GOV/MIL With New Mini-Satellites, Special Ops Takes Its Manhunts Into Space

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/special-ops-mini-sats-manhunts/

With New Mini-Satellites, Special Ops Takes Its Manhunts Into Space
BY NOAH SHACHTMAN05.21.136:30 AM
FOLLOW @DANGERROOM

A U.S. soldier participates in a night-raid training mission during Emerald Warrior 2012, an exercise put together by U.S. Special Operations Command. Photo: USAF
Updated 8:05 a.m.

In September, the U.S. government will fire into orbit a two-stage rocket from a Virginia launchpad. Officially, the mission is a scientific one, designed to improve America’s ability to send small satellites into space quickly and cheaply. But the launch will also have a second purpose: to help the elite forces of U.S. Special Operations Command hunt down people considered to be dangerous to the United States and its interests.

For years, special operators have used tiny “tags” to clandestinely mark their prey — and satellites to relay information from those beacons. But there are areas of the world where the satellite coverage is thin, and there aren’t enough cell towers to provide an alternative. That’s why SOCOM is putting eight miniature communications satellites, each about the size of a water jug, on top of the Minotaur rocket that’s getting ready to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. They’ll sit more than 300 miles above the earth and provide a new way for the beacons to call back to their masters.

The officers in charge of SOCOM say their forces will soon do less manhunting, and more training of foreign troops. Perhaps so. But with senior Pentagon officials predicting “at least another 10 to 20 years” of combat with al-Qaida, these special operations forces will continue with their mission of “tagging, tracking, and locating” suspected militants. In this fiscal year alone, SOCOM will spend $88 million on new tagging gear.

This isn’t SOCOM’s first mini-satellite. In December of 2010, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket put into orbit a $25,000 special operations spacecraft small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. The satellite stayed more than 170 miles up for about a month. But that first flight was mostly a proof of concept that something so cheap and small could have any military value at all. (“Just to test the theory that we could do it,” Douglas Richardson, SOCOM’s executive in charge of Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Exploitation Technologies, explained in 2011.)

The Operationally Responsive Space-3 mission (.pptx) will carry eight satellites for SOCOM (plus another 20 for other government agencies). This array of configurable “cubesats” is designed to stay aloft for three years or more. Yes, it will serve as further research project. But “operators are going to use it,” Richardson promised an industry conference in Tampa last week. His presentation showed a cubesat under the heading “tagging, tracking, and locating.”

Special operators are already using a dizzying panoply of equipment in order to perform “TTL,” as it’s called within the military. Last fiscal year, SOCOM put into the field 7,000 TTL kits, Jennifer Powers, the project manager in charge of tags, tells Danger Room. Those kits are individually tailored to the environment – jungle or desert, urban or rural — and can be filled with a mix of 190 different pieces of gear. While SOCOM funds mid-term research to make the beacons more compact and less power-hungry, new gear can also be fielded in as little as three days.

A slide on TTL (tagging, tracking, and locating) technology presented at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference. Photo: SOCOM
Some of the beacons use infrared flashes to signal their location; in 2009, al-Qaida propagandists claimed they found them all over villages that had been hit with U.S. drone strikes. Others are implanted into seemingly-innocent commercial electronics. Under “TTL examples,” Richardson’s presentation (.pdf) showed pictures of a cell phone and a key fob, like the kind used to open a car. Still other tags are affixed to cars or people, and transmit their whereabouts using satellite or CDMA, GPRS, and other cellular networks.

Until 2009, the market for these tags was dominated by the secretive, Virginia-headuqartered Blackbird Technologies, Inc., which counts a former chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center as a executive. That year, the firm won a contract from the Navy for up to $450 million in TTL equipment.

But since then, SOCOM has decided to introduce some competition into the tagging market. (Blackbird, meanwhile, saw one of its employees fall victim to a gruesome murder-suicide last fall.) Cobham Plc, a British firm, is now one of several firms supplying American special operators with TTL gear.

Cobham claims its UniTrac system can perform “tracking and command/control of over 70 different tracking devices and communications networks.” The 2.5-inch GPS tags themselves weigh about 2.5 ounces and can send out SMS messages when someone walks or drives nearby. ”These solutions give valuable intelligence as to the ‘pattern of life’ of subjects, as well as being used for live tracking, location and apprehension of criminals,” the company promises in an online brochure.

