Security News > 2020 > October > Friday Squid Blogging: Saving the Humboldt Squid

For anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics who can also thibk laterally would know that, that very hexagonal flight path is not in any way for "Optical surveillance" As the "Live video feed" comment claimed, it does not align with any geographic or infrastructure or other man made structural features.

For people in the open the vertical pattern is thus the lowest of loss paths the "Line of sight path" where one tenth of a watt is enough to reach a very simple anntena five hundred miles away on the space station with good enough intelligibility for a voice channel.

At radio frequencies you can "See" almost unobstructed signals in the nanowatt range at 20,000ft which alows not just very easy and quite precise direction finding(DF) but with appropriate IQ receivers the direction and entire "Radioband" to be downconverted to "Baseband" and stored in digital form for later very indepth analysis or sent via broadband satellite links to a remote ground station for near real time analysis.

Whilst not entirely necessary having a grid aligned very precise flight path would ease the analysis quite significantly, especially if in "Seek mode" as part of a "Find Fix Finish" mission.

So hoovering up every cellphone identification could be done passively in just a very few circuits of such a flight path.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/10/friday-squid-blogging-saving-the-humboldt-squid.html