Absent exigent circumstances, the court held, police must get a warrant.

Similarly, in State v. Muhammad, the Washington Supreme Court held that a cell phone ping used to locate the defendant’s vehicle in real time is a search under the Fourth Amendment and the Washington state constitution and requires a warrant absent exigent circumstances. This case was especially interesting because the court held that Carpenter precluded warrantless access to any amount of cell phone location data, no matter how minimal and no matter whether it was historical or prospective. In doing so, the court rejected the “mosaic theory”—which the court describes as one where “discrete acts of law enforcement surveillance may be lawful in isolation but may otherwise intrude on reasonable expectations of privacy in the aggregate”—as unworkable in practice.

24/7 Video Surveillance

In 2019, courts also struggled with how to apply Carpenter to 24/7 video surveillance in a series of “pole camera” cases. Pole cameras are exactly what they sound like—video cameras mounted by the police on utility poles or other fixed locations outside of a defendant’s property that continuously record everything that happens on the property, often for months at a time. Police can control the cameras remotely using pan, tilt, and zoom features and can review past footage at any time to look for patterns, visitors, and routines. In the past, many courts have found this kind of surveillance does not violate the Fourth Amendment, but that may be changing after Carpenter. In a Massachusetts federal district court case called United States v. Moore-Bush, the court explicitly held that, after Carpenter, circuit appellate court precedent upholding pole camera surveillance was no longer binding. The Moore-Bush court held that eight months of warrantless video surveillance violated the defendants’ reasonable expectations of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

Similarly, in People v. Tafoya, the Colorado Court of Appeals held that police use of a video camera installed at the top of a utility pole to conduct continuous video surveillance for more than three months of the defendant’s fenced-in backyard was a warrantless search that violated the Fourth Amendment. Citing an earlier Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals case, the court noted “[A] camera monitoring all of a person’s backyard activities . . . provokes an immediate negative visceral reaction: indiscriminate video surveillance raises the spectre of the Orwellian state.” The court recognized that at least one “lesson from the [Supreme Court’s United States v.] Jones concurrences and Carpenter is that not all governmental conduct escapes being a ‘search’ simply because a citizen’s actions were otherwise observable by the public at large.”

Automated License Plate Readers

In 2020, we expect to see courts applying Carpenter to other kinds of technologies as well. Earlier in 2019, EFF filed amicus briefs in three cases in which automated license plate reader (ALPR) data was used to implicate the defendant: People v. Gonzales (California Court of Appeal), United States v. Yang (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal), and Commonwealth v. McCarthy (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court). In each of these cases, we argued Carpenter should apply to ALPRs. Like CSLI, the aggregation of ALPR data can paint a picture of where a vehicle and its occupants have traveled, including to sensitive and private places like homes, doctors’ offices, and places of worship. ALPR data collection is detailed and indiscriminate; anyone who drives is likely to have their past locations logged in a database available to police. And, like CSLI databases, ALPR databases facilitate retrospective searches of cars whose drivers were not under suspicion when the plates were scanned. So far, we’ve only heard from the Gonzales court, which chose not to address the ALPR issues. We expect rulings from the Massachusetts SJC and Ninth Circuit some time in 2020.

Reverse Location Searches

This past year, several news outlets reported on a new technique increasingly used by law enforcement to try to identify the perpetrator of a crime when the police don’t have a suspect. The technique, frequently called a “reverse location search” or a “geofence warrant,” allows law enforcement to figure out everyone who was within a certain geographic area during a specific time period in the past—perhaps hundreds or even thousands of people. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. Google stores this location data in a database called “Sensorvault.” Although it’s possible to prevent the collection of this data and to delete it after it’s been collected, most users have not done so and may not even know Google is collecting this data on them. This is in part because Google encourages users to turn on location data collection to take advantage of features in apps like traffic alerts and in part because data collection is challenging to turn off on Android devices. Because Google stores this data indefinitely, the company may have nearly a decade’s worth of location information for hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. That has made it a honeypot for police.

We are starting to see cases involving reverse location searches appear in courts across the country, and we are currently consulting with defense attorneys in several of those cases. For reasons we detailed in a post earlier this year, we think these kinds of searches clearly violate the Fourth Amendment, even when they are conducted with a warrant.

