from Hacker News

New Satellites Will Hunt Pirates, and Maybe Terrorists

by PeOe on 11/30/18, 9:35 AM with 28 comments

• by yholio on 12/1/18, 9:06 PM

  > 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.

• by crooked-v on 12/1/18, 9:22 PM

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

• by closeparen on 12/1/18, 9:37 PM

  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?

• by Bucephalus355 on 12/2/18, 12:43 AM

  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...

• by clubm8 on 12/2/18, 3:59 AM

  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

• by ridgeguy on 12/2/18, 4:07 AM

  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.