DefenseNews April 3, 2006
Spy Sats Seek Relevance in War on Terror
By Michael Fabey
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which turns 45 this year, is facing a midlife crisis: Cell phones, fiber optics and clever foes are neutralizing the agency’s imaging- and signals-intelligence satellites.
Gathering intelligence from space is “really a matter of simple physics,” said Loren Thompson, space analyst for the Lexington Institute, Washington. “The farther away you go, the harder it is. There are just other and better ways to do it.”
A satellite communications technology called spot beaming might help the NRO regain some of its fading signals-intelligence relevance, but imagery’s place as an intel centerpiece may have gone with the Cold War.
“The NRO was once an intelligence organization at the beginning of the space age; now, it is a space agency in the information age,” longtime CIA officer Robert Kohler wrote in the October issue of the NRO’s own unclassified journal.
NRO spokesman Richard Oborn acknowledged the agency faces challenges but said the demand for the intelligence satellites remains strong.
“We continue to be oversubscribed,” Oborn said.
Still, even NRO “subscribers” are wondering just what they are getting from the agency that reportedly carries an annual budget of about $7 billion.
Irrelevant Imagery?
Images, which were useful when counting Soviet tanks or measuring the size of an East German air base, aren’t much help against small terrorist cells, said John Kringen, the CIA’s director of intelligence.
“When you look at certain facilities, and you’re trying to identify a car or individual, and ID them as a terrorist, that’s not easy,” Kringen said at the March 17 annual luncheon of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
And people have learned to hide from orbital cameras by going indoors or underground when the satellites pass overhead. When U.S. forces ousted the Taliban from caves in Afghanistan, they found instruction manuals for avoiding imagery satellites.
These drawbacks will not be overcome by the NRO’s Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), a dozen-satellite constellation intended to provide photos of unprecedented resolution in visible and infrared spectra. The $25 billion-plus program, now set to launch around 2013, has been beset by delays and cost overruns. Last fall, NRO officials stripped much of the work from Boeing and gave it to Lockheed Martin.
The finished FIA may not have all the capabilities once envisioned. “We’re reviewing options,” Oborn said.
Listening to Cell Phones
NRO’s eavesdropping satellites also have been growing obsolete in a world that moves less data by microwave signals and more via cell phones and the Internet.
The Soviet Union used microwaves, whose robust waveforms carried messages through clouds and dust and far into space, where they were picked up by U.S. satellites in geosynchronous orbit. But microwaves are foghorn blasts compared to the low-powered whispers of cell phone signals.
Listening in on a cell conversation is much harder from space, said Thompson. “It can be done, but it requires special technology. We’re talking about billions of dollars, not counting the launch or daily operations,” he said.
He said it might be easier to eavesdrop with unmanned aerial vehicles or other near-Earth platforms, not deep-space satellites.
Extracting the signals of interest from today’s urban hubbub is largely beyond current space-borne capabilities.
“Our current satellites were developed well before the explosion of cell phones and communications,” said Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Archives and author of the 2002 book, “The Wizards of Langley.”
Moreover, digital encryption, once the province of military systems, is cheap and strong and commercially available.
“A growing variety of nations and groups … are increasingly using sophisticated and rapidly changing encryption systems [requiring] a far different SIGINT effort than the one prevailing during the Cold War decades,” the Congressional Research Service said in a June report, “Intelligence Issues for Congress.”
There are other problems. E-mail, which travels along hidden fiber-optic lines in the ground, cannot be tapped from space, Thompson said.
Oborn said just because communications technology has made it more difficult to do SIGINT does not mean the NRO can’t do its job or that its satellites are losing relevance. “It’s not a straight line.”
Beaming Up
But advancements in transmission technology may help the NRO pick up cell calls from space.
Such mobile devices generally transmit on L-band frequencies, which were deemed too weak to bother with when the current generation of satellites was built in the early and mid-1990s.
But commercial telecom companies have developed L-band devices that can talk via space. Their satellites use a technique called spot beaming, in which the receiving antenna emits a narrow field of energy that, in effect, gives a boost to the low-power signals it’s trying to pull in.
“Our spot beams are like lasers,” said D D’Ambrosio, who runs the government services arm of satellite communications provider Inmarsat.
Eavesdroppers soon will build satellites that use this technique.
“It’s all a question of receiver sensitivity,” said GlobalSecurity’s Pike. “They have a collection plan, with different frequencies, different sensitivity, different intervals and different signals.”
But Inmarsat and other industry officials say it won’t be that simple. Their systems work only through special components that link the phones and satellites. Vacuuming up stray electronic signals will prove harder and more expensive.
Such satellites will need to pack bigger antennas, more electrical generators, and more processing capability into a package still small and light enough to be lofted into orbit. Thompson said the NRO is building such a system, whose name is still classified.
Oborn hinted at obstacles overcome. “I’m not going to give away what we can do. But our ability to collect things that are of interest has increased a lot over the past few years.”
Kohler said the technology is there to pick up cell phone conversations from space. “It’s a question of processing,” he said.
But Thompson said the cost of the new satellites is rising. The NRO’s attempt to push the envelope in satellite development comes as the Air Force, burned by delays and cost overruns, is generally taking a slower approach.
In October, Kohler wrote that the NRO’s culture of high-tech, whatever-the-cost would prevent change or compromise. The cause of the agency’s acquisition problems is “the inability of the [NRO] and the community to decide what are the priorities and the inability to kill anything,” he wrote in “Recapturing What Made the NRO Great,” an article for the NRO’s annual, unclassified “National Reconnaissance Journal of Discipline and Practice.”
In the mid-1980s, Kohler directed the flow of NRO money for CIA projects, and has since worked for Lockheed Martin and TRW, and advised Boeing on the FIA program.
Oborn counters that the NRO has killed parts of poorly working programs. He cites the FIA contract restructuring, but said he could not provide specifics.
Oborn acknowledged that space reconnaissance has limitations, but said it remains a vital part of the nation’s intel collection.
“Everyone understands that we must have an integrated structure of multiple sensors,” Oborn said. “The NRO is uniquely positioned because of its technical expertise and systems engineering skills to provide a foundation for global situation awareness. We don’t do