> including satellite phones, walkie-talkies, cellular towers, and GPS.<p>How can they track gps devices? I thought gps devices are passive in the sense that they don’t emit any signals but only read signatures from satellites.<p>Or am I reading the article wrong?
"HawkEye’s current constellation of 21 satellites is trained to locate the sources of electromagnetic emissions with wavelengths ranging from roughly 2 meters down to 2 centimeters, with “Signals of Interest” including satellite phones, walkie-talkies, cellular towers, and GPS."<p>Despite the headline, the system does NOT track individual cellphones or GPS receivers. Cellular signal from a personal cellphone isn't strong enough to register at satellite altitude. The same goes for non-milspec walkie-talkies.
I just learned about the SBIRS mission that Lockheed built, which is a constellation of far earth orbit satellites that are constantly scanning every inch of the entire globe with IR cameras with missile/plane/boat/person(?) level resolution. And has been for at least nine years now.<p>Incredible.<p>Here is a video that explains it. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTnl4E9FiY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTnl4E9FiY</a>
Pretty sophisticated surveillance technology - though it's worth remembering that you can't use it to look back in time and the footprint of each satellite is probably fairly small? I imagine that number is highly classified.<p>The info on the foreign buyers is pretty spicy, though it's generally known that UAE's high-level relationship with the USA is built upon recycling a good chunk of their oil money back into the military industrial complex (Wikileaks Cablegate said $19 billion/year as of 2010) - which is only one part of their overall Wall Street/London investment portfolio, but it does have a special significance.<p>> "HawkEye’s advisors have helped lead a large percentage of U.S. military and intelligence organizations — including the Central Intelligence Agency’s technical surveillance programs — and have included two former members of Congress who pivoted into lobbying, Norm Coleman and Lamar Smith. And so one can only conclude that HawkEye’s surveillance support for Gulf dictatorships is not an anomaly, but rather a corporate extension of official U.S. foreign policy."<p>UAE is also known for buying Israel's NSO Group (Pegasus etc.) surveillance tech:<p><a href="https://gulfstateanalytics.com/pegasus-as-a-case-study-of-evolving-ties-between-the-united-arab-emirates-and-israel/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://gulfstateanalytics.com/pegasus-as-a-case-study-of-ev...</a>
> Lockheed is now tracking phones<p>I get that the satellite can track the radio emissions from phones, but can they differentiate between different phones? - pick up the signal and track device by SIM IMEA/ICCID etc
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.<p>Can someone furnish evidence that ordinary cell phones are actually trackable... from space? When 5g is typically 200 ft, at best ~4km; LTE being ~100km at best... and the literal record for the lowest satellite orbit (Tsubame; which merely sustained it for 7d) being 2711.5km?<p>Yes, sure, maybe at the obscenely low signal received in space, one could pick up some kind of signature as opposed to it being even marginally usable for tx. But to infer that some kind of high-fidelity tracking could be done with that? Come on.
Tangential: I have argued that privacy is largely an artifact of the lack of technology. As technology increases, the total amount of information which can be kept private shrinks.<p>Also, the total number of criminal laws (including violations of treaties) is huge. One of the reasons we aren’t all prosecuted is because of the lack of prosecution resources and technology. As technology and automation increase, more average people will increasingly get prosecuted.<p>Not necessarily worried about the outcome of this Lockheed satellite system, but it is another tool which could contribute to this trend.
The text only mentions satellite phones, so the headline might be a bit click-baity.<p>I assume tracking mobile phones from space would be way harder and more expensive, although the progressive addition of satellite connectivity to recent iPhone models might help with that?
Can anyone explain how this works? Are these satellites in a similar orbit to GPS satellites? Do signals from cell phones etc include timestamps? Or is there a high resolution way of detecting the direction of a signal?
There's a new paper related to this RF signal identification technology by MIT [1]:<p>[1] Score-based Source Separation with Applications to Digital Communication Signals:<p><a href="https://paperswithcode.com/paper/score-based-source-separation-with" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://paperswithcode.com/paper/score-based-source-separati...</a>
Hopefully aliens also have some powerful SIGINTs, so they could detect American military and exercise certain actions against the north American warmongers.
It’s not possible to track ordinary cell phones this way. They’re tracking stuff that is much higher energy afaiu.<p>Yes, “cell phones” but like, satellite ones.