China to Deploy Secure GPS by 2010

hackingbear writes "Unsatisfied by the reliance on American GPS navigation systems and not feeling much security joining the European Galileo system, China will expand its 4-satellite Beidou navigation system to a full-fledged, competitive, and encrypted system by 2010."

Will civilians be allowed to use it

and will Tibet be in the correct location?

Re:Will civilians be allowed to use it

and will Tibet be in the correct location?

For the Chinese. Tibet will be in China.

Interference?

One of the big concerns about the Chinese system is interference with the US and European GPS systems, and up until now there haven't been any set specs to start a meaningful discussion over.

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One of the big concerns about the Chinese system is interference with the US and European GPS systems, and up until now there haven't been any set specs to start a meaningful discussion over.

[Citation needed]

Re:Interference?

One of the big concerns about the Chinese system is interference with the US and European GPS systems, and up until now there haven't been any set specs to start a meaningful discussion over.

[Citation needed]

How can you expect anybody to cite the lack of published specs?

Unless of course its in the Big Book of Unpublished Specifications, which causes any reader to disappear in a puff of paradoxical smoke.

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How can you expect anybody to cite the lack of published specs?

I think that was the joke.

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All the better. If Geoff learns UNIX then he won't be reliant on nine year olds to escape islands with biological experiments gone awry.

Mmmm.

Too bad most of the satellites will be knocked out of orbit by all the debris their last little stunt in orbit left behind.

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Silly me forgot the link........ http://www.space.com/news/070202_china_spacedebris.html [space.com]

Good

And will this mean that my take-away will be delivered on time and, importantly, to the correct address? I hope so!

Peace and Harmony

Great, now they can spread peace and harmony more precisely, +/- 1m.

I wonder what else China will do...

I have the feeling the expansion of this system has an ulterior motive. I'm sure they're right, from their point of view, about the other GPS networks. I don't doubt them. I do doubt their good intentions though. A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is. It might even end up mandatory. I know I probably sound a little extreme, and for all I know, I could be wrong. I'm just not very trusting of any government. The UK is becoming an Orwellian surveillance state, America is getting "Real ID" or something. I don't know much about it. Here in Australia, various government factions keep pushing for a national ID card, disguising it under various names to try and fool the sheep, or "voters", as we prefer to be known. I just wouldn't put it past a country that is known to heavily censor the internet and spy on citizens' internet use, to basically microchip everyone to know exactly where they are. Why stake out the house of a dissident, when they can track his movements and arrest everyone involved with them, without lifting a finger and exposing their domestic spies?

Re:I wonder what else China will do...

Look carefully at their network. If this was for policing, then the original 4 geo-sats would cover it. But they are building out a full 30+ system. It is not just GPS, but military communications. This is most likely not going to be used for policing, but truly for military use. And that is the problem. China is gearing up militarily. [google.com] Just in the last several years, they have been launching new attack subs and SSBNs at a rate of at least 1 / per year each. We have spoken about China's shoot down of their weather sats (which is different than our shooting down a crippled sat that was coming down). We have spoken about their using a ground based laser on a US sat. China is now gearing up faster in the military front faster than anybody has over the last 100 years. That includes Hitler's build up in 1934-46, and FDR's 2 year build-up. Add to that the amount of spying going on as well as China's trying hard to hide budgets.

What we are looking at is that China is getting ready to attack, not defend.

Russia and India are now cooperating closer than ever, even while India is pulling closer to UK and America. They are getting worried about China's intention. I suspect that Russia will realize soon exactly why America is pushing their anti missle system. It is not about Iran, or even Russia.

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I personally think they are gearing up to get some Lebensraum [wikipedia.org]. they have to be building it up for SOME reason,and it certainly isn't for defense. They have us Americans hooked on cheap tech junk,so they know we ain't going to say boo to them. The Russians?

Re:I wonder what else China will do...

Ugh. How is this insightful?

China threat theory is sooooo out of favor among people who know their stuff that it boggles my mind how the rest of the world (except for US army leadership of course, who just want more toys to play with) keeps nagging on about it .