TTL also means keeping tabs on targets’ data, in addition to the people themselves. So Virginia-based EWA Government Solutions, Inc. not only markets a line of radio frequency tags for “High-Value Target Tagging Missions” and “Intelligence Operations.” (.pdf) The firm also sells a “Black Hole” wi-fi intercept system (.pdf), which is allegedly able to crack the encryption keys protecting 802.11 networks, and suck up all the traffic being communicated therein.

That gives operators “the ability to filter, display, and reconstruct e-mail messages (POP3, SMTP, IMAP), instant messaging (Yahoo, ICQ, AOL, MSM), or web page (HTTP) activity,” EWA asserts. “A simple double-click will reconstruct e-mail messages, web pages, and instant message conversations.”

EWA says its technology is being used in “real-world operations with various Department of Defense and national- level agencies.” The company won’t say which agencies or which divisions of the Pentagon, exactly, have used their technologies. But a look in a federal purchasing database shows that the company has signed multi-million dollar contracts in recent years with the Army, Navy, and, of course, U.S. Special Operations Command.

The commandos were already using all the gear they could in order to zero in on their targets. Come September, they’ll have even more, orbiting at 300 miles up.

So the microtagging "spray" that LA uses may be real not phantasy...

Hmmm i'm going to have to re-eval my understanding of the tech available insofaras radiating data is concerned....

night driver said:

So the microtagging "spray" that LA uses may be real not phantasy...

Hmmm i'm going to have to re-eval my understanding of the tech available insofaras radiating data is concerned....

Click to expand...

If you have something in question, some time in a microwave should EMP it enough to kill it. You might want to buy an RF Field Strength meter to "sniff around" to see if something is emitting should you feel concern about possibly having been tagged.

Right now I would think that Iranian nuclear scientists might wish to be careful about picking up thumbdrives and such. They got burned by Stutznet being introduced into their lab systems by pre-infected thumbdrives. Now they might have their locations pinpointed by tagged thumbdrives serving as location beacons.

And I'll bet that there are already existing satellites that can track these things, just not enough to provide the sort of coverage thus article describes. The description and purpose of them sounds like something described as NSA signal intercept "beachballs" in a book from the 1980s about electronic intelligence.

Interesting that such technology would be under control of an operational command these days instead of at a higher level like NSA. Wonder what the NSA gang is using for such missions these days. That might be the really interesting info to find out.

WW

night driver said:

So the microtagging "spray" that LA uses may be real not phantasy...

Hmmm i'm going to have to re-eval my understanding of the tech available insofaras radiating data is concerned....

Click to expand...

Semiconductor chips can pack a lot of technology in a couple square milimeters, even a passive device not needing internal power would be far too big as a spray. Antennas are a problem unless they are using sub-milimeter wavelengths, even so there are other issues. RF radiation is limits are a problem. What else is there? Optical (light) communications? a device made entirely optical, but visible from space? Encoded signal on a device buried by a shovel of dirt would make it useless.

Naw not buy it.

As far as the micro-sats they have been well proven and utilized by universities for several years for a whole host of science experiments. Sensors, cameras and a smart phone and what more do you need?

night driver said:

So the microtagging "spray" that LA uses may be real not phantasy...

Hmmm i'm going to have to re-eval my understanding of the tech available insofaras radiating data is concerned....

Click to expand...

Double_A said:

Semiconductor chips can pack a lot of technology in a couple square milimeters, even a passive device not needing internal power would be far too big as a spray. Antennas are a problem unless they are using sub-milimeter wavelengths, even so there are other issues. RF radiation is limits are a problem. What else is there? Optical (light) communications? a device made entirely optical, but visible from space? Encoded signal on a device buried by a shovel of dirt would make it useless.

Naw not buy it.

As far as the micro-sats they have been well proven and utilized by universities for several years for a whole host of science experiments. Sensors, cameras and a smart phone and what more do you need?

Click to expand...

You guys might want to check this tech out.....

Dust Networks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Networks

Dust Networks, Inc. is a company specializing in the design and manufacture of wireless sensor networks for industrial applications including process monitoring, condition monitoring, asset management, Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) monitoring and power management. They are headquartered in Hayward, California.

