thuraya maps !! !

Thuraya has launched a new service called ThurayaLocate which allows you to track the position of any Thuraya phone in Google Maps and Virtual Earth. I am thrilled that Thuraya has decided to enter the geolocation fray. This product could prove a serious challenger to the app I have been helping the InSTEDD team withand to a lesser extent Nokia’s SportTracker and various iPhone Apps. Thuraya satellite phones are the workhorses of the humanitarian telecommunications arsenal.

en août 2008 !!

et déjà en 2003 !!!! de Slate  : SADDAM HUSSEIN était équipé d’un Thuraya !!! c’est top ça comme info !!

Smart Bombs, Dumb Targets

Did overconfidence in precision targeting cause civilian deaths in Iraq ?

Over the course of the war, U.S. air forces mounted 50 so-called "decapitation strikes." The bombs accidentally killed several dozen civilians who happened to be near the explosions, but they killednone of the Iraqi leaders they were intended to strike.

Why the intelligence was so wrong—why the targets weren’t there when the bombs struck—makes for a flabbergasting tale. According to the report (which was assembled by Marc Garlasco, a former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency whose specialty was the Iraqi military), U.S. spy agencies determined the location of these Iraqi leaders by intercepting their telephone conversations. Like many people in the Middle East, the leaders were using Thuraya satellite phones. Thuraya sat phones have an internal global positioning satellite chip. Intercept the phone call, you also find out the GPS coordinates of the phone.

Second, it has widely been known for a long time that the U.S. National Security Agency tracked al-Qaida terrorists through their Thuraya sat phones. It is quite conceivable—Garlasco thinks it very likely—that the Iraqi leaders were using deception tactics, making calls from a location, then quickly leaving, so that the American planes would waste bombs, kill civilians (and thus make enemies of the victims’ relatives), and look incompetent.

Third and most astonishing, the GPS signal beamed by Thuraya sat phones is accurate only to within a radius of 100 meters. The bombs that were dropped on these targets are accurate to within 10 meters. In other words, even if the caller had still been on the scene when the bombers arrived (unlikely enough), the bombs would very likely have missed because the target could have been as far as a football fieldaway from where the phone’s signal indicated.

This information about the Thuraya’s GPS chips is neither new nor classified. The manufacturer’s manual—cited by the Human Rights Watch report—clearly states its technical features, including the error radius of its location-tracker.

An intriguing question, which someone in Congress should pose to a relevant witness : Did the officers who selected the targets know that the intelligence was so imprecise ? Certainly the NSA knew the specifications of the Thuraya’s GPS chip. But were these data—and their implications—passed on to the military commanders ?