> Incredible.

Incredibly dystopian. Since at least nine years ago, there hasn't a single place on the surface of the planet where you had any total and absolute privacy.

Its been that way since probably the 1960s and has yet to materially impact your life I imagine.

Bold claims require bold backing.

It's also in the country's favor to overclaim their capabilities.

It may have materially impacted many people’s lives by allowing western governments the required intel to sabotage WMD programs of governments who believe in first strike attacks.

I am generally pro-situational-awareness of things in public spaces.

Fair point, its hard to quantify the number of events that didn't happen because of intervention.

"who believe in first strike attacks"

Which don't exist.

In the 1960s, high resolution images were definitely possible (and taken daily from Russian territories), but only when the plane was overhead.

Cameras are so cheap now, and prices will keep falling, that I think in the future pretty much everything will be filmed.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. But it is inevitable, and we need to adjust to that reality.

They are already flying over some big cities and constantly capturing everything in car-level resolution, then when a "crime" happens they can roll the tape back and see the where the car came from.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky-2306

"Persistent Surveillance System" google blackholed of course

This is why everyone should vinyl wrap their cars. Then if anything happens, just peel it off.

A big point from the podcast isn't that the goal is to identify you or your car later as you might think. It's that they can "rewind" the footage and trace where the offender came from and show up at their doorsteps within minutes/hours. It's as much about traceability as identification. A vinyl wrap won't help that.

Also why you should wear a ski mask in every bank, in case “something happens”

Perhaps the fact that it all of a sudden became acceptable (to put it mildly) to cover the lower half of one's face has some benefits after all.

After all, who could object to a safety measure?

Yep, a video about it capturing a murder (blurry video from 7 years ago I'm sure it's even better today):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA

Unless they are using actual film, calling it filmed is not the correct term here. Everything will be recorded. Everything will be imaged. But hardly anything, if at all, space based will be filmed as it is impossible to do in real time.

David Brin has idea after thinking about future making surveillanace unavoidable. The solution is that everybody can spy on everybody else. The problem is that the government and corporations can spy on us, but are immune. I'm not sure if he means it as blueprint or inevitability with the price dropping.

I think he is wrong that everybody spying will help, when everybody discussing online doesn't. But it is useful to think about what world will be like when everybody can surveil.

Cameras are already cheap enough that even fairly poor people can afford 24/7 cameras in and outside their home.

The linked article shows they’re not wholly immune. Some publicly available technologies can be quite powerful as Bellingcat demonstrates.

It’s certainly an asymmetrical field but, especially moving forward, I doubt it will be an entirely one-way street.

The #MeToo movement made me realise that we will probably choose constant surveillance for our own protection, rather than have it imposed on us by some Orwellian government.

Can you elaborate on what this has to do with the #MeToo movement?

The fact that verbal allegations of events decades ago were enough to sink multiple people’s lives.

Hence, people will choose to record every minute of their lives out of fear of something similar happening to them.

The “I should be able to personally launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without being detected” take isn’t one I expected to see today! Less facetiously, this is like complaining you don’t have privacy when turning on your house lights at night because optical satellites can see that there is light. It’s a little silly and honestly you don’t do any privacy causes any favors with this sort of unwarranted hyperbole.

> this is like complaining you don’t have privacy when turning on your house lights at night because optical satellites can see that there is light.

Which is also concerning if the consequence of that mere-observation becomes something like "Oh, the house of Citizen #DYSTO-48195812 had its lights on during interval X-Y."

"Privacy" isn't about the raw mechanics of observation, it's about capabilities and powers and how those might be abused by other humans.

> intercontinental ballistic missiles

Well, if allll someone needs is to detect giant missiles roaring into the edge of space on a pillar of fire, then we should be ultra-suspicious if they start building a system which goes beyond that into, say, following around the hot-spots of individual human heads.

Agreed. I often waffle about whether to blind a camera--not based on where it is pointing but based on where I think the data is going.

If you want to be able to see in front of your business without going outside, fine.

If you want to feed that data into a citywide network which the police can query to see who was where at which time, less fine.

> If you want to feed that data into a citywide network which the police can query to see who was where at which time, less fine.

This is pretty much Ring’s secondary purpose, at least as Amazon continues to loosen their data privacy when it comes to LEO requests.

> Well, if allll someone needs is to detect giant missiles roaring into the edge of space on a pillar of fire, then we should be ultra-suspicious if they start building a system which goes beyond that into, say, following around the hot-spots of individual human heads.

I think you missed another possibility: that they make your head as hot as giant missile. Constant vigilance!

Hence the "tin"-foil hat: Reflective heatsink.

Not sure how people wanting some privacy means that someone

"should be able to personally launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without being detected"?!

They’re specifically complaining about their loss of privacy stemming from an infrared satellite system designed to detect missile launches.