Genetic Genealogy Searches

2019 also saw a stark increase in law enforcement searches of consumer-facing DNA databases, including genetic genealogy websites, which are set up to help people find distant biological relatives. Estimates are that these sites were used in around 200 cases just last year. For many of those cases, officers never sought a warrant or any legal process at all.

The use of genetic genealogy in criminal cases is highly problematic. Like CSLI, genetic data can reveal a whole host of extremely private and sensitive information about people, from their likelihood to inherit specific diseases to where their ancestors are from to whether they have a sister or brother they never knew about. Also like CSLI, genetic genealogy searches impact millions of people—research shows that 60% of white Americans can already be identified just from the DNA data uploaded by the 1.3 million users of one genealogy site called GEDmatch.  Finally, like reverse location searches, the police are using genetic genealogy searches expressly in cases where they don’t have a suspect, which makes these searches no more than a giant fishing expedition through our genetic data. Our founding fathers drafted and ratified the Fourth Amendment specifically to prevent these kinds of general searches.

In 2020, we expect to see more cases involving all of these technologies bubble up through the courts. When they do, we’ll be there.

Read the original article at eff.org HERE.

Are cell phone calls on airplane flights inevitable?

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12/20/19 | Matt Villano

(CNN) — Ah, holiday travel. Between huge crowds and weather delays, flying during this time of year is hectic. Now close your eyes and imagine the entire scenario with one additional annoyance: Loud talkers yammering into their cell phones at 35,000 feet.

Don’t worry — this potentially ear-splitting scenario isn’t a reality yet. At least not in the United States. But it could be soon. Some even say it’s just a year or two away.

The technology to support midair cell phone calls exists right now.

Just about every plane that offers WiFi has the bandwidth to support voice over the internet, and several international airlines allow voice calls on certain routes already. Still, at least on domestic US flights, voice calls are forbidden for four distinct reasons: flight attendants, public perception, concerns about safety and US law.

Airline officials won’t even consider in-flight cell-phone calls until or unless they feel there is overwhelming demand from customers to provide the service, according to Henry Harteveldt, president of Atmosphere Research Group, a travel industry analysis firm in San Francisco. Even then, airlines still may not cave in.

“No matter how you look at it, allowing cell phone calls on planes is controversial,” he says. “These are precisely the kinds of issues airlines tend to avoid addressing unless they must.”

Keeping cabins calm

Without question, flight attendants are the biggest barrier to allowing voice calls in the air.

Pretty much across the board, people who work in airplane cabins say the idea of allowing passengers unfettered in-flight phone use would lead to chaos, conflict and downright craziness in flight. As such, they oppose phone use vociferously.

Flight attendants are already tasked with managing overhead bin use, monitoring drink intake among unruly passengers and mediating fights between seat-recliners and passengers who don’t recline.

Taylor Garland, spokesperson for the Association of Flight Attendants, a union representing 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines, says her colleagues don’t want to take on any more policing of passengers’ social behaviors.

“We are strongly against voice calls on planes,” she wrote in a recent email. In another, she doubled down with all caps: “NO CELL PHONES.”

Flight attendants’ opposition is significant.

They’ve had major influence on certain decisions regarding domestic passenger travel. In recent years, they’ve been at the forefront of efforts to get airlines to control unruly passengers. In the 1980s, they led the charge against cigarettes in cabins, which ultimately led to full-fledged bans on in-flight smoking by 2000.

On the issue of in-flight cell phone calls, flight attendants say that passengers inevitably would offend some neighbors by being too loud, and arguments would surely follow.

Cassandra Michele Brown, a flight attendant who works for Frontier Airlines, adds that unfettered cell phone use in midair likely would prevent passengers from complying with flight attendant instructions in the event of an emergency.

“At the end of the day, our job is to evacuate an aircraft in 90 seconds or less,” says Brown, who is based out of Las Vegas.

“If you’re a passenger on my flight, no matter how good you might be at multitasking, you’re not going to be able to follow my step-by-step instructions to evacuate if you’re focusing on your phone.”

