New Satellites Will Hunt Pirates, and Maybe Terrorists

New Satellites Will Hunt Pirates, and Maybe Terrorists(bloomberg.com)

68 points by PeOe 7 years ago | 28 comments

yholio 7 years ago |

> The company he formed in 2015 had a simple pitch to government agencies: “We convert a capital expense to an operation expense.” Raytheon Co., the giant defense contractor, was an early investor and customer. It has engineers working with Hawkeye’s 31-person team and, in turn, will sell some of the company’s findings to its own government customers.

Essentially, open market spooks for hire, selling limited space intelligence to countries that can't afford their own space programs.

someguydave 7 years ago | |

The quote says more about Congressional incompetence than fancy innovation in technology.

madengr 7 years ago | |

It’s been done with optical imagery for a while, but this is probably the first SIGINT.

offmycloud 7 years ago | | |

So ... SIGINTaaS ?

crooked-v 7 years ago |

Pirates, and maybe terrorists, and definitely lots of ordinary people spuriously prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws.

starbeast 7 years ago | |

And Iceland. https://www.ft.com/content/abf583de-9546-11dd-aedd-000077b07...

To be fair, they are Vikings, which probably counts as both pirate and terrorist, though I'd say it is a bit of a delayed response as the Icelandic haven't gone a'viking in simply ages.

As an aside, I have run into a few people recently who claim to be both vikings and anti-immigration, which I cannot help but find really funny.

notahacker 7 years ago | |

It's pretty difficult to use this satellite technology as evidence that an ordinary person might be a terrorist, unless that satellite happens to locate (not listen to) radio transmissions from their ordinary hiking trip through the Iraqi desert shortly before someone intercepts them.

It's much more practical for figuring out where ships which have their transponders turned off are.

Same goes for current generation state of the art optical satellite data, which is mostly useful for pretty pictures and environmental trends, but might be just about enough to prove you didn't park your car where you said you did if you're really unlucky. (This, admittedly, is the bit that might improve rapidly in ten years, but it's still not going to be particularly useful for targeted tracking of individuals, never mind dragnets)

maxxxxx 7 years ago | |

Or just people they don't like and eventually everybody. I think in a few decades the surveillance infrastructure of 1984 will look benign and quaint. Winston Smith actually could hide for a while.

liftbigweights 7 years ago | | |

> Winston Smith actually could hide for a while.

Actually, he couldn't. He thought he could hide. But we find out in the ministry of truth and room 101 that everything he did "secretly", like writing in his diary or his rendezvous with julia, were known to the authorities.

But I agree, unless we wake up, I think a mix of 1984 and Minority Report style of dystopian future awaits us.

closeparen 7 years ago |

The intelligence community was hunting RF emissions with trucks during WWII. Three quarters of a century of top-dollar aerospace and electronic warfare R&D later... I’d be surprised if they didn’t have this capability by the 70s. What do you think the National Reconaissance Office is?

daviddumenil 7 years ago | |

RF tracking was even more sophisticated in WWII.

The Gestapo developed a man-portable set worn under a trenchcoat:

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/df/gurtelpeiler/index.htm

ImprovedSilence 7 years ago | |

I think the point here is that the satellites are not owned by the gov, but by a contractor, hence the quote about capital expense to operational expense. Everyone wants to be a service these days, you don't own it, you borrow it, etc...

greglindahl 7 years ago | |

I don't think the NRO puts much effort into finding illegal fishing, or other kinds of activity that don't impact US national security.

ggm 7 years ago | | |

Having a capability and chosing what you use it for are different things. I also believe that the life of RF detection by third parties, and radio between parties has been entirely parallel. For every signal, there is a device hunting that signal in amongst the noise.

jhayward 7 years ago | |

You probably mean the National Reconaissance Office [1]

[1] http://www.nro.gov/

closeparen 7 years ago | | |

Thanks, updated.

Bucephalus355 7 years ago |

Tracking / Signal Hunting technology for planes and boats has always seemed to generate the most fantastical ideas.

There has been a good amount of progress, but it really stalled for a while when ICBMs seemed to negate the importance of aircraft. The US had the quite sophisticated Northern Early Warning Line at one time to monitor all airspace in the North Pole. It’s very hard, even today, to get good satellite tracking there because it is a Pole.

The craziest thing I’ve heard is what the British tried before radar was invented. A Hoover Dam like wall 200 feet high that was supposed to amplify the sounds of planes approaching from Germany that would alert a human operator.

http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/locations/denge...

FlyMoreRockets 7 years ago | |

RF snooping has traditionally been done by "fishing trawlers".

clubm8 7 years ago |

So basically in 5-10 years they'll be using satellites for domestic surveillance? After all, pretty much every other "anti-terror" measure seems to "trickle down" to local LEOs

ridgeguy 7 years ago |

These may not work well for low frequency sources. The satellites are above the ionosphere, which reflects/absorbs low freq RF.

Comm signals at, for example, 3.5MHz wouldn't get through the ionosphere.