'Heping jueqi' is the 21st century mantra for the chinese. They don't want to fight any serious wars, and aren't going to be able to project global power in any serious way for quite a long time.

China is a great power in name only, they are not willing and capable of acting like a great power yet. They're still on the edge of the world system in a lot of ways. What they want right now is to be accepted into it, and if anything, the west should accomodate them. You might want to read John Ikenberry's extremely insightful essay [foreignaffairs.org] in Foreign Affairs of Jan08.

Also, they walk a razors edge in their national politics, balancing economic freedom and political dictatorship. Nobody can expect them to 'go western' all of a sudden. It'd destroy their nation as a unit. All our complaints about human rights violations, morally right as they may be, are trumped by their national survival. China is preoccupied by raising its living standard right now. Deng Xiaoping got something very right when he allowed for just economical freedom, but also gave China a huge national problem.

All this crap about 'china's growing military' pails when compared to current US power. China is not 'getting ready to attack'. China is getting ready to be able to protect her trade-lanes in the east/south china sea. That may scare americans, who have regarded that little pond as their own back yard for a century, but it's only natural for a rapidly growing nation. Yes, China is indeed growing its army, but that does not mean they're pumping liquid oxygen into their DF-5 ICBM's just yet. Misinterpreting the goals of a rising power is the surest formula to kick off a war. As a Rising power, China is risk-averse and, for all intents and purposes, seems to have limited revisionist aims.

The biggest threat of war with China comes from self-fulfilling prophecies about war.

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I agree with the general thrust of what you're saying, but you're being as simplistic as the previous poster in a lot of ways.

First off, US military power is at a seriously low ebb these days. We are locked into Iraq and Afganistan for the forseeable futu

Analysis of Chinese military - now +future growth

Excellent post! Informed, pragmatic rationalism based on facts - uncommon in /. discussions about international affairs.

See also a very informative article from the Atlantic Monthly: How We Would Fight China [theatlantic.com] by Robert Kaplan, an experienced journalist covering U.S. foreign affairs and the military. Detailed description of China's current military, with short- and long-term views of their military growth.

A tiny exceprt: (please keep in mind that Kaplan isn't advocating for confrontation, but doing a thorough analysis of what might happen if foolish politicians get us into such a mess).

" At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy's warships have a collective "full-load displacement" of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world's warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy's warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world's thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn't mount a rescue effort after the tsunami)."

"China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II...Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically...But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat."

"There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection--that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range--all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers."

--- --- --- ---

Also from the Atlantic Monthly:

Superiority Complex - Why America's growing nuclear supremacy may make war with China more likely [theatlantic.com] Again, detailed anaylsis of possible flashpoints and the resulting warfare. Section title: "Strategic Implications of the Nuclear Imbalance"

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"China is now gearing up faster in the military front faster than anybody has over the last 100 years. That includes Hitler's build up in 1934-46, and FDR's 2 year build-up"

Huh? In the mid 1930's Germany was producing hundreds of attack subs a year, hundre

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Huh? In the mid 1930's Germany was producing hundreds of attack subs a year, hundreds of aircraft a year and thousands of tanks! Unless China has hundreds of secret military factories, they are not even coming close to matching Nazi Germany's militarism.

It's kind of hard to compare military power between the eras. A single boomer doesn't weigh as much as a battleship nor look as impressive but it can toss 200 warheads and put a serious hurting on any country out there. (let's leave aside the consideratio

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sure a bullet from a tommy gun kills just as easily as a bullet from an m-16 unless the guy is wearing body armor. the tanks are doubled up armor.

Weapons tech is drastically different from even 20 years ago. Even more so is personal body armor. Soldiers

Re:I wonder what else China will do...

GPS is one way communication, it does not send anything back to the satellites. To do so would require either a very powerful transmitter on the ground device (say goodbye to GPS in your mobile and other handheld battery powered devices), or a very sensitive receiver on the satellite with the signal processing power to differentiate the weak signals of millions of devices from each other and from the general radio noise coming from earth.