Passengers advocating for quiet

Among the travel experts and the traveling public, feelings about allowing voice calls in the air are mixed.

Much like the flight attendants, a vocal contingent of passengers has emerged as opponents of loud noise, insisting that an open environment for in-flight cell-phone calls will create an “annoying” cacophony of chaos in the skies and undoubtedly trigger disagreements about what volume is appropriate.

Harteveldt, the analyst, is in this camp, and says research recently conducted by his firm estimates that less than 5% of all domestic air passengers want to use their cell phones in midair.

“I don’t want to be forced to overhear someone else’s conversation if it’s avoidable,” he says. “It’s bad enough when you find yourself in that situation at a coffee shop or in a hotel lobby. In an airplane at cruising altitude, in a situation where you can’t do anything or go anywhere to escape, it would be horrendous.”

Other passengers say privacy also would be a concern, since even first-class passengers are packed tightly into airplane seats for the duration of most flights.

Business travelers, however, seem to be more utilitarian in their thinking.

Paul Forgue, a consultant who manages performance improvement for a global private equity portfolio company and travels 40 weeks a year, says he could see situations in which in-flight phone use could come in handy.

“For those work emergencies when you really need to have contact with someone, it would be fantastic to know you could pick up your phone and do that from the plane,” says Forgue, who is based in San Francisco. “In those situations where you need to talk to a colleague about something you can’t articulate via text or email, it’d be perfect — provided people don’t take advantage.”

One strategy Forgue says airlines could implement to allow in-flight cell phone calls: Special areas of the plane for those passengers who wish to use their phones and special areas for those passengers who do not.

This is the plan deployed by Amtrak and various commuter rail systems across the country. For the most part — save for the occasional abusers or overflow problems on crowded trips — it works.

Is the technology safe?

The story of in-cabin calls from personal electronic devices is a colorful saga that goes back decades.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when cellular technology became mainstream, use on planes went relatively unchecked. If you’re 40 or older, you probably remember the seatback handsets available to anyone with the swipe of a credit card for upwards of $4 or $5 per minute. These essentially were early public cell phones.

Even after the turn of the millennium, cell phone calls were mostly unregulated; victims of the 9/11 terror attacks were able to call their loved ones from the hijacked airplanes before the planes crashed.

The rise of smartphones changed everything.

As phones became more sophisticated, industry insiders worried about the possibility of a phone’s radio transmitter interfering with certain equipment in the cockpit and therefore rendering some of the equipment unreliable.

Many of these concerns were stoked by published papers about the potential effects of electromagnetic interference to flight navigation and communication systems. The gist of those reports: Some devices had the potential to interfere with unshielded cockpit instruments, and that such interference could in worst-case scenarios affecting the regular operation of the plane…

Continue reading at CNN.com HERE.

Worried About 5G’s Health Effects? Don’t Be

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12/18/19 | Klint Finley

Even as carriers around the world race to build 5G networks, some government officials are reaching for the throttle, citing fears that the new generation of wireless technology could pose health risks.

Earlier this year the Portland, Oregon, city council passed a resolution asking the Federal Communications Commission to update its research into potential health risks of 5G. (In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics made a similar request to the FCC about its research on cell phone use more generally.) In May, Louisiana’s House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the state Department of Environment Quality and Department of Health to study the environmental and health effects of 5G. Meanwhile, a few Bay Area towns, including Mill Valley and Sebastopol, want to block carriers from building 5G infrastructure.

“The impending rollout of 5G technology will require the installation of hundreds of thousands of ‘small cell’ sites in neighborhoods and communities throughout the country, and these installations will emit higher-frequency radio waves than previous generations of cellular technology,” US representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) wrote in a letter to the FCC echoing concerns about the new technologies involved with 5G.

There are real concerns about the way 5G is being deployed in the US, including security issues, the potential to interfere with weather forecasting systems, and the FCC steamrolling local regulators in the name of accelerating the 5G rollout. But concerns over the potential health impacts of 5G are overblown. If you weren’t worried about prior generations of cellular service causing cancer, 5G doesn’t produce much new to worry about. And you probably didn’t need to be worried before.

