https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/03/18/small-cheap-spy-satellites-mean-theres-no-hiding-place

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[20210320_std001]

Intelligence gathering
Small, cheap spy satellites mean there's no hiding place

Fleets of them will eavesdrop on every part of Earth's surface

Science & technologyMar 20th 2021 edition
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Mar 18th 2021

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IN THE MIDDLE of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340
foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the
Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country's westernmost
province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such
vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS)
that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on.
Some boats, however, failed to comply. There were more than 550
instances of vessels not transmitting their locations for over a day.
This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were
sneaking into Ecuador's waters to plunder its fish.

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Both local officials and China's ambassador to Ecuador denied this,
and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October,
however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia,
announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador's EEZ on 14
occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting AIS (see
map). HawkEye's satellites could pinpoint these renegades by
listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars
and radio communications.

[20210320_s]

HawkEye's satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of a
large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and launch.
HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them, in 2018. They
are now in an orbit that takes them over both of Earth's poles. This
means that, as the planet revolves beneath them, every point on its
surface can be monitored at regular intervals.

Initially, the data the satellites collected were downloaded to a
tracking station on Svalbard, a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean.
But business has since boomed. HawkEye now counts a dozen governments
among its customers, as well as private clients. The firm has
therefore recruited the services of a second ground station, in
Antarctica, and it put a second cluster into orbit on January 24th.
It plans three more such launches this year, and also intends to
widen its network of ground stations yet further.

Given this success, it is hardly surprising that at least six other
companies are operating or developing similar systems. Quilty
Analytics, a research firm in Florida, expects the number of
radio-frequency (RF) intelligence satellites of this sort in orbit to
multiply from a dozen at the beginning of January to more than 60 by
the end of next year.

Unmixed signals

RF-intelligence satellites detect where a transmission is coming from
in two ways. One, trilateration, relies on measuring minute
differences in a signal's arrival time at each member of a cluster.
The other uses the Doppler effect--the shift in a signal's frequency
if the transmitter is moving relative to the receiver. Together,
according to HawkEye, these can pinpoint a signal's source to within
500 metres of its true origin. Kleos Space, a Luxembourgeois company
that launched its first cluster in November and hopes to put two more
up later this year, says its accuracy ranges between 3,000 and 200
metres.

A cluster sweeps a band of territory 2,000km wide so, circling the
planet every 90 minutes or so, it can revisit many areas several
times a day. Moreover, unlike spy satellites fitted with optical
cameras, RF satellites can see through clouds. Their receivers are
not sensitive enough to detect standard mobile phones. But they can
pick up satellite phones, walkie-talkies and all manner of radar.
And, while vessels can and do illicitly disable their AIS, switching
off their communications gear and the radar they use for navigation
and collision-avoidance is another matter entirely. "Even pirates
don't turn those things off," says John Beckner, boss of Horizon
Technologies, a British firm that plans its first launch in August.

RF data are also cheap to collect. Satellites fitted with robotic
high-resolution cameras are costly. Flying microwave ovens that
capture and timestamp radio signals are not. Horizon says that
building, insuring and launching its August mission should cost no
more than about $1.4m.

America's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of that
country's numerous spying operations, is a big user of RF
intelligence. It employs HawkEye's data to find guerrilla camps and
mobile missile-launchers, and to track both conventional warships and
unconventional ones, like the weaponised speedboats sometimes
deployed by Iran. Robert Cardillo, a former director of the agency
who now advises HawkEye, says dozens of navies, Russia's included,
spoof AIS signals to make warships appear to be in places which they
are not. RF intelligence is not fooled by this. Mr Cardillo says,
too, that the tininess of RF satellites makes them hard for an enemy
to destroy.

Beside matters military, the NGA also uses RF data to unearth illicit
economic activity--of which unauthorised fishing is merely one
instance. Outright piracy is another. And the technique also works on
land. In 2019, for example, it led to the discovery of an illegal
gold mine being run by a Chinese company in a jungle in Gabon. And in
2020 the managers of Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic
of Congo began using HawkEye data to spot elephant poachers and
dispatch rangers to deal with them.

There are commercial uses, too. Andy Bowyer, Kleos's boss, reports
interest among telecoms firms keen to locate rogue transmitters, such
as unlicensed ham radios, that are operating within their domains.
Regulators, meanwhile, would like the firm to create "heat maps" of
shifting patterns of legitimate transmissions. These would help them
select sites for mobile-phone towers and also give them a better idea
of the value in particular places of licences to use parts of the
radio spectrum that are going up for auction. Some charities, too,
have an interest in Kleos's data. RF information can, for example,
flag up routes taken by migrants likely to need food and other aid.

Declustering

Using satellite clusters to gather RF intelligence is clever. But
engineers at Unseenlabs, a firm in Rennes, France, reckon it is
already outdated. At the moment, Unseen has three satellites in orbit
and sells data to about ten navies, including France's, as well as to
maritime insurers and a handful of big defence contractors. But its
satellites operate independently, rather than as a cluster, for
Unseenlabs' engineers have devised a detection system, which they
claim is accurate to within 5,000 metres, that requires but a single
satellite.

How this system works remains a secret--and one that, according to
Clement Galic, Unseenlabs' boss, is protected by the French state.
After several attempts were made to steal it, he says, the defence
ministry's Directorate General of Armaments offered its assistance in
defending the details from cybertheft.

Secret or not, though, Unseenlabs may soon have competitors in the
single-satellite-RF-intelligence market, for Horizon, too, says that
it has worked out how to perform the trick--a claim backed up by the
fact that its launch in August will loft but a single device. Shortly
after it filed an application for a patent in America on the wizardry
involved, the government there classified it. Even so, Mr Beckner
drops a hint. The method involves assessing differences in the angles
at which a target's signals arrive during the satellite's arc across
the sky. Horizon says its system will be accurate to within 3,000
metres. By the middle of next year, it, too, plans to operate three
satellites in different orbits--enough to scan most of the planet
every two hours or so.

Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse
"fingerprints" of the world's vessels, for the tiny differences in
componentry that exist even between examples of the same make and
model of equipment mean that signals can often be linked to a
specific device. It will thus be able to determine not merely that a
vessel of some sort is in a certain place, but which vessel it is,
and where else it has been.

Unseenlabs, for its part, has already catalogued the radar
fingerprints of many thousands of vessels, several hundred of which
have, subsequent to the events of last summer, spent time in the
Galapagos EEZ with their AIS beacons switched off. It remains to be
seen what Ecuador's authorities will do with that information. But no
one can say they weren't told.#

Correction (March 18th 2021): An earlier version of this story
referred to HawkEye's satellites as being cubesats, about the size of
a shoebox. In fact they are smallsats, about the size of a microwave
oven.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Ears in the sky"

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