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A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is

You wouldn't really need any changes to the GPS for that- the satellite has no knowledge about the position of anyone receiving its signal anyway; the positioning signal is one way. In theory, a receiver could of course send an ID and the location it com

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A new "feature" of their expanded GPS network will probably be to tell the police exactly where the user is. It might even end up mandatory.

In itself, GPS won't do that, because a GPS receiver is just that -- a receiver, with no backchannel. I suppose the Chinese could build a backchannel into their system (perhaps under the pretext of negotiating the encryption) but there would be bandwidth

GPS is primarily a military application

Quite obviously this is because in times of war, the Chinese could find themselves locked out of either the US or EU systems. If they are going to tightly integrate GPS capabilites into military units - a no brainer - they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on come WW3.

As my philsophical opponents say so often "This is'nt rocket science".

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The US has been preparing for this phase a little longer than China though :)

http://www.afspc.af.mil/units/ [af.mil]

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While I am not a big fan of senseless war, their logic on this move seems sound.

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[..] they want to have a closed system that noone can pull the plug on come WW3.

Until you point your missiles at the satellites. No plug is unpluggable.

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So that's why both sides need an anti-anti-satellite missle which could be effectively countered by an anti-anti-anti-satellite missile. In the end the one with the most "anti-" word stamped on the missle belly would win. *Brilliant*

Re:GPS is primarily a military application

You have a point, but as Schlock Mercenary points out: [schlockmercenary.com]

Note also that the correct term for 'a missile to be deployed against "anti-missile missiles"' is not "anti anti-missile missile." It's "anti anti-missile-missile missile." You're always supposed to have one more "missile" than "anti," because otherwise nothing will blow up. Granted, this information comes from civilian linguists, rather than from military sources. Military sources would almost certainly be using acronyms instead.

Questions...

Who says it should be global? As information given in the wikipage, the satellites are on the geostationary orbit. can't we have networks of different positioning system? such as global cell phone networks, satellite Tvs, phones, internet that we have toda

Re:Questions...

Actually they do have several things like what you are talking about, the thing seems to be cost is why you don't see them in cell towers. They have to be very accurately surveyed to provide better accuracy than GPS.

WAAS - wide area augmentation system begain deploying a few years back. It has 25 ground sations in the US that recieve the signal and then send corrected signals back up to the satellite.

The next one, is called LAAS, local area augmentations system, like the WAAS but much more local. It is designed specifically for aviation and is only good in a 20 mile proximity to the airport. It's supposed to be a cheaper replacement for ILS systems.

Take a look on wikipedia under WAAS GPS & LAAS GPS there are some pretty decent articles on them.

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Its because having the GPS satellites moving is more accurate and more importantly, cheaper.
You dont need anywhere near as many satellites.

Again, radio beacons have the same problem.
Whats cheaper? 30 or so satellites covering the entire globe or peppering

Yes, this is what they have to do.

No way around it, too much military equipment needs this these days. No one in China doubts that the USA would shut them out of the GPS at the slightest confrontation and the EU is a weakling and would crawl under American pressure. Unfortunatly that will mean that soon India will need it's own system as well since they also don't trust the USA very much. (USA has been funding pakistan through all the wars they had)

Why not Galileo?

I can see why they won't trust the American system, but why not the nicer European system? Is there something in Galileo that won't fit their communist dictatorship agenda?

This is yet another lame move from the Chinese government. Instead of trying to redu

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Is there something in Galileo that won't fit their communist dictatorship agenda?

First and foremost, they want an independent system exclusively under their own control. They know that the EU will surrender the Galileo controls to the US whenever they demand it - there goes Galileo's sole big advantage. The sad story of how the EU be

Lets deal with both your points

First, China is a very proud nation and as such will not allow itself to be dependent on any other nation for services it can provide itself. They also are trying to express themselves on the world stage as a world power and mostly do this by repeating the same technological achievements other countries of similar stature already have done. Its kind of like a rite of passage.

