The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it has developed a four-legged robot designed to jam the wireless transmissions of smart home devices. The robot was revealed at the 2024 Border Security Expo and is called NEO. It is built using the Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) and looks a lot like the Boston Dynamics Spot robot.
According to the transcript of the speech by DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) director Benjamine Huffman, acquired by 404 Media, NEO is equipped with an antenna array that is designed to overload home networks, thus disrupting devices that rely on Wi-Fi and other wireless communication protocols. It will thus likely be effective against a wide range of popular smart home devices that use wireless technologies for communications.
Sounds like cops are getting sick of being shown during their raids on home camera systems.
That is terrifyingly true. Wired cameras all the way.
The lesson is always use Ethernet whenever you can, folks.
And if you can’t run Ethernet, even those power line Ethernet adapters are better then WiFi.
Just beware, if you’re in a place where you can only get DSL and coax or fiber are not available - Powerline does use the same frequencies as DSL and both the power cables and your landline are unshielded wires. So there will be cross talk and powerline can and probably will affect your DSL connection. Also depending on your cables and the powerline adapters you use, you may disturb radio stations in a wider area around your house.
you may disturb radio stations
Isn’t that illegal, as you’re basically radio jamming? Devices have that little FCC sticker saying it shouldn’t interfere with other devices. During my amateur radio license studying that was mentioned.
I’m curious about the privacy aspect; would someone be able to see my network by plugging in to the neighbors house, perhaps with some exploits involved?
Well, VDSL and VDSL2 use 138kHz to 12MHz and then 30-35.5MHz (according to the german Wikipedia - I couldn’t find that table in the English article.)
Powerline has several standards (same as above, couldn’t find that table in the English Wikipedia), but the frequency range starts at 2-4MHz and ends at 20-30MHz (with one standard using 30-68MHz).
For DSL, there’s not really a problem using these frequencies but powerline transmits at a higher power and intentionally uses cross talk as a feature. The byproduct is that now your power cables act as an antenna and the Powerline signal “leaks”.
Medium Frequency radio stations e.g. use the band from about 520kHz to 1.6MHz which correlates with Powerline and can be affected by it.Edit: Medium Frequency transmissions in general (300kHz - 3MHz) and High Frequency transmissions (3MHz - 30MHz) can be affected, but radio stations shouldn’t (~530kHz - 1.6MHz).And yes, if you’re transmitting “strong enough” over Powerline (depending on your adapter and how well your cables act as an antenna) one could recieve your signal and decode it. IIRC the signal is encrypted (somewhat like WiFi - the adapters need to be paired to talk to each other), but I don’t know much details about it.
Depends on what they’re doing.
- Simply drowning out valid signals is usually illegal so it would be interesting how they justify violating FCC
- However you can also just block communication with things like a flood of connection requests. They’re not interfering with the signal, just with your router’s ability to send data back and forth
Might be time to hardwire my doorbell camera.
Yeah I’m glad you brought up the doorbell. Once the jammer dog is jamming, it’s impossible to ring most doorbells and choose the polite option. It’s 110% murderville from that point onwards.
I keep forgetting to do this. I just upgraded my panel, time to pull another cable …
Make sure all your cameras are hard wired.
…. and display/video
D’Oh!
I always tried to prefer hard wiring where possible, so this shouldn’t block my cameras. However it just hit me reading this that all my displays are wireless. I’ll get the video but won’t be able to see it
This roaming robotic jammer was first contemplated after a child sexual abuse suspect used his doorbell camera to see FBI agents at his door serving a search warrant. The gunman opened fire on them from behind the closed door with an assault-style rifle, killing two veteran agents and injuring three more.
Fuck pedos and abusers, and I’m sorry for those agents’ families’ losses, but it sounds like they went in without having done their homework on who they were arresting.
And now the rest of us have to pay the price for half-finished police work—on a single case—with an authoritarian ”solution.”
ACAB.
I have the same attitude for cops as I do Zionists.
Zionists - if you hate 1200 dead, wait til you hear about the 40k dead in Palestine.
Cops - If you hate the ~50-60 murdered cops over the last year, wait til you hear about the 1100 or so civilians murdered.
