NSA Blimp Spied in the United States | Hacker News Reader

NSA Blimp Spied in the United States

theintercept.com

135 pointsycnews39 comments

I find it interesting that this blimp is called Hover Hammer. I was stationed in Ft Lewis and went to Iraq (OIF II 2003-2004) and as part of a RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition) cavalry squadron, our unit had these "Prophet" SIGINT listening devices. They were humvees with telescoping antennas. The antennas would go up maybe 2-3 stories high and they look like this:

https://www.army.mil/article/76623/Soldiers_train_on_upgrade...

The NSA operated a much larger immobile version called the "Prophet Hammer", which there doesn't appear to be much on the internet about:

https://icwatch.wikileaks.org/search?company_facet=Prophet+H...

Given the similarity, I can't help but think that the NSA uses "HAMMER" for their main SIGINT collection hardware. Something to note when reading some of the released documents full of codewords and internal DoD lingo.

Is it appropriate to post this kind of sensitive material on the internet?

The real question is whether it is appropriate for a government to be using weapons of war against its own civilian populace, in direct violation of human rights and constitutional prohibitions.

What?

There is absolutely nothing sensitive in that document. The order of battle and the past deployment are public knowledge and public domain. There are references to the prophet hammer (with extensive information about it in a few books). I did have a clearance, but this isn't posting anything that is classified whatsoever.

I hate the idea that government agencies can deploy technology like a blimp that flies around for 6 months at a time listening to everything in order to spy on citizens who should have a right to freedom and privacy, but a little part of my brain can't help but think "That is so cool."

The last time I was near Baltimore, I saw one of those things and it gave me the creeps.

What really stuck with me was the way the locals blithely accepted it, like "Oh, those are always up there".

Like Eloi and Morlocks.

Quick, bring out the biplanes! :)

Naturally they'd probably want something like those absurdly high-resolution real-time drones put into a package that can be kept aloft not just for hours but perpetually.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/146909-darpa-shows-off-1... is an example of an existing drone. That kind of equipment could easily fit into a blimp.

These look like the TARS blimps or DEA blimps used for border surveillance and trying to catch drug smugglers.

They've had blimps at the border for some time.

https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/frontline-november-aerostats

But ya, the pictures do look the same.

What are they alleging it spied on?

I hear about test operations and the targeting of international traffic.

Was there domestic targeting for non-test purposes? Or even any domestic targeting at all?

It sounds like you didn't read the article, what documents they have state it was getting heavy investments, and being tested. So no alleged operations as of yet.

> The agency added in the document that it planned to conduct more tests with the Hover Hammer, and said it wanted to develop a larger version of the blimp that would be capable of flying at altitudes of 68,000 feet for up to six months at a time.

It'll be hard to track when it's out though, flying at 70k feet and being impervious to infrared and a couple other items as the article stated.

They are alleging that it spied on any and all electronic communications that occurred in the Long Island, New York area .. not just international shipping, though that was included, but potentially everything else as well.

And that's really the point: we don't know. Unless someone investigates and pulls the evidence, we won't know, for sure, that this device isn't being used by the political elite in order to maintain their powers.

Such is the nature of a nation run on secrets.

The terminology made me think that they just had a VHF receiver up there and were listening to AIS traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

It's similar to the ADS-B systems that airplanes use to report their location and altitude and heading.

AIS has a built-in messaging system for ship-to-ship communications and to receive alerts.

You can detect AIS traffic from satellite, but ground-based antennas are cheaper and more sensitive. Having a aerostat to increase range would be good for monitoring maritime traffic over a larger area.

UPDATE: After reading some more, I think this is a perfect fit for AIS monitoring. Ground-based solutions have a horizon limitation of 46 miles. Satellite systems get overwhelmed with too many ships reporting in and data is lost. A balloon based system would be in a sweet spot where it would allow the US to extend the AIS monitoring a few hundred miles out from the borders while not having to put more satellites into orbit.

Global AIS traffic is publicly available: https://www.marinetraffic.com/

Nothing in the article indicates that they are 'only spying on AIS traffic' - this is an assumption, and a poor guess, possible diversion tactic, at best.

The source material linked in the article (SIDtoday newsletter) is what states it was used for AIS traffic.

I am curious as to what else you believe it is used for?

I'd guess they were monitoring every signal from radio bands that have a line-of-sight or one-bounce range limitations, as they could get the rest of the spectrum from their ground-based antennas.

