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Comment by bagels | Hacker News Reader

I find it hard to believe that there aren't already intelligence satellites up there listening to as much RF as possible everywhere all the time.

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The cool thing is that now you'll be able to cheaply monetize this information in order to better serve users with great perfectly-tailored advertising

It'll be like a cool guy is just following you around 24/7 making sure you know what to buy and do and think

Barf. This sounds like a version of my own personal Hell.

Given the forum, the sarcasm tag is almost certainly implied.

haha, to be fair, that's exactly the kind of thing a lot of Facebook/Google employees would say unironically in a face to face conversation about ad tracking

>It'll be like a cool guy is just following you around 24/7 making sure you know what to buy and do and think

Can they animate him (or her) so I don't feel lonely too?

There literally are, there's very good declassified evidence that has leaked out periodically in small pieces since the mid 1980s that some of what the NSA has are very large satellites with big unfolding umbrella-like antennas aimed directly down at the ground. For SIGINT collection and analysis. Or possibly some combination overlap between the black budget parts of the NRO and NSA.

Same size satellite bus as the largest class of things you would see in geostationary orbit (approx 6500 kg and the size of a school bus) but in high inclination orbits around 600 km.

I believe you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

> The satellites have estimated mass close to 5,200 kg and very large (estimated 100 m diameter)[2] radio reflecting dishes. USA-223 (NROL-32), which is seen as the fifth satellite in the series, is according to NRO director Bruce Carlson "the largest satellite in the world".[3] It is believed that this refers to the diameter of the main antenna, which might be well in excess of 100 m (330 ft).[4]

I've never bothered following the citations so I don't know how true this is, but it's pretty insane if it's real. A 100-meter-diameter satellite! I know it's an unfolding-umbrella-style mesh like you said, but still, that's impressive.

The giant unfolding umbrella antenna is not far off from what has been thoroughly commercially publicized for the unclassified commercial first and second gen Thuraya satellites (Boeing 702 bus).

Trevor Paglen has a pretty amazing talk that discusses finding and photographing some of these satellites. I've linked the specific part of the talk where he starts getting into this, but the entire thing is well worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvEMSRKniWk&t=1480s

Yes; the misty program is what you are thinking of. It had a clamshell RF shield to deflect incoming tracking

I mean it's been a common facet of movies from the 80s/90s of satellites intercepting cell phone communications directly.

There are, but I think the idea here is “the more the merrier”.

I wouldn't go that far. Rather I'd say that it opens up the risks and abuses to a much wider audience. I think the fact that there is no open source baseband firmware or open hardware for the GSM/LTE stack makes it even worse. There is no escape valve for consumers to exercise control over their privacy, and the technology doesn't care about regulatory boundaries, not that _any_ countries government actually wants that.

Currently Osmocombb can be considered a fully open source and audittable GSM stack, down to the baseband and modem firmware. Too bad it does not fit the phone completely.

FreeCalypso does and is audittable, but it's licencing situation is murky at best. It's based on leaked Texas Instruments sources with a gpl licence stuck on top. But Calypso is essentially abandonware and TI got out of the GSM modem biz in early 2000's so they apparently don't care.

For LTE there's srsUE from Software Radio Systems, but it's a 100% SDR implementation that does not fot any phone and is more of a lab and research tool. But it is open and audittable.

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