I can be sympathetic to deaths of any kind, but not when they’re martyred explicitly to dehumanize and justify violence against the masses.
So this is the ‘mechanical hound’ that RayBradbury was referring to in Farenheit 451.
I forgot about that… The black mirror episode with them was terrifying.
Now ppl just need to jam the controller/video frequencies it uses to counter it.
Disclaimer: don’t do this unless you want the FCC knocking on your door too
Looks like Ethernet cams are the answer after all.
Always have been. 🌎🔫
Isn’t that interesting…
The anbility to prevent the getting-out of evidence of what the authorities do to the locals…
Just like the unconstitutional state-laws which criminalize capturing-of-video-evidene of police executing people…
“I wonder” if this would ever be abused by anti-accountability authorities…
( remember that the whole Christian religion is founded on a guy who was a kind of whistleblower, & had spikes hammered through his wrists, in his crucifixion, for his calling the legalists “hypocrites”…
I wonder how “Christian” he’d find them to be, if he returned, & saw what they’re doing? )
Human nature & demon nature seem … related?
or is that too harsh?
… perhaps … but wasn’t the Inquisition demon-law in the name of benJoseph?
hmm…
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While I agree with the anti-authority statement, I have to say the rest of the post is approaching incoherence. This reads like you did translation party on some apologetics texts.
It has an aneurysm or AI vibe, for sure.
Everything I write is “translated”…
Normal people usually have an innate-mind-language of either
- visual-cognition
- auditory-cognition
- kinesthetic-cognition
I think in abstract-shapes, & have to translate from abstract-forms into English, & it is … frustrating & tiresome … to accomplish this,
& it’s required ALL the time.
Maybe someday I’ll go read what the discussion was, to figure-out if I was having a bad day, that day, & try correcting it…
_ /\ _
wtf, I bet it would work equally well for thousands of dollars less if their jammer didn’t come with a robot dog.
activating the HVAC system to introduce chemicals into the environment and cause a fire or explosion
Someone’s been reading comic books and raiding the edibles again
Stop using wireless security cameras. Burglers do this too. It doesn’t take a robot dog to carry around a jammer.
Ya cant jam an Ethernet cord
Now this is some watchdogs 2 shit
Jokes on them, Uptime Kuma pings my doorbell cams every 5 seconds and starts the self-destruct sequence if they aren’t reachable.
Apart from the fact that I don’t believe you :) What would your self-destruct routine actually destroy?
the PhotosOfRealNature folder…and browsing history because they don’t deserve the memes
The antidote
Certainly not any evidence, as that would be illegal
It actually only checks every 30 seconds and sends an email if it fails for 3 minutes. But don’t tell the feds.
Okay, I’ll just use wired devices from now on then.
For real security, you basically have to. Even without this, jammers can be used by thieves to disable wireless cameras and security systems.
WPA2 (and I believe 3 as well) are notoriously easy to crack the passwords to. Wired is truly best for security, and for wireless WPA Enterprise can help with securing the network
I don’t believe this is the case. 3 is fairly robust, and 2 is still just brute forcing, though rapidly on a local CPU. The one that’s trivial is trivial to crack is WEP.
WPA2 is pretty trivial too. Not as easy as WEP since you do have to locally brute-force the PSK (password), but that’s pretty quick on modern systems. We had multiple assignments when I was in college that had cracking a WPA2 password as a step (in the interest of time, the instructor used passwords from the RockYou list but still)
Yeah, if you’re using common words or variants thereof, you’re gonna have a bad time. But a 128 character string of random characters is going to be functionally safe from such an attack, for now.
And you’ll go crazy every time you try to add a device that doesn’t support QR code scanning.
Just use multiple dictionary words with a symbol or two thrown in. Or go all out and set up 802.1x with client certificates and save the PSKs for a firewalled segment of less important crap.
Although it’s worth mentioning that wireless security means nothing to jamming. Jamming is RF, it’s destroying layer 1 before WPA matters.
Cool, so my hardwired cameras won’t be affected, and they’ll be announcing themselves with tons of suspicious radio activity. I’ll know exactly when to react to their arrival.
