I am looking forward to LEO satellite networks that are connected to the Internet. Won't be easy to suppres yoir people then.
Brown trucks with gobs of antennas are the guys who are tracking them down, some Chinese 3 letter service.
Besides, the antenna itself is rather small, and can be hidden inside just about any structure transparent to RF in the relevant frequency bands - say, a seemingly innocuous water cistern on the roof, for instance.
2. It is possible to build verious kinds of covert antennas. Radio amateurs do that all the time. Just google the term "stealth ham radio"
But if you shine a powerful laser beam into the sky it is visible from pretty far away. It's highly focused, but also gets scattered a lot by the atmosphere.
That's actually how spies send data back over the satellites:
>Unlike with SW signals, a radio signal to a satellite is very difficult to intercept and trace, as the waves are 'beamed' straight up rather than all around.
A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them and even pointing out the approximate location (eg. a building) where they're located. If the antenna was inside a huge apartment building, it would be hard to find the right apartment, if the transmitter was turned off, but with single family buildings, it would be easy.
Ham radio operators hide and then look for hidden transmitters for fun, so it's not that hard, especially with a budget that is given to the police.
You are very wrong sir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-millimeter_band
>A helicopter with the right equipment flying over urban areas would have an easy job finding them.
That is not true. Helicopter would need to fly RIGHT into such directional and tiny beam. Which is nearly impossible to do in huge city. Even when flying 2m next to it, you would likely not detect it.
That is the reason why CIA had so much problem with pinpointing Iridium satellite phones back in Colombia in the 90's.
and yes, even with a laser (nanometer wavelengths) it's hard to produce a 2mm wide beam at a helicopter distance.
"Yeah, that's my 'compost bin'"
Even in the US, constitutional rights have been waved on a mass scale for 20 years. People only take up arms to defend te right to oppress downtrodden minorities.
It is probably cheaper to launch a StarLink bird than it is to blow it out of orbit. Think of it as a DoS attack on the launch batteries!
As for the second? I find that approach much more likely to succeed. Sigh.
They have some propellant to make adjustments and stay in orbit a bit longer but if you blow them up you just make the decay process quicker.
First, it's one of extremely few actions actually likely to get you nuked or "liberated" - you just threatened one of the most valuable strategic advantages (even if it's just a civilian satellite, it wasn't yours, and militaries will consider their satellites under threat).
Second, in case you're not aware, the remains of the satellite now are a danger to any other object in that orbital plane, and this can trigger a cascade reaction and take lots of them down, making new launches impossible for many years. Look for Kessler Syndrome.
Nobody is nuking anybody else over satellites. Nukes will only be used in case of regime / home territory threat (eg if Russia were losing a conventional war, and NATO were pushing toward Moscow, Russia could throw down the nuke threat card and say stop or else), or in response to the use of a nuke.
If North Korea starts shooting down US satellites at some point, it would prompt a conventional military bombing response (which would attempt to neutralize their ability to launch rockets at US satellites), and possible full-scale war. It would not prompt a nuclear retaliation. There is zero interest - anywhere - in seeing millions of people die over some satellites.
The plan for Starlink is to have 12,000 satellites eventually. You'd need to shoot down quite lot a of them to block access to an entire country.
You: Camping, in the mountains, sorry boss, no signal there, I won't be accessible.
Boss: No problem.... here's a portable starlink antenna,... just in case... you know... if there is a bug in your code... or if we have a skype call with the clients... or if we need a bug fixed... haha.. you know, fixing bugs in the forest hehe.. well yeah... just have it connected during normal business hours, just in case... and check your emails while you're connected.. and slack... and CI logs... but otherwise, have a nice vacation, I hope you get some rest!
It was providing a self healing command and control network capable of surviving a nuclear attack. It evolved into a Internetwork of trusted hosts to facilitate rapid information dissemination. It took a bunch of advertisers to turn it into surveillance nirvana by realizing that you could use http requests and your own portable sensor platform and in-house OS to rake in profit overwhelming.
At least early on, the latter had the excuse of lack of foresight regarding the dystopia they were building, but for decades now it's been more than obvious to everyone and most of them are continuing to cobble together their own prisons and ours.
Pretty much same thing as complaining about bad leaders when the sheeple putting in the bad votes is the actual problem.
Who really is the loser here.
This was a very disjoint cultural shift in from the research I've done, and it was really pushed by only a handful of big names.
That's a nice myth. But it wasn't so.
As https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br... explains, the idea of packet switching was invented twice. The Internet came out of the invention by Leonard Kleinrock at MIT. Separately Paul Baran and others at RAND had demonstrated that packet switching could be used to build a network to survive a nuclear attack.
Even though the Internet came out of military research, it was not designed to withstand nuclear attack. As can be verified by the fact that the early network had no redundancy, and neither computers nor the network were shielded from the EMP that a nuclear bomb could be expected to emit.
That's not to say there weren't earlier efforts to leverage networks for security purposes. I'm reminded of a tale of connecting FBI branches in the southern U.S. to facilitate case information sharing to close a series of cases involving a multi-state child and human trafficking ring in the Southern U.S. as well. Again though, that wasn't something bearing the character of "Hey! Let's 1984 these disgusting subhumans!" It was more, "Hey, seeing as our entire reason for existence is to work on crimes that cross State boundaries, doesn't it make sense that we should be able to keep the entire organization connected enough so that all our distributed branches can be kept up-to-date on what we've all found?"
Nothing controversial there. At all. Where things started getting controversial is where we started to take Lincoln's "tap the telegraph lines", an extreme wartime measure, and make it matter of fact through the establishment of the NSA/DIA. Where we started seeing the privatized Palantir's pop up, and seeing government agencies exercise or otherwise excuse investigative techniques they could not justifiably engage in themselves through delegation or voluntary action by private organizations.
It's these private businesses building datasets that never should gave existed that have outright corrupted things, and the at the time far more reasonable Third Party Doctrine that have driven things off the rails. Not the Internet itself.
So on the one hand a random internet stranger claims to have known someone important who said something.
On the other hand we have a history written by people including the author of the first paper on packet switching, the program manager at DARPA who authorized the project, the inventor of TCP/IP and so on and so forth.
I'll believe the paper that I cited.
Packet switching can be used to build networks that are resilient in the face of disruptions, whether natural or manmade. That is where the myth of "designed to survive a nuclear war" comes from. But the original Internet was designed using packet switching to allow computers to freely talk to each other without having an insane number of dedicated circuits kept open.
That said, I agree with you that it was not designed for surveillance. But I disagree on the timeline. While the response to 9/11 certainly stepped up the level of surveillance to an insane level, all evidence is that ECHELON had been tapping the Internet long before that.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON for more. Also note that ECHELON predated the internet, and to them it was simply another telecommunications network.