> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.
All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.
That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.
It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.
Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.
> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites.
Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website
The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.
It should be standard practice to use radio jammers and dazzling lasers against every non-allied foreign satellite that passes over our territory, or any of our military bases or warships. Why give them a free look?
Given the “Hybrid” attacks in Europe originating with Russia, the Houthi’s and Iran taking shots at shipping and the likelihood that certain countries are feeding Iran some of the intel… this is pretty understandable.
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
Laser links for satellites work fine, but if you're up against a 10 year old spy satellite or you're selectively jamming their SAR (radar imaging) or GLONASS positioning rather than their comms...
If you take a look back at history, literally everyone would disagree. A strong England has done unimaginable damage to almost every other society on the planet.
Nobody is pretending to build or defend anything positive in space. Efforts like Starlink are blatantly and publicly a synthetic aperature radar constellation for military use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Of course it is. That’s why they didn’t really care at first if Russia was using it in Ukraine. I thought the military had their own constellation but maybe not.
And in that respect, it was a deviation from the propaganda of previous eras, which did in fact frame efforts as building and defending positive things in space.
Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"
If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.
The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?
I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation
Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).
It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.
So, who's the UK actually attacking?
Russia makes whole regions inaccessible to GPS and it’s ultimately for the same underlying reason: soft kill systems and area denial scale better than kinetic options and are deniable.
It’s disappointing to see the majority of conversation here is moralizing and grandstanding rather than analysis.
or a whole new technology invented other than radio waves for data transmission
are any satellites using laser downlink yet or is line-of-sight too temperamental with weather and planes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
They'd drop their film back down to earth.
but seriously, the first spy satellites used to drop film rolls and they had a crazy way for the military to track and catch them via planes
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORONA_(satellite)
In that case you don't need to ground lasers, you just beam the data where you have unjammed communications with the cost of higher latency.
“disrupting, degrading and denying hostile threats in space”
Not even pretending to be building and defending anything positive in space.
Lots of people in former British colonies like and trust the UK.
With great power yadda yadda
Its OK for the UK for the UK to be strong.