Report: Massive US Spy Satellite May 'Hoover Up' Cellphone Calls (dw.com) 85
Launching today is America's classified NROL-44 spy satellite, which German public broadcaster DW calls "a massive, open secret":
NROL-44 is a huge signals intelligence, or SIGINT, satellite, says David Baker, a former NASA scientist who worked on Apollo and Shuttle missions, has written numerous books, including U.S. Spy Satellites and is editor of SpaceFlight magazine. "SIGINT satellites are the core of national government, military security satellites. They are massive things for which no private company has any purpose," says Baker... "It weighs more than five tons. It has a huge parabolic antenna which unfolds to a diameter of more than 100 meters in space, and it will go into an equatorial plane of Earth at a distance of about 36,000 kilometers (22,000 miles)," says Baker...
Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. "The move from wired communication to digital and wireless is a godsend to governments because you can't cut into wires from a satellite, but you can literally pick up cell phone towers which are radiating this stuff into the atmosphere. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic," says Baker...
Some people worry about congestion in space, or satellites bumping into each other, and the threat of a collision causing space debris that could damage other satellites or knock out communications networks. But that may have benefits, too — little bits of spy satellite can hide in all that mess and connect wirelessly to create a "virtual satellite," says Baker. "There are sleeper satellites which look like debris. You launch all the parts separately and disperse them into various orbits. So, you would have sensors on one bit, an amplifier on another bit, a processor on another, and they'll be orbiting relatively immersed in space debris."
"Space debris is very good for the space defense industry," says Baker, "because the more there is, the more you can hide in it."
Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity. "The move from wired communication to digital and wireless is a godsend to governments because you can't cut into wires from a satellite, but you can literally pick up cell phone towers which are radiating this stuff into the atmosphere. It takes a massive antenna, but you're able to sit over one spot and listen to all the communications traffic," says Baker...
Some people worry about congestion in space, or satellites bumping into each other, and the threat of a collision causing space debris that could damage other satellites or knock out communications networks. But that may have benefits, too — little bits of spy satellite can hide in all that mess and connect wirelessly to create a "virtual satellite," says Baker. "There are sleeper satellites which look like debris. You launch all the parts separately and disperse them into various orbits. So, you would have sensors on one bit, an amplifier on another bit, a processor on another, and they'll be orbiting relatively immersed in space debris."
"Space debris is very good for the space defense industry," says Baker, "because the more there is, the more you can hide in it."
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It's to spy on _other_ countries (Score:1)
All without any Huawei products in any US cell tower!
Re: It's to spy on _other_ countries (Score:1)
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That only covers calls inside the US. A satellite could catch cell tower traffic from anywhere.
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Spy satellites "hoover up" of hundreds of thousands of cell phone calls or scour the dark web for terrorist activity.
Where "terrorist" is "anyone who thinks differently to how employees of the NSA, NRO, and CIA think". You're most probably a terrorist. And so is your mother.
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Also "scouring the darknet" from space is just nonsense. To begin with, most of that traffic isn't even available on radio waves....
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The satellites dont work very well but they are a good PR weapon to scare bad actors into using wired communications which of course are much easier to tap with telco cooperation
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The satellites dont work very well
They don't work at all. How are they going to "hoover up data from the dark web?"
Seriously, think of how much a datacenter weighs. Five tons is nothing. How are they going to dissipate the heat from that thing?
Also, imagine the technical difficulty of doing an FFT to read 100million overlapping signals, all of them below the noise floor.
Re:Sounds redundant. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:2)
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You blew my paradigm.
Can you do that in a vacuum?
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:3)
Dark helmet want's his weapon back (Score:2)
Is'nt that what Rick Morannis attacked alderon with?
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Seriously ? Heat dissipation is what you came up with? In Space? Which is at -273 C?
The rest are valid points
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Except for the parts of your satelite that is exposed to the sun. And with the added problem that cooling is radiative (black body) only.
So yeah, heat management is a pretty major issue in spacecraft design.
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:3)
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>Seriously ? Heat dissipation is what you came up with? In Space? Which is at -273 C?
And a thermal conductivity of approximately 0.
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:2)
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:2)
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:2)
It's nonsense.
There are a finite number of frequencies for cellphone use, and the transmitters and towers are all relatively low-power, tailored to serve a limited geographic area, to allow re-use of the allocated frequencies outside the limited geographic area. And, BTW, NONE of the antennas involved radiate signals up, instead very carefully laterally to towers and phones on the ground.
In other words, at any one point in time there may be THOUSANDS of simultaneous users on the exact same frequency across
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Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actual sniffing hardware can pick up enough of the tower to handset broadcast to eavesdrop on half of the conversation, especially when it has direct line of sight.
Re: Sounds redundant. (Score:2)
There are other factors that tell me that the idea of listening to cellular traffic from space is bogus. Cellular transmission is digital with power constraints and frequency selection to avoid interferring with neighbouring cells.
If old fashioned AM transmission was used such as a radio station then a satellite would be able to pick up the signal because the signal would be high power and continuous.
