A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War | Hacker News Reader

A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War

spectrum.ieee.org

71 pointsBrajeshwar17 comments

Signals intelligence is an interesting topic, doubly so from orbit. The article covers some Cold War hardware, meanwhile today the largest antennas deployed that we know of are from the Orion satellites, with an estimated 100m diameter primary dish, nearly as long as a football field, and its predecessor Magnum with one of approximately 77m, both with a very unique "unfurling" mechanism given their size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(satellite)

https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/magnum.htm

Guess that JB solar laser sat wasn't far fetched, if I'm remembering that movie (unfurling large mirror)

So I recall this being briefly discussed, under the "Classic Wizard" code name, in the 1986 book by William Burroughs, _Deep Black_ (his history of US space intel). Obviously didn't have details like how the computer systems processing the data worked, but it's been known for a while. The Soviet's paid far more attention to tracking NATO ships, launching 33 nuclear reactor powered radars (program named US-A, RORSAT to NATO) between 1967 and 1988 and a series of similar ferrets as well. One of the Soviet RORSAT's broke apart and scattered uranium across the Great Slave Lake region of Canada(1).

Fact that will probably be of interest to the crowd here: the huge radio antenna on the Stanford campus was used by the CIA in the 1960's to spy on Soviet radar! (2) In the mid-1960's, the US realized that bored Soviet operators would have their powerful new ballistic missile tracking radar (Dnestr, NATO name Hen House) track the moon. And the US tried to always have antenna pointed at the moon listening for signal reflections when the geometry of Earth and Moon were right- the one at Stanford and a Navy antenna on the East Coast were the primary stations for this, but other antennas were used as well.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954

2: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Moon-Bounce-Elint.p...

From https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/library/report/1993/nos...

> The last designation more precisely reflects the mission and operating principle of the system's satellites. The mythological Parcae were the three daughters of Zeus and the goddess Themida (the SSU satellites are launched in groups of three and fly relatively close together.) One of the daughters spins the thread of fate for each mortal (one satellite has a wide observation swath, but cannot exactly determine the coordinates of radio emitters). The second daughter measures out a length of thread for each person (when two satellites get a fix on the shipborne emitters, the position is obtained, but with some ambiguity). The third sister (Atropos - "she from whom one may not flee") cuts the measured thread of life (the third satellite, getting a fix on the emitters' signals, enables their coordinates to be determined precisely and then transmitted to Navy ships for weapons employment.

The naming, and its exposition by this Russian expert who was researching them, is oddly beautiful.

> A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of…

Yes, I feel like that’s usually how that works

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42780490

(HN convention is it's not a duplicate if it doesn't have a significant comments section).

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20duplicate%20significant... ("The issue with duplicates isn't reposts of articles as such, it's not wanting significant duplicate discussions.")

I always wonder how much (relevant) sigcom satellites can nowadays collect given the ever-growing increase in encrypted traffic, especially from the most interesting targets like foreign militaries.

Keep in mind the purpose of these satellites often isn't to intercept the communications. A major use of ELINT to to detect and locate active radars. You don't actually care what the radar is detecting or anything like that, you are trying to identify where the radar is, what kind of radar system, maybe measure the frequency and power to get a sense of its performance, etc.

And when you are trying to actually collect communications, sometimes you can get a lot just from the metadata. Even if you don't know the content of the communications, you can know that at time T, emitter A sent a message on frequency F using protocol P, lasting for duration D and transmitting B bytes. Depending on the communication mechanism, you could also determine the intended destination as well. Even if that data is perfectly encrypted, there's a lot you can do with just traffic analysis, especially when you look at patterns over time and try to correlate this with known events.

Imagine if the US tested some classified missile over the ocean, and some unknown ship nearby broadcast something, and minutes later a bunch of encrypted transmissions are detected at various places in China, places that don't usually send communications at that particular time or that particular volume. That would be a clue that those locations are related to Chinese military intelligence. Comparing exact timestamps, and looking at what happened during similar tests in the past, you can narrow that down further.

And that's just in peacetime. In an active war, this information becomes far more useful. Anything transmitting a lot of data near the frontlines is probably something worth targetting. Maybe just an information relay point, or maybe the headquarters of an armored division. You can also look at the volume of traffic and try to discern intentions. A big spike in the amount of communications in a particular region, followed by near radio silence? That's probably the start of an offensive.

Even in the 1960's most Soviet radio traffic would have been encrypted. That was why the US did things like Ivy Bells (1), because they wouldn't be encrypting domestic phone traffic. (They were able to get information on Soviet missile tests, after the fact, from that source.)

And of course, as always, the easiest way to break a code is always the 5 dollar wrench attack (something like the way the Soviets paid the Walker spy ring a few thousand dollars a month to just give them the decryption keys (2)).

Finally, there is Radio MASINT that also gathers information from radio receivers, even if they are encrypted (3).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker 3: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/21-113_MASINT_Prime...

There are now commercial signit satellites. I would assume that they can track mobile devices since that would be the main market. Since everything is encrypted now, I bet they are focused on finding locations and identities of devices.

Gross. I should run Ethernet in my house.

Ethernet cables are also an antenna

Fiber can be really dark to that sort of stuff.

and brought zs the wealth gap and the oligarchy we all love

> The Parcae project revolutionized electronic eavesdropping

And the ieee revolutionized propaganda. /s

The only identified warships, but not submarines. Warships are toys compared to submarines. And parcae is a toy compared to the hubble-style CIA satellites.

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