As for the population, China really is two distinct countries when it comes to its people. Now I know you can divide up the population into various ethnic groups but it comes down to you are either part of the Communist system or your not. So you have a couple hundred million in the one camp, with all the benefits of modern life, and then the rest who are still essentially not much more progressed since the the beginning of the last century.

The problem is, China really could not give a rats ass what you, I, or the world thinks. Any attempt to tell them and they take it as an insult. The big concerns going forward are not what happens to China's people but what China attempts with its neighbors. This makes the GPS development interesting in that it increases their threat capability. Considering the fact that its nearly a monthly exercise their threats against Taiwan take on even more seriousness with this expanded capability. This allows them to accurately deliver weapons to targets far beyond their borders. This means they can simply ignore the pleas of the world should they decide to finally address Taiwan in a military manner. It provides a good threat projection versus the US as well.

We can hope they will use the technology to better the lives of their people but unless you part of the first group in China I doubt they can or want to. Simply put the numbers are too large and the territorial issues are extreme in many cases. Combine this with the fact many would just preferred to be left alone and its hard to imagine why the government would bother unless national interest were at stake.

China doesn't want to play big, they already are. They simply want the respect they feel they are not getting. The Olympics were a gesture by some feel good misdirected people on the world stage made to China. Unfortunately China didn't care about all the supposed conditions these people attached, they saw it only as a means to elevate their status in the world and redirect some attention from the unsavory side of their activities. Unfortunately too many in the world are willing to go along. Unfortunately too many people like to vilify the US for things that in China get a pass. Perhaps its because at least with the US there is a chance of changing the behavior.

My friend came back from China teaching English there for a few years, even with a native as a wife. Go figure, anyway what China has a problem with is that many of these highly educated young people don't want to stay. His view was that all this modern conveniences and such were like a bribe to keep the people the nation's leaders need to keep the country going. Basically buy the people off with shiny stuff.

Inevitable

This was inevitable. I remember, about a year back, in India, over a beer, discussing the defense scenario with a colleague who was an engineer/researcher with the Indian Navy for about 20 years. His words -- "What we need is a secure GPS system soon. We all know the American version is civilian and of course they can shut it down whenever they want. It is a major desirable in your defense program." I think the Chinese too think the same way. They just came up with it. I would not be surprised if India announced the same within half a decade.
It is what it is. A desirable in the military program. Period.

Wiki: limited number of receivers

The Beidou system returns time after after a query from a terminal. They can only handle so many requests a minute. On the other hand US and Euro system continually broadcast time and location information.

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right i'm sure you know all about it with your years of experience in international diplomac and satillite design.

Re:1 words; Windows

I know how PGP works down to the algorithmic level, yet I can't break into somebody else's PGP-secured data.

Re:1 words; Windows

Lack of ability on your part does not mean lack of ability for others. [slashdot.org]

Re:1 words; Windows

The problem with them being involved in Galileo was that it showed them how to build their own GPS satellite system. Which if China ever fights the US will give them technological parity in a very important area. Ever wonder how all those smart bombs navigate? The US DoD didn't built the GPS system so civillians can navigate - the civillian version can be turned off in regions where the US is at war with a technologically sophisticated opponent and the military version left on so only US forces have access to precision location information. This is why China wants it's own GPS system, in case of a major war with the US.

Actually I found an interesting article on this. The French invented a trick to make sure that the US would be unable to jam Galileo in a warzone. US allies like the UK and the Eastern Europeans forced them to not do this and so the Chinese decided to make their own fork.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/643/1 [thespacereview.com]

According to an article in last week's Space News, the Europeans and the US are disturbed by China's planned Compass military satellite navigation system. The Chinese are going to try to do to both America's GPS 3 and Europe's Galileo systems what the Europeans, under French leadership, tried to do to the US. Europe originally planned to neutralize the military advantage of the US system by putting their signal on a frequency so close to the US M-code one that any attempt to jam their signal would interfere with the US system's operation: a neat trick that was aimed at giving France a de facto veto over all US military operations. The rest of Europe didn't care to follow France into a conflict of this kind with the US so they forced France to swallow an agreement on this (See "Whatâ(TM)s the frequency, Jacques?", The Space Review, March 1, 2004)

