Four Rules of Guns, Comms, and Traffic Analysis, by GuerrillaLogistician
by Guerrilla Logistician
Reference – 6F
Common comments from people online that will get you killed.
-I don’t understand radios at all. The only ones I understand are push-to-talk walkie-talkies.
-Only licensed ham operators know how to use radios properly.
-I can’t read this book. It’s way too hard.
-Ohhh, look, some YouTube videos showed me ATAK and Mesh. I want that.
Many of these comments lead to people getting clapped by Russian Caliber missiles just inside the Ukraine border, especially people with ATAK and Mesh network systems.
Let’s talk about radios, and I will dumb it down to the simplest format I can. Radios aren’t hard; what can be hard is the setup, and what can get harder is understanding and being good at it. If a thug in an inner city can shoot a handgun out of a window with little knowledge, you can learn to use a radio. If you have shot any guns safely, you can also learn to run radios effectively and safely. This crap isn’t that hard. It just looks hard, and people make a big deal out of it. This article won’t be about how to use radios, though it will be about how to operate them safely and help prevent SIGINT from getting you while also showing you how to nail others because they won’t follow the rules.
Keeping your booger hook off the bang stick
Don’t press the trigger until you are ready to shoot. Simple words, but when it comes to radios, people don’t understand this at all; not only that, so much tech nowadays is constantly communicating. Mesh networks and ATAK are this way; they are the gangbanger with a switch on a Glock just shooting out of a moving car. It looks cool, makes a lot of cool noise, and your boys are all impressed, but it also shows everyone where you are and who you are. To explore this, let’s talk about my favorite topic: submarines. While many of you know about the Enigma machine and how we cracked their code, there were still issues. Long story short, at times, it couldn’t be decoded. For example, when they modified the machines, it took time to decode, which may mean the info wasn’t relevant anymore. So when they couldn’t decode the info, they had to do some high-frequency direction finding or HUF DUF. So, how do we combat direction finding because technology is so advanced? Long story short, cut your transmission as short as possible. People think the US gov has all this equipment to DF anyone in the blink of an eye. Which to be fair, the gov has amazing capabilities, but they have to know where to look for you, when, and make sure it is you. If you transmit all the time, a TX pattern starts to appear, and this goes into traffic analysis, which allows someone to know you are there. This is also why a PACE plan is so important pg 35. Just like the gangbanger pulling the trigger, if you transmit a lot, people can direction find you and possibly figure out much more
Finger off the trigger / Minimal TX time / Who is talking a lot?
Assume every gun is loaded.
Assume everyone can read your previous messages. People tout AES256 encryption because it is what the military uses. Well, guess what? The Japanese were reading our comms, and we were reading there in WWII. In an effort to find out if the Japanese were planning an attack on Midway or the Aleutian Islands, the US sent a false radio message saying that Midway’s water system had failed. The Japanese intercepted the message and decoded a Japanese message that “AF” was having water problems, confirming that Midway was the target. The codebreakers used a code they knew the Japanese had already broken to send the false message and then were able to figure out the meaning of AF. This is why Scout uses trigram encryption to shorten the message and then an OTP to encrypt it. If the Japanese had been changing their codes regularly, previous transmission codes would have been voided.
Realistically, you should be transmitting information via a digital mode, encrypting with a trigram that you change regularly, and then using an OTP, which is good for only one time. Even if the enemy can’t read the code, they still might know what kind of digital pattern you are using over time, so if possible, switch that up as necessary and change your check-in times so you don’t create a pattern. So what it looks like includes the pattern and when. Even if I can’t read it, I can figure out who is transmitting via patterns you leave; if you are blasting away like a thug, I can find out where you are, and it gets worse. This is also why you need to change your SARNEG daily as well as your SOI. If you can figure out the enemy SOI, you can start gathering information from their actions, which may lead to cracking their code.
Also, many mesh