Modern cellular communications use non-continuous transmission with frequency hopping, encryption, dynamic p
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Didn't Snowden inform us that the NSA routinely collects cell calls from the carriers' own data centers?
-jcr
Yes but I rather doubt that sort of cooperation can be had from telecom companies in Iran, Russia, China etc.
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Personnel in telcos in such countries aren't high earners. Spies can be surprisingly cheap to hire.
-jcr
Yes but you need more than a single underpaid telephone switch administrator to record, voice analyse, automatically transcribe into metadata and archive every single mobile phone call in Iran, Russia, China etc. You need a massive infrastructure for that and if you can't plug physical cables into their network backbone a satellite like this is the only other way. Expect Huawei/Ericsson/Nokia and phone manufacturers to roll out a mobile voice encryption standard as a response to satellites like this.
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Massive? (Score:2)
If it was tiny or not a satellite at all, I'd be so much less worried.
Mmm (Score:3)
Under 'Hoover up' I understood an old fat man wearing a tutu.
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I just figured it was how they were going to get the data into the tubes, which are apparently pneumatic.
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I just figured it was how they were going to get the data into the tubes, which are apparently pneumatic.
That's why the satellite transforms into megamaid.
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but then how do the turtles breathe
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"but then how do the turtles breathe"
What do you mean by 'turtles'?
There's only the Great A'Tuin.
PS.
'The Light Fantastic', in which the Great A'Tuin attended the hatching of eight baby turtles, each with four baby elephants and a tiny discworld of their own, doesn't count.
Utter bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is utter nonsense and bullshit. You simply can't spy on cell phone signals from the geosynchronous orbit. First, the 4G cell phone protocols are all encrypted, you need collaboration of the cellular network provider to be able to spy on them.
Collaboration between major cellular carriers and government spy agencies is absolutely happening.
I didn't think anyone was still naive enough to believe otherwise.
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Re: Utter bullshit (Score:1)
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Quite right, it is simply ludicrous to expect them to pick up anything useful with a mere 100m antenna over 24000 miles away! Why, we can barely pick up a 1watt transmission with a 70m antenna at 11 billion miles distance! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
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Cellular band specifically chosen because they fall off to noise floor in 5 miles of humid atmosphere, 10-20 in the middle of parched nowhere. The newer bands are even more short ranged. One side of the
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I did a rough/quick calculation and got that a 100 m antenna at say 2 GHz has a half-power beamwidth of about 0.09 degrees. From geostationary orbit the corresponding footprint would have a radius of about 56 km. So it's doesn't seem that useful to me for those frequencies, you'd pick up to many cell phone base stations at once.
Maybe the purpose instead is to locate ground terminals, i.e. there's a spy with a satellite phone somewhere and you want to detect his location. For instance, if the satphone uses
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Whatever it is, it'd have to be reasonably stationary. A 100-meter antenna will have a significant moment of inertia while having to be made quite flexible (to keep the mass down). I expect this makes for quite a control problem to change orientation "quickly", where quickly for me and a normal GEO satellite is maybe 0.1 deg/s or something. With an antenna this size, I have no idea.
Hmm, maybe it'd be a good idea to spin the antenna around its boresight and let the centripetal forces help with keeping the sh
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Maybe it doesn't eavesdrop on the cell towers directly below it, but on those that are far away, eg. tangent of the earth from the viewpoint of the satellite, as I presume these waves go straight while the earth has curvature.
Re: Utter bullshit (Score:1)
What if you have a high gain, super selective antenna... And do something novel like point it at a cell tower near your target? Or maybe a limited geographical area? The value of the average voice conversation or text thread is probably much less than zero, when you factor in needing to decrypt it. So, limit your search to areas that are likely to be of interest. Embassies? Areas with known terrorist activity? Industrial centers? The possibilities are endless.
Yes and maybe no (Score:2)
> Second, your satellite will see several tens of millions of phones all operating at the same frequency at mere 2W power. There's zero chance you can extract one conversation out of this noise.
Agreed. Imagine you have a microphone sensitive enough to hear a voice 200 miles away. You point it at a city, you're going pick up 200,000 overlapping voices. Trying to pick out one conversation would be just about impossible.
> the 4G cell phone protocols are all encrypted
Well, about that encryption
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I 100% agree it's bullshit, governments don't spy from outside, they spy from inside, it's much more efficient. From inside, tapped into every landline and mobile phone company they can neatly copy all data out to their massive data warehouses with the decryption done for them already.
The summary is pure fantasy, sure it may be a sigint satellite but what it actual does IDK. You don't stick a hugely expensive satellite in the sky to do what you are already doing from the ground.
Utter bullshit? Not Entirely (Score:2)
My gut reaction is that this is partially true.
The parts about the dark web are nonsense. Getting information there is about breaking encryption or hacking into systems on the inside. The simplest approach is to get the same people to sign up for accounts elsewhere and use the same user ID and passwords at the dark sites; that would probably get you 80% of the accounts.