Dust Networks works with industry and standards groups such as WirelessHART, IETF, ISA, and WINA to help drive the adoption of interoperable wireless sensor networking products.

Click to expand...

Company history

In 1997, Kristofer S. J. Pister, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, conceived of and started the Smart Dust project with DARPA funding.

Smart Dust

The Smart Dust project[1] attempted to demonstrate that a complete sensor/communication system could be made of sensors one cubic millimeter in size. This involved advances in miniaturization, integration, and energy management. The project focus was independent of any particular sensor, and looked at both commercial and military applications including:

Defense-related sensor networks such as battlefield surveillance, treaty monitoring, transportation monitoring, and scud hunting.
Virtual keyboard sensors: by attaching miniature remotes on each fingernail, accelerometers could then sense the orientation and motion of each fingertip, and communicate this data to a computer in a wristwatch.
Inventory control: by placing miniature sensors on each object in the inventory system (product package, carton, pallet, truck warehouse, internet), each component could "talk" to the next component in the system. This evolved into today's RFID inventory control systems.
Product quality monitoring: temperature and humidity monitoring of perishables such as meat, produce, and dairy.
Impact, vibration and temperature monitoring of consumer electronics, for failure analysis and diagnostic information, e.g. monitoring the vibration of bearings to detect frequency signatures that may indicate imminent failure.

Technology

Wireless sensor networks attempt to increase transmission reliability and quickly adapt should the transmission fail and automatically route around failed links. This requires embedded networking intelligence that establishes, maintains and utilizes redundant multi-hop routing from source to destination.

Dust implements full-mesh networks, sometimes referred to as ‘mesh-to-the-edge’, which provides redundant routing to the edge of the network. In a full-mesh network every device has the same routing capabilities and is able to ‘decide’ where it belongs in the routing structure based on what other nodes it can communicate with, its proximity to the network gateway, and its traffic load. This allows for self-forming and self-healing. The multi-chip modules used to drive these networks are divided into 'gateways' and 'motes' (or mote modules). Gateways then tie back into larger networks used to make decisions within large industrial plants (oil refineries, chemical plants, produce facilities, etc.).

The company has evolved from using a proprietary protocol called TSMP (Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol), to Wireless HART to launching an Internet Protocol-based initiative, in support of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), focused on the use of IP networking in urban infrastructure, building automation, utility metering, and other wireless sensor networking applications.

Click to expand...

The project led to the founding of Dust Networks, to provide commercial applications of the above.

Click to expand...

But Carl we know that a naked chip is just that, there are interconnects to be made, packaging to protect it, some sort of lead frame to make electrical connection.

hooking up a battery? connecting the output, etc

Nice tie in with LTC, their tech note is where the real info lies and reminds me about energy harvesting concept no battery needed

oh and BTW mesh networks is something we need to bone-up on. Self-organizing wifi networks, an interesting idea where each device can become a node to a bigger network, conceivably replacing much of the current internet by becoming the internet.


ETA: this white paper is interesting http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/white-paper/Analysis_Channel-Specific Wireless Sensor Network Path.pdf

and this one is valuable as well http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/white-paper/wp001f.pdf

All you need is a little bit of signal that's in range of a bigger transciever to hit something else farther away. They're making things now that look like rocks - what better to hide in places like A'stan than something that looks like a rock?
==========================

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/spy-rock/

This Rock Could Spy on You for Decades
BY NOAH SHACHTMAN
05.29.12 4:00 AM
FOLLOW @DANGERROOM



A Lockheed Martin "unattended ground sensor," or UGS, disguised as a rock.
Photo: Lockheed Martin

America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back to a remote headquarters. Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors’ operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed.

Traditionally, when armies clash, they leave behind a horrific legacy: leftover mines which can blow civilians apart long after the shooting war is over. These “unattended ground sensors,” or UGSs, won’t do that kind of damage. But they could give the Pentagon an enduring ability to monitor a one-time battlefield long, long after regular American forces are supposed to have returned home.