They're experts in signals intelligence and have no practical budget limitations. They're recording everything, automatically processing to find the interesting bits, and assigning real life humans to look at those interesting bits.

I'm guessing that in the NYC area, at the very least Russia, China, and Canada are sucking up the same EM signals, or trying to.

We mere mortals tend to assume that such a tool would be used for one thing in particular, because don't have cults of patriotism or bottomless bank accounts.

We've had these blimps over our landlocked midwestern city. The largest ships in our area are 24' Sea Rays on a lake, nowhere near the gross tonnage that mandates use of AIS. We may have to accept that the true nature of these blimps is shrouded under layers of state secrecy, and all we have left is speculation based on observation.

>... we won't know, for sure, that this device isn't being used by the political elite in order to maintain their powers.

As much as I'd love to agree with you, I don't realistically see how it would be practical to blackmail people with a blimp.

For targeting the vast majority of people (politicians included), accessing the sum total of that person's digital life already sitting in storage is more than ample. Browsing history, chat logs, video calls, phone conversations, banking information, medical history, geolocation data. It's all there already.

You don't have to blackmail. When you know enough about a person, you can control them with just the right messaging (ref: the point of ad tech). Quick example: An incumbent could use this to have substantially better data on their voter's preferences and tune their campaign appropriately. Or generate just the right kind of fake news to push major policy changes against people's interests. The real potential here is how subtle these moves can be while also being quite effective.

I completely agree, my only point was that a blimp really can't add much to existing surveillance measures that essentially capture everything. A blimp might help you target extremely paranoid people, that's about it. Even then, having actual human tails would be more effective, especially in NYC.

For foreign operations blimps are amazing though, since a place like Afghanistan doesn't necessarily have modern infrastructure or any shortage of people trying to hide.

This whole blimp thing is ridiculous. Perhaps they're worried about CB/Ham or the towers (or wiretap authorization) didn't support what they wanted.

Are blimps threatened by AK-47s?

>Are blimps threatened by AK-47s?

Not at altitude, no.

Yours is rather a naive point of view. You can do a lot with a little bit of information - it doesn't necessarily need to be blackmail. Just knowing what your political opponents are investing in, for example, can be enough to exert un-seen control over them in such a way as to weaken their ability to usurp your current power status. Its not all just blackmail and Hollywood-style intrigue...

Is there any evidence anything like this is happening?

Wikileaks is full of it.

So link any evidence of it happening, from Wikileaks or otherwise.

its literally what Hillary was accusing Russia of doing when the whole 'fake news' & her emails getting hacked debacle started.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure intelligence services use intelligence they gather to help their country achieve some objective - that's sort of what they're for.

That's a pretty massive difference from intelligence services in western democracies being used to further the interests of specific elites - that would be a gigantic scandal.

The point is, which you missed, that Wikileaks is all we've got. So far.

There really isn't any way to know, for sure, that these apparatus aren't being used for politically motivated means, with all else being considered. We, the people, from who the politic derive their powers, have no idea what they are doing with it.

The secrecy level is too damn high.

That statement could be interpreted more than one way...

>Yours is rather a naive point of view. You can do a lot with a little bit of information ...

You can also do a lot with a lot of information, which is already available without the presence of a blimp.

Obviously blackmail isn't the only form of leverage, and there's many other ways surveillance can further a bad actor's agenda.

> "that it spied on any and all electronic communications that occurred in the Long Island, New York area"

A blimp monitored communications that ran through buried fiber optic cables? Or were they just talking about wireless traffic? The former would, of course, be impossible.

> "Such is the nature of a nation run on secrets."

Every nation is run on secrets.

I'm not really certain there is much to spy on. They mention cell phones but that traffic is encrypted and if you have the capability to capture it elsewhere (as we know they do) then why bother? There's nothing they could capture that the average joe with an RTL-SDR couldn't

If the NSA is targeting some legitimate and happens to intercept other traffic at a device level, then filters it out as not desired... What's the problem? That sounds like them doing their job.

And so far as I can tell, any claim they did more than that is just mere allegation to sound scary.

I'm sick of jumping at shadows every time a spy agency does anything.

The NSA fucked up with overly broad collection, but at the same time, talking with people, it sounds like that's what the majority really wanted them to do at the time.

The problem is political, and has more to do with the public wanting unreasonable things than some need to fear absolutely every thing they do.

The spy agency stuck an antenna on a blimp! Oooooo, spooky!

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