The parts about clusters hiding in debris is science fiction, just like the asteroids in Empire Strikes Back. Space is huge, even in orbi
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It's a huge, expensive satellite. It wouldn't have been launched if it wasn't collecting *something.* What is collects might not be the same as the apparent accounts of what it collects though. Giant antenna means weak signals radio, but it doesn't have to mean cell traffic. It could be for monitoring military radio - even if potentially hostile forces encrypt everything, just being able to get an approximate location could be valuable information. Or it could be part of the country's own communications - a
Re: Utter bullshit (Score:1)
Re: Utter bullshit (Score:1)
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Re: Utter bullshit (Score:2)
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Re: Utter bullshit (Score:2)
I know nothing about the area but I have some questions...
Q1. Presumably the signals from cell towers are much stronger than those from phones? Could it be listening to that?
Q2. Presumably the time or frequency multiplexing algorithms of the protocols are well known, so the satellite could figure out which device the cell tower is speaking to?
Q3. Even without knowing the content of the call, how much Metadata could a satellite pick up from listening to a cell tower? Can it get device fingerprints? Deduce an
Huawei (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we need to get rid of Huawei. If everyone was using Cisco routers we could simply use the built in backdoors instead of having to spend billions on sending up spy satellites. If the germans and French want us to stop spying on their Presidents they should simply join 5 eyes instead of building 5G networks with Huawei eqipment
hoover up (Score:1)
what is this, slashdot news for ignorant old fucks? Does anyone even actually use the phrase "hoover up" anymore and did they ever in the USA? OMG I have to leave... now my "electronic brain" needs to rest on the dynamo.
Re: hoover up (Score:3)
Pretty much the entirety of the non-American anglophone world uses âoeHooverâ as a proprietary eponym like Americans use âoeKleenexâ to mean âoetissue paperâ or that rest of the world uses âoeAmericanâ to mean âoefat bastard.â
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âoeHooverâ what the fuck is that retard
Re: hoover up (Score:2)
An obvious artifact of crappy legacy 1990s website coding that cannot properly detect common characters entered via modern devices. Why do you ask?
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From now on, "Roomba up".
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Hiding in the trash (Score:2)
Whatever the merits of this article, I like the idea of hiding a satellite among the space trash. It reminds me of the Millennium Falcon's getaway.
Suck to Blow Joke Here. (Score:2)
I call bs. (Score:2)
1) You do not need to a satellite to `scour the dark web for terrorist activity`. How would a satellite help and how is that in any way efficient.
2) You would need an enormous amount of bandwidth to gather cell phone traffic and then send all that traffic back to earth for processing. Unless the satellite can target specific users or do some data analysis directly no way is this device up there for gathering arbitrary voice audio.
little satellites made of ticky-tacky... (Score:2)
> "Space debris is very good for the space defense industry," says Baker, "because the more there is, the more you can hide in it."
1) this seems to be falling for the asteroid belt fallacy. Space debris is in all kinds of orbits, not clumped together like a pile of rubbish at the side of a road. "Hiding in space debris" is stupid. "Hiding /as/ space debris" might work for a while, but one characteristic of space debris is that it doesn't give off radio signals. Little bits of satellite connected by w
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And every damn one of them would need ground-comms, inter-debris-comms, power, and guidance. Each one is a weak link to reliability and security. Not gonna happen.
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Not that I think the concept makes much sense, but ...
> Little bits of satellite connected by wifi, on the other hand...
When local Channel One station broadcasts on 470 MHz at 5,000 watts and the picosatellite up in space transmits on 470 MHz at 1 watt ...
Done well, it would be like trying to find two people whispering on the other side of the stadium at a rock concert. And you don't even know if anyone is whispering, much less where in the stadium they might be.
NRO only does optical/radar/infrared I beleive (Score:1)
could be more effective using current methods (Score:1)
Report: Massive US Spy Satellite May 'Hoover Up' Cellphone Calls
Well, that sucks.
So private companies don't have comm sats now? (Score:2)
They go up to around 7 tons these days, and hang out in GEO too.
The 100-meter dish is very impressive though. Depending on what it's pointed at, it could pick up some very faint signals indeed. I am curious what/who they plan to listen to.
The "distributed spy satellite disguised as debris" is pure science fiction. There's very little reason to make such a thing, and it would be logistically difficult. The members would drift apart and become useless unless they have active propulsion (or high power comms) t
In geosynchronous orbit (Score:2)
Over our government's number one mortal enemy. That would put it somewhere over Kansas' longitude.
Sounds like sick dogs nightmare (Score:1)
Spying on satellite phones I guess (Score:1)
You can spot the lie at "dark net" (Score:2)
A cell network snooping satellite does exactly nothing for spying on the dark net. It does not even see the relevant signals. The whole "justification" is a lie, as usual. The real purpose is to spy in ordinary citizens, which is an illegal act for good reasons. Authoritarians cannot stand that people use their freedoms and, gasp!, may exchange unauthorized ideas! I am surprised they did not claim this could recognize child abuse in the act or track drug dealers (which it probably can, but nothing will be d