China's existing Beidou navigation network is a clumsy system based on three satellites, (two operational and one reserve) in geosynchronous orbit, launched between 2000 and 2003. Its military uses have been limited, but it is suspected that they include providing guidance for the ICBMs China has aimed at US targets. Above all, this system has given China hands-on operational experience with satellite navigation hardware. Combined with the sophisticated science and engineering data they have been able to obtain from Europe, they are now in a position to begin work on their own military satellite navigation system. Australia, the US, Japan, and India can thank the good folks at ESA and the EU for the subsequent increased instabilityâ"or worseâ"in the region.

Kind of scary isn't it that China is spending billions building something which is only useful if they fight a major war with the US.

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With this new system things are getting pretty ridiculous. Enough countries have shown that they now have the ability to launch a GPS style system that no one is going to be able to disable all the available systems and there will be no military advantage

FUD alert

Strange that this kind of stupid scaremongering gets modded up - oh, what am I talking about, this is slashdot.

So China choose to rely on their own stuff, just like the Europeans, because in their view America doesn't seem like a very reliable partner; and

Re:war with the USA? Are you nuts?

The US' GPS system is dated and on the verge of becoming unreliable. Many of the sats are well past their anticipated lifes. Two of the US sats are expected to fail in the next year or two. Several missions to replace these sats have been pushed back or scrubbed over the years.

Right now, one of the sats has been coming up and down over this past year. IIRC, it is one of the sats past its prime and is high on the list of anticipated failures.

Frankly, the US needs new sats and the technology can be significantly improved. It is hard to imagine any country wanting to use the US' system when there is so much room for improvement, resolution, time precision, encryption, and associated military advancements (over the air encrypted rekeying/synchronization, etc).

Not to mention, it is foolish, from a national security perspective, to not be in control of such an important military technology.

If for no other reason, all of the countries creating their own GPS system are showing the world they are not stupid. Find me a person that believes the US would depend on a China controlled GPS system for much of its military capability and I will show you a moron. A country needs no other reason.

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"Difference is the US is setting the state so Iraq has political and economic self-determination."

The US is ensuring that the economic output of Iraq benefits primarily the US. Iraq was economically, politically and even socially better off under Saddam th

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The US is ensuring that the economic output of Iraq benefits primarily the US. Iraq was economically, politically and even socially better off under Saddam than it is now, unless you measure welfare in a method that doesn't include death rates, disease pro

Re:Encryption

Like the US system. And the EU system. Both of which have provision for encrypted signals that only those with the key (i.e. the military) can decrypt, while providing less accurate data "unencrypted". Except that the US turned their encryption off a few years back, but neither the EU or the US have said that they wouldn't turn encryption on "in troubled times". The EU initially considered doing without this but it ended up getting included too in a roundabout way.

Not so much "bad" as a waste of time. The unencrypted accuracy is still very useful for most purposes, and there are historical records of the US system being scuppered so that over certain parts of the globe at certain times, even the unencrypted signal was deliberately highly inaccurate but the military knew how to "compensate" for the bad data using a key. However, if China are doing this to stop the effects of a US/EU turnoff from affecting them, this is pretty much vital, I would say. The rest of the world's GPS has exactly the same features, so I don't see how China are doing anything "bad" by this. That's not to say that their overall motives are good, but no worse than the EU/US.

Re:Encryption

Nope. The US system has selective availability turned off, and all new US GPS satellites don't even have SA functionality, so they can't turn it back on later.

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So the EU were planning on pissing off the US? It wouldn't surprise me, actually, but I don't think they are considering declaring war on the US just yet.

Simple military tactics - make sure your weapons and systems are under your control. Make sure they