Drops in a bucket

If it can invade privacy that badly, then detecting missile launches was definitely not the guiding design goal.

If you are not criminal you have nothing to hide. Right?

Hide my infrared signature created from my missile launches? This second amendment thing has gone too far…

This is basically what the second amendment was intended for. It starts with a bit about militias and securing the state; the intention is clearly that we should be able to buy weapons of war. Nowadays that includes missiles.

How are you going to secure a free state with a rifle? Any reasonable adversary to the US would have jets and stuff. We should at least be able to get together and buy a neighborhood SAM site.

These HOAs are getting out of control!

Recreational PATRIOT batteries.

This is benign compared to ubiquitous camera phones with unbelievable image resolution and location data, being uploaded for "free" to services with cutting-edge facial recognition capabilities, among others.

Only 9 years? Try 22 years. 9/11 changed the game. PATRIOT Act in the USA is still in effect. FISA courts rubber stamping any search order in the name of “national security”.

The idea of privacy disappeared a long time ago. FB/Cambridge Analytica/IG/TT/SC is just the surface.

There are plenty of places. Under a forest canopy. Underground, under a large overhang from a cliff. And those are just the types of privacy you don't create for yourself, or you don't naturally get through large structures.

They aren't necessarily convenient places. But it's not like you can't find any privacy privacy just because there cameras up high pointing down. It's actually probably far less intrusive and privacy destroying than the electronic device you likely carry everywhere with you that reports you location and could (if it doesn't already) keep track of when it can't report and relay it when it can again.

If you think the trade-offs of that make it worthwhile most the time, consider that there may be trade-offs here that are positive that you are discounting.

How about: walkie-talkie with decent crypto?

Suppose we design walkie talkies such that two or more units can be hooked up together in a daisy chain. While the devices are daisy chained, a button can be pressed on the head walkie talkie which will generate a random symmetric key, like 256 bit AES or whatever. This is sent over the daisy-chained bus to all the others. They flash an LED or something to indicate they accepted the key. After that they can be split up and will all use that key.

Everyone has a walkie-talkie with decent crypto in their pocket already. The problem is portable radios have limited transmission range, so you'd need some sort of a ... maybe network of towers that could pick up and re-broadcast the signal? Hmm.

This satellite can find walkie-talkies

Says a thing or two about our medias that it's never mentioned.

What purpose does the highly elliptical orbits provide that a more circular orbit doesn't? Does it allow higher resolution when it swings in closer, and that the higher orbit is over parts of the globe of little interest?

Historically, it's for dwelling over the interesting long side and rushing past the uninteresting short side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit

I think it's usually the opposite. The satellite spends much more time observing interesting stuff in the higher part of the orbit and much less time zipping by uninteresting stuff in the lower part.

that does make sense. US targets of interests do tend to be northern hemisphere oriented.

Probably higher resolution over more desirable areas as well as more stable orbits.

Look at where the sats dwell, mostly over the North Pole. Now think about the great circle routes between the USA and the USSR.

There are hundreds if not thousands of those up in the space. You can even rent one yourself as a civilian (order one to point the camera/SAR at a specific location).

Why was it so difficult to determine the MH370 flight path then?

The satellites were all too busy monitoring HN users.

Judging from this thread, yes.

I have direct experience being tracked by this technology. With photo evidence of a utility he360 truck in the field after several loop backs on the road. The technology can be used to swarm a target of interest. It is my opinion from experience all skilled ethical hackers and non ethical hackers are tracked. I say this knowing my surveillance is about to be doubled down now. Yay.

Edit: to their defense… my laptop was compromised at the time due to a Realtek chip supply chain hack that was persistent. The exploit was associated with “redgobot”.

Frequencies are combined to create unique footprints of any given target… ie car satellite or mobile connections, radio stations, devices, chips in head… you know the usual.

Get used to it, my friend. There’s a reason the TI phenomenon is growing, and it isn’t just baseless paranoia.

I do not identify as a TI btw. I identify as the average Joe American citizen that may or may not be aware of the undercurrent that defines their existence.

Because who is looking in the middle of the Indian Ocean at commercial airliners. There’s far more important targets and areas for these systems to focus on

Yes indeed. You can see for example here what kind of lead times are we talking about: https://sar.iceye.com/5.0/productguide/ordering/

Any serious military is tracking all known imaging/SAR satellites and uses their fly-by times (which are entirely predictable), and uses this information for moving stuff covertly. I.e. you want to be out in the open in Area 51 testing a new RQ-180 derivative only when no one can be looking at you right now.

Also, there are global ADS-B satellite relays, and frankly I don't know why this data wasn't logged - it must be explained somewhere. There's a guy on Twitter who captures those on a custom antenna + BladeRF setups (this data is plugged into adsbexchange for oceanic routes coverage). AIS relies even more on satellite relays, as the curvature of the planet limits signal propagation much more than for airplanes. What you see on any AIS website is mostly from a satellite.