“Were going to leave behind a lot of special operators in Afghanistan. And they need the kind of capability that’s easy to put out so they can monitor a village without a lot of overt U.S.-made material on pathways and roadways,” says Matt Plyburn, an executive at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

The U.S. military has used unattended ground sensors in one form or another since 1966, when American forces dropped acoustic monitors on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Tens of thousands of UGSs have been emplaced around Afghanistan and Iraq, forming electronic perimeters around combat outposts and keeping tabs on remote locations. It’s a way to monitor the largest possible area with the smallest number of troops.

“You use them to cover up your dead space — the areas you’re concerned about but can’t cover with other ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] assets,” says Lt. Col. Matt Russell, an Army program manager overseeing the deployment of unattended sensors.

But earlier UGSs — even ones of the recent past — were relatively large and clunky, prone to false alarms, and had lifespans measurable in days or weeks. “What we found in the field was significant under-usage,” Russell tells Danger Room. Plans to incorporate them into every combat brigade fizzled as the Army’s proposed $200 billion revamp, Future Combat Systems, went south.

The new models are dramatically smaller and consume far less power, enabling them to operate for months — maybe even years — at a time with only the slimmest chance of being detected. Lockheed calls them “field and forget” systems for “persistent surveillance.”

And they won’t just be used overseas. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. Defense contractors believe one of the biggest markets for the next generation of the sensors will be here at home.

“They could be used for border security or even around corporate headquarters,” Plyburn tells Danger Room.

In early 2011, commanders in Afghanistan issued an “urgent operational needs statement” for better sensors. In response, the Army shipped a new line of about 1,500 “expendable” UGSs to the warzone. The size of a few stacked hockey pucks with a four-inch antenna, these sensors are easily hidden, and can “pick up wheels or footprints” for up to three months at a time, Russell says. It’s a perfect surveillance tool for the remote valleys of eastern Afghanistan.

Soon, when one of the sensors picks up a signal, it’ll queue a spy blimp to focus in on the spot. “That’s a capability coming to a theater near you soon,” he adds.

Even more sophisticated are the UGSs being tested northeast of Norfolk, Virginia, at a Lockheed proving ground. Arrays of up to 50 palm-sized acoustic and seismic sensors form a mesh network. When one sensor detects a person or a vehicle passing by, it uses unlicensed radio frequency bands to pass an alert from one node to the next. The alert finally hits a communications gateway, which can send the signal via satellite, tactical radio network, or Wi-Fi to a command and control center. That signal can tip off additional sensors — or it can send a Twitter-like message to an intelligence officer’s phone or tablet.

When they’re not picking up signals or passing along messages, the sensors are all-but-shut-down, barely consuming any power. That allows them to last for weeks, buried underground. Or the sensors can be encased in hollow “rocks” equipped with miniature solar panels. A quick recharge from the sun will allow the sensor to “get through the night anywhere on Earth that U.S. forces operate,” says Plyburn.

Plyburn claims that the sensor’s battery, about the size of a postage stamp, has been able to go through 80,000 recharges, compared to a few hundred cycles for a typical lithium-ion battery. Even if he’s off by a factor of 10, the sensor’s battery could keep the machine operational for nearly twenty-two years.

Russell is skeptical of these assertions of longevity. “I’m sure there are a lot of claims by contractors,” he says. “My experience is: the longer the lifespan, the bigger the battery.”

Nor does Lockheed currently have a contract with Defense Department to mass-produce the sensors. But Plyburn says there has been interest around the armed forces, especially since the system is relatively cheap. Plyburn says each sensor could cost as little as $1,000 each — practically expendable for a military paying $80,000 for a single guided artillery round.

Lockheed isn’t the only company claiming that its sensors can operate for years on end. U.S. Special Operations Command has handed out at least $12 million in UGS contracts to tiny Camgian Microsystems, based out of Starksville, Mississippi. Company CEO Gary Butler, who spent years developing ultra-low power integrated circuits for Darpa, was awarded in March a patent for such a next-gen unattended sensor suite.

Rather than relaying alerts from node to node, each of Butler’s sensors is designed to send signals directly to a satellite — speeding up notifications, and cutting down on power consumed. Rather than a simple acoustic or seismic detector, the sensor relies a steerable, phased-array radar and moving-target indicator algorithms. That could give it a much greater ability to detect people and vehicles on the run. High-powered solar cells provide will enable up to “500,000 recharge cycles” could give the sensor a “10-20 year life,” according to the patent.