Few 5G services will use higher frequencies in the near term, and there’s little reason to think these frequencies are any more harmful than other types of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light.

Most concerns about health impacts from 5G stem from millimeter-wave technology, high-frequency radio waves that are supposed to deliver much faster speeds. The catch is that millimeter-wave transmissions are far less reliable at long distances than transmissions using the lower frequencies that mobile carriers have traditionally used. To provide reliable, ubiquitous 5G service over millimeter-wave frequencies, carriers will need a larger number of smaller access points.

That’s led to two fears: That the effects of millimeter-wave signals might be more dangerous than traditional frequencies; and that the larger number of access points, some potentially much closer to people’s homes, might expose people to more radiation than 4G services.

But millimeter waves aren’t the only, or even the main, way that carriers will deliver 5G service. T-Mobile offers the most widespread 5G service available today. But it uses a band of low frequencies originally used for broadcast television. Sprint, meanwhile, repurposed some of the “mid-band” spectrum it uses for 4G to provide 5G. Verizon and AT&T both offer millimeter-wave-based services, but they’re only available in a handful of locations. The wireless industry is focused more on using mid- and low-band frequencies for 5G, because deploying a massive number of millimeter-wave access points will be time-consuming and expensive. In other words, 5G will continue using the same radio frequencies that have been used for decades for broadcast radio and television, satellite communications, mobile services, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Even when carriers roll out more millimeter-wave coverage, you still won’t need to worry much. Radio waves, visible light, and ultraviolet light are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The higher-frequency parts of the spectrum, including x-rays and gamma rays, are what’s known as “ionizing radiation.” This is the scary kind of radiation. It can break molecular bonds and cause cancer. Millimeter waves and other radio waves, along with visible light, are considered non-ionizing, meaning they don’t break molecular bonds. They are higher frequency than traditional broadcast frequencies, but they’re still below the frequency of visible light and far below ionizing radiation such as shortwave ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays…

Continue reading at wired.com HERE.

How Dish Network plans to become a cell phone company in 2020

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December 20, 2019 | CNN Wire

Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen believes his company could be a significant competitor in the US consumer wireless business.

Ergen testified over two days this week in support of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, which is currently being challenged in federal court by a group of state attorneys general. The companies say the merger is necessary to build out a nationwide 5G network and because Sprint could struggle to survive on its own. But the states say consolidating the market will reduce competition and will probably raise prices for consumers.

The merger stands to be one of the most consequential in the history of the telecommunications industry, and the trial is its final hurdle. The combination was approved earlier this year by the US Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission after Dish agreed to acquire assets from Sprint and enter the wireless market, a move intended to reduce potential anticompetitive effects from the merger.

If T-Mobile and Sprint win the suit and the merger is allowed to go through, Dish would be poised to buy Sprint’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand. It would also buy a block of wireless spectrum — the radio frequencies that wireless signals travel over — from Sprint. As part of the deal, Dish would have a seven-year agreement with T-Mobile that would allow Dish customers to be serviced on the T-Mobile network while it builds out its own network.

“We will compete with the largest wireless operators in the United States and we will compete from day one,” Ergen testified.

But there are questions about whether the satellite provider could really become a viable competitor to what — post-merger — would be three similarly-sized wireless giants: AT&T, Verizon and the “New T-Mobile” (AT&T is CNN’s parent company).

Nonetheless, Ergen’s testimony excited Dish investors. The company’s stock jumped from $34.47 at close on Tuesday, the first day of Ergen’s testimony, to open at $36.05 Wednesday.

“This isn’t some fantasy for us,” Ergen said. “We’ve wanted to get into this wireless business for the past 10 years. I’ve worked on it darn near every day. Now, the stars have aligned to allow us to do this and we know we can compete.”

Propping up a fourth competitor

Ergen’s testimony shed some light on how the merger deal, with Dish as a remedy, came together. Initially, he said, he opposed the combination.

Dish has wanted to enter the wireless market for a decade, spending around $12 billion on earlier wireless spectrum purchases and promising the FCC that it will have a nationwide 5G network by 2023…

Continue reading at wtvr.com HERE.