Data analyst Bjorn Bergman (Bjorn Bergman) has discovered 9 ships, they are located north of San Francisco, Calif., Point Reyes (Point Reyes) broadcasting false GPS signals. In fact, these ships are thousands of miles away from various places in the Norwegian Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Nigerian coast.
Bergman presented his findings at the annual meeting of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation on May 5, 2020. He told delegates he was unsure of the cause of the jammer. Bergman said, “It may just be a strange failure of the AIS system, or it may be more serious when some form of GPS manipulation occurs. "
Professor Todd Humphreys (Todd Humphreys), in accepting Newsweek's review of Bergman's findings, said the circle at Reyes' corner indicated deliberate GPS deception.
“Fast forward to 2020 [and] the odd pattern that I think we are seeing… is the emergence of out-of-the-box deception devices,” he told Newsweek. “If I'm right, cheap scooters can be sold now, then you can bet there will be more GPS jammer impact incidents in the months and years to come, which will affect ships, planes and ordinary turns will have a negative influence on instructions. "
Before discovering the "ghost ship" near Cape Reyes, Bergman and his colleagues at SkyTruth investigated similar GPS interference at more than 20 coastal locations in China. An article published by MIT Technology Review in November 2019 was one of the first reports of this strange wave jammer. Data showed that the ship was moving in the "crop circle" and that the actual location is a few miles away.
Crop Circles can also be seen on Strava's Global Heat Map, which tracks cycling, running and other forms of exercise by Strava users. The erroneous data in the fitness app confirmed the existence of a potential GSM jammer problem, not a malfunction of the on-board Automatic Identification System (AIS).
Most of the interference sites are oil terminals and government agencies, suggesting that deception can be used to cover up crude oil transport security or anti-surveillance measures. According to Bergman, as of May 2020, manipulation is still ongoing in four cities (Shanghai, Dalian, Fuzhou and Quanzhou).
