SIGINT planes vs. radioisotope mapping

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 09:10  PM, David Wagner wrote:

> Sampo Syreeni  wrote:
>> Rather it's the fact that the Big
>> Brother doesn't have the necessary total funds, and so doesn't listen 
>> into
>> a considerable proportion of calls as a whole.
>
> Yet.
>
> As far as we know.
>
> :-)
>
> I agree it's an economic issue, and law enforcement doesn't seem to
> listen in on a considerable proportion of calls as a whole at the 
> moment.
> But what happens to costs in the future?  Remember, it takes 10 years
> to get any change to the cellphone/telecommunications infrastructure
> deployed, so it pays to think ahead.
>
> By the way, what's the story with those SIGINT planes supposedly
> advertised as being able to fly over a city and capture communications
> from the whole metropolitan area?  John Young had a pointer on his web
> site at one point.  Do you suppose they might snarf up all the 
> cellphone
> traffic they can find, en masse?  What proportion of calls would that 
> be,
> as a fraction of the whole?  One wonders whether your confidence in the
> security of cellphone traffic is well-founded.

AWACS-type planes have long had the ability to act as "cell towers," so 
cell traffic is easily picked-up, if in fact they are doing this. 
Landline signals are vastly harder to pick up, and I doubt strongly 
that every minorly-radiating landline signal is being picked up.

Perhaps for very, very targetted signals, but not cruising over general 
cities, it seems likely to me.

I'm not sure of the context here, but in the past year there were some 
reports of planes circling over university campuses, and many were 
hypothesizing that SIGINT was being done on telephone and computer 
messages. This seemed unlikely to me.

I concluded--and posted on Usenet about my thinking--that some campuses 
may have been targeted for low-level gamma ray surveys. Kind of a gamma 
ray version of Shipley's "war driving" maps. Possibly for construction 
of baseline maps of existing radioisotopes in university labs, 
hospitals, and private facilities. Then deviations from baseline maps 
could be identified and inspected in more detail with ground-based vans 
and black bag ops.

>
--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize 
Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of 
conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are 
peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams