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On 21 August 2017, the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with a large merchant vessel near the heavily trafficked Strait of Malacca, leaving five U.S. sailors injured and ten missing. The incident was the fourth collision of a U.S. vessel in a year, with the most recent -- that of the USS Fitzgerald -- occurring just two months before, on 17 June. These recurring incidents have led some to speculate about a connection, as suggested in a 21 August piece on the military news web site RealClearDefense: The fear, according to these arguments, is that a person or government has used a hacking technique known as GPS spoofing to encourage maritime collisions. Unlike GPS jamming, which merely blocks access to the satellites a receiver uses to locate itself, GPS spoofing can covertly alter a GPS receiver to report that it is somewhere other than its actual location. University of Texas professor Todd Humphreys, an expert in GPS hacking, demonstrated this in 2013 when he successfully overtook a yacht in the Mediterranean by injecting its navigation systems with false GPS signals via an overhead drone: The idea this technology would be used to disrupt maritime operations is not an absurd contention. In fact, there is sketchy evidence suggesting a GPS spoofing test in June 2017 in the Black Sea, which some have attributed to Russian interference. On 22 June, the United States Maritime Administration issued an unconfirmed warning that ships in the Black Sea off the coast of Russia were misreporting their GPS-derived locations: Dana Goward, President of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, an NGO that helps protect critical infrastructure by promoting resilient navigation and timing worldwide wrote an editorial that detailed the backstory to this alert. First a ship reported to the Coast Guard that its GPS signal was intermittently not working or giving an inaccurate location. Later, the same ship told the Coast Guard: That Russia, specifically, would be interested in testing such technology is, also not an unreasonable assertion. Russia has, at the very least, invested heavily in electronic warfare technology that jams GPS signals in such a way as to render them useless. A 2016 intelligence summary by the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office noted that Russia had integrated a massive network of GPS jammers into their civilian cell phone network, which could be switched on to impede smart missiles or other threats that rely on GPS navigation. A 2014 report by the same office said that Russian media has been trying — at the very least — to convince the world it is capable of disabling American maritime navigation systems. After a much publicized 2014 confrontation in the Black Sea between the US Navy destroyer the Donald Cook and a Russian SU-24 fighter plane that made a number of provocative and close approaches, Kremlin-backed media claimed that it had successfully achieved this goal (and terrified the Americans to boot): The United States military denies this account of the event, but does allow that Russia has been at the forefront of developing electronic warfare: Outside of reports that the USS McCain’s steering system failed prior to the collision, however, there is no evidence that an external actor caused these recent Naval collisions through electronic manipulation of GPS systems. Academics and analysts familiar with GPS hacking techniques argue that electronic warfare is not the most likely explanation for their occurrence. Goward told us that it’s a good question to ask but that it would be much more challenging to do this kind of thing to a military vessel rather than a commercial or private one: Humphreys echoed this point, telling us via email that while hacking military navigation systems is possible, it is much more challenging because they use an encrypted radio frequency for their geolocation, which is separate from the civilian system: Humphreys suggested that, rather than hacking, the collision might be attributable to the US Navy’s policy to operate in the South China Sea without an automatic identification system (AIS) beacon, which automatically transmits information between ships and to other monitoring organizations. The Navy doesn't use such a system in the South China sea for security reasons, Humphreys told us. They train as they fight, and broadcasting one’s position during wartime is unwise, he said. Unfortunately, almost any conclusion drawn at this point about the cause of the USS McCain incident or any of the other recent Naval accidents is speculative. The Daily Beast reported on concerns from military experts that these accidents were evidence that the Navy was overstretched: In the wake of the USS McCain collision, the chief of Naval Operations ordered a worldwide operational pause as fleet commanders assess practices.
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