Someone disabled the transponder before they turned off into the ocean is why.

Apparently the ADS-B transponder on MH370 was received but stopped suddenly.

Interestingly there are 7 hours of logged Inmarsat Classic Aero mobile handshake data from (IIRC) the "smart engine" telemetry.

The logged transmission round trip GroundStation -> Sat -> Aircraft -> Sat -> GroundStation provided an non unique "arc of travel" across the globe that was used by Australia to narrow the search area to a truckload of ocean floor that was substantially smaller than the entire planet.

The archived versions of the logs saved by the Malaysian gov are:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304040818/http://www.dca.go...

Alternating sat routing would have given a more definitive fix and removed the ambiguity.

Many have lost trust in the WSPR data and Inmarsat pings. (Example: https://twitter.com/JustXAshton/status/1699535126663688544)

Your source conveniently omits weird data in the logs that start at 18:39:55UTC (a bunch of zeros, like something errored out).

Satellite pings switch to IOR at 15:59UTC and never change back to POR despite the plane flying east towards it. Going east until 17:21 UTC the plane should have pinged POR but doesn't

That's the archive.org mirror of the openly declared edited from raw logs version released by Malaysia .. so not "my source" which, back in the day, were the raw logs from ground stations.

The specific issue I have with hyper focused attention on these specific logs and hoorah about "weird data" is that I haven't seen much in the way of properly comparative analysis of a super set of broad fleet Inmarsat logs ... these in general are the trailing edge of quality data, riddled with nuls, semi handshakes, line noise, etc.

Transponders are for positioning, black boxes for logging important flight data, diagnostic interfaces for mechanics in hangers ... and component level Inmarsat .. pretty much not more than a curiousity of "because we can" that's occasionally useful when a properly formed messages truly indicates an inflight issue.

Ping routing and ping times were never meant to be consistent nor used for gross "half-LORAN" positioning .. this is all happenstance after event signal engineering hack work.

Maybe there was much less of this in 2014?

No satellite was pointed at the path when MH370 was flying.

So it isn't actually true that it is "constantly scanning every inch of the entire globe with IR cameras with missile/plane/boat/person(?) level resolution" then, or it is true and they know exactly where the plane went down they just don't tell anyone about it for some reason. Its either or.

Every inch of the globe is imaged every N hours, by satellites making continuous observations. Most of the earth is not under sensor coverage at any particular instant. Both are true.

Constantly scanning != Constantly recording and storing in perpetuity.

I think "repeatedly scanning" would be a better phrase.

Some say otherwise. I don't know what to make of it, but here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwaC4AXFqRI

Assuming it was monitored by a classified system, would they release the information? Recall rumored IUSS role during the Titan implosion situation and consider Malaysia's position, geographically and geopolitically, between the US and China in the context of sharing monitoring capabilities. If those capabilities even exist.

bingo. it either landed somewhere secretly or crashed. In both situation there was nothing aboard, secret cargo or important politicians, that would justify unveiling of their capabilities to track everything everywhere at all times.

SBIRS is the upgrade, previously it was DSP, since the 70s.

https://missilethreat.csis.org/defsys/dsp/

So every plane, train and automobile that went missing in the past 9 years did so without this system offering help?

When have trains gone missing?

There is a movie called closely watched trains which is humorous but not relevant.

It sounded nice

Well….

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2675415775

Perhaps they went missing when it was cloudy?

From the article: "trained to locate the sources of electromagnetic emissions with wavelengths ranging from roughly 2 meters down to 2 centimeters"

These types of signals wouldn't be obscured by clouds, presumably.

wouldn't some IR go through clouds? I thought that was the point of using IR.

That being said, the more important question is, how's the temporal resolution.

Yes. These systems are for control, not general purpose law enforcement.

Not yet

These systems are generally never used to solve low-level crimes. When they are, parallel-construction is used to avoid publicizing their existence. These systems are reserved for direct threats to national interests.

“…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

I think they thought about it and decided they should.

Do you have a link to something discussion the resolutions you mentioned? The video didn't seem to mention them when I watch, unless I missed it?

At the end of this video: "We never forget who we're working for."

If you have to put this disclaimer into your work, we already have a problem.

This is why I've said from the beginning that we absolutely know who hit Nordstream. We know the boat, and we probably know the operators by correlating the boat movement with communications records and financial surveillance.

Whoever they were, they're enough on our side(i.e. the west) that we chose not to name and shame them.

My guess is a Ukraine NGO but it could have been anyone with a couple hundred thousand dollars given the equipment required to accurately plant the explosives is so common now.

Wait until someone realizes what Starlink with cameras could do.

I mean, Planet's been doing that since before Starlink had a constellation, and what it can do is "image every inch of the globe at least once each day".

https://www.planet.com/

> Incredible.

Incredibly worrying, as a member of a nation state with conflicting interests with the USA.