THE NEW MILITARY HEADACHE 

There were days when the military had control over security. When "national defense", "confidential" and "top secret" meant something. Now serendipity has put "mirrors" where anyone can see and hear what is going on! The Pentagon, America's NSA, Canada's "secret service" and Britain's BGCH are not amused.

We owe this new "freedom of the skies" to British engineer Anthony Hopwood who, in the manner of famous discoveries of the past, just serendipitously "tripped" over this "unknown" phenomenon. As recently reported by technology writer Barry Fox in "New Scientist", Hopwood found, while carrying out his 10-year-old hobby of measuring the differences of electrical potential between the ionosphere (the outer portion of the earth's atmosphere that contains high electron content) and ground here on earth. He does it all with a common, relatively inexpensive device known as an electrometer. His discovery, is that small "electronic mirrors" are created in the atmosphere when ionized by microwave input from the ground thus reflecting signals in this previously unknown manner.

Since the end of World War II the military has been looking into the advantages of "meteor communications". This process is activated utilizing the ionized "reflector" created when any one of the billions of meteors enter our atmosphere every day. Most are as small as talcum powder, but they still work. In the 1970s the military gave up but it caught on in civvy street and is in commercial use today from Egypt (where it's used to measure the flow of the Nile) to Alaska (for snow level measuring). It's much cheaper than using expensive satellites and in some ways the information has a higher security factor. It also contains the facility to bounce signals over considerable distances. And, it was this facility built-into the entire Ionosphere that allowed Marconi to send his first "wireless" signal from Cornwall, England in 1901 to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. Short-wave enthusiasts have been using the system ever since.

But engineer Hopwood's discovery goes beyond that. His findings could make local radio and television obsolete. Not to mention that it permits global reading of military transmissions.

His now-patented system would, for example, allow a Vancouver transmitter to send a TV signal to another city without the use of a satellite, cable or terrestrial micro-wave! His patent covers those segments, or "mirrors" in the sky that have received "artificial" ionization (the analogy with artificial insemination isn't far off the mark). These segments ionize when a high-frequency ground signal penetrates the ionosphere, as during a TV, phone or a satellite military signal up-link.

During routine monitoring one day, Hopwood picked up speech, music and data from his measuring system. Voltage variations that matched office hours clued him in to just what he had discovered. According to Fox's report, Hopwood wrote the British Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham but they never replied (heard that before?). Later he phoned GCHQ. Minutes after he completed that call a security officer phoned and told him this should only be discussed on a scrambled line and read the Wireless Act to him. When Hopwood pointed out that he had picked this up with just a measuring device not described in any communications act, the GCHQ caller hung up.

Hopwood's patent application has not been rejected by the British Patent Office but I would love to hear the panic in military intelligence sections on how they hope to handle this. "This", being something that within days will be known world-wide and open to testing by any electronic hacker.

Apparently, the Age of Uncertainty even applies to the military.

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