Butler won’t say how U.S. special operators are using his research, if at all. But when I ask him about the possibility of leaving UGS networks behind after American troops have officially left, Butler calls that “plausible. Very Plausible.”

Camgian’s patent claims that the sensor’s ease-of-use and small size means it “is easily emplaced in difficult areas, using airborne assets such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.” Edward Carapezza, who has been overseeing UGS research for more than two decades, says drones are already dropping unattended sensors into hostile locations.

“In certain areas, we certainly are using unmanned vehicles and unattended sensors together,” says Carapezza, who now works at the defense contractor General Atomics. He declined to name where these operations were being conducted. He simply gave the rationale for the missions. “Instead of sending patrols of our guys in, we send in drones and unattended sensors — dropping arrays, locating bad guys, and then putting weapons on target.”

The “MicroObserver” UGS from defense contractor Textron has been in the field since 2008. The U.S. Army is currently using the sensors in Afghanistan. “Another customer — we’re not allowed to say who or where — used it as part of a comprehensive border security program in a Middle Eastern country,” says Patty Shafer, a Textron executive.

Textron’s seismic sensors come in two varieties. The smaller, three inch-long model, weighing 1.4 pounds, will last about a month. The bigger system, a 4.4 pound spike, can be buried in the ground and gather intelligence for more than two years. It can detect and characterize people from 100 meters away, and vehicles from three times that distance, Shafer says. A conformal antenna allows it to communicate with a gateway five kilometers away.

Northrop Grumman employs a family of sensors for its Scorpion surveillance network.

“Seismic sensors work well detecting vehicles on bumpy roads, but lose range as the road becomes smoother, or the vehicle lighter. Typically, magnetic sensors sense only large vehicles at fairly short distances. The range of acoustic sensors depends upon environmental conditions such as humidity and surroundings. Most sense engine exhaust noise or other periodic pulse trains and measure the period to determine numbers of cylinders and classify the source,” explains a Northrop presentation to an academic conference on unattended sensors.

The Army has purchased over a thousand of the original versions, with an average of four sensors, each. The vast majority have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 20 Scorpion II systems were recently bought by the Army Research Lab. The sensors can today spot people from 800 meters away, and vehicles from 2,100 meters. The sensors’ batteries wear out after a month.

These might have been eye-popping results, not long ago. But the U.S. military now has plans to keep its network of tiny, hidden spies going for much longer than that.

Big advancement when you compare this with the sensors used on the Ho Chi Minh Trail back in the day.

HC...........I agree, planted many a Minnie & Maggie in my time there.

Yep LOTS of advances, I've seen these advances in al areas, conventional semiconductor manufacturing and in MEMS devices and in the development of the critical MESH networking software using low power (which is critical) to hop about and communicate which is really what is equally critical a sensor is not all that valuable for working in real time if it cannot communicate it's information. I would strongly encourage members here who are interested to read the two white papers I cited in my post above.

I also want to add my comments (and doubts) were in reference to ND's comment about these sensor/communications modules being the physical size of dust that could be sprayed about, that is what is not here at this time. If and when it comes it will be a whole new paradigm.

Dozdoats said:

Plyburn claims that the sensor’s battery, about the size of a postage stamp, has been able to go through 80,000 recharges, compared to a few hundred cycles for a typical lithium-ion battery. Even if he’s off by a factor of 10, the sensor’s battery could keep the machine operational for nearly twenty-two years.

Click to expand...

THIS in itself is a fabulous advancement. Lithium polymer batteries are fabulous advances but cannot compete with technology that can be recharged 80,000 times!

Best batteries I've seen to date can go 1500 charge cycles, the better ones can go 600. With recent development of low quiescent power management chips extending operating time on a single charge it now becomes less frustrating when a manufacturer solders in place a battery on a consumer device! By the time the battery will not take any more charge cycles, it's obsolete and the device needs to be retired.

In Dozdoat's first post there was a photo in the cited article he did not post, here is is.

A slide on TTL (tagging, tracking, and locating) technology presented at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference. Photo: SOCOM