alt Hacker NewsWe see a few bits and pieces released to the public of optical/infrared wavelength mirrors and hubble-like hardware from IMINT systems. One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit. Or good details of other things that also fall within the RF engineering domain like synthetic aperture radar satellites to monitor naval activity, construction activity like digging bunkers, etc.
If you think the public DEM/DSM datasets like the ASTER GDER v3 or SRTM GL1 V3 are pretty good, I would bet that the DoD has things far more accurate than those as digital models of the surface and built environment of the earth's surface.
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One recent theory I heard is that Starlink works as a synthetic aperture radar. I mean surely space internet is an ok business but how profitable can it be?
An RF domain where there seems to be a dearth of information is passive radar. (Kraken passive radar was shutdown.) It makes sense that NRO satellites would be doing passive SAR.
What would be the point of going much more high tech than what's already commercially available? You can buy commercial satellite footage at a native resolution of 25cm, optionally upscaled to 15cm, for $20/km^2. [1] A bit of processing and you could certainly do high precision geographic mapping. In either case that's already enough to track individual people from space.
I suppose even higher and you could start resolving things like license plate numbers from space, but it just seems like sharply diminishing returns in general.
[1] - https://xrtechgroup.com/who-has-the-highest-resolution-satel...
High probability the NSA has satellites intercepting cellular radio traffic world wide with triangulation.
Pocket backdoors.
Honestly I'm sure if they're releasing stuff as good as 3DEP (which is extraordinary, by the way), the spooks probably have every leaf, pebble and dirt mound mapped out across the entire face of the earth.
The Soviets also had passive and active naval radar satellites during the cold war (RORSAT), which could downlink directly to cruise missiles (SS-N-19 Shipwreck)
The SAR stuff is crazy good and and scary- the publicly released stuff from drones sort of hit a ceiling in quality over a decade ago. And it seems to be rarely released at all now.
It was good enough then to track individuals movement and 'replay' where they had been over the last few days to figure out where they came from and associate them with other people/ vehicles/ rf signatures.
I think it's safe to assume that the quality kept quietly improving from orbit since then- it's just too good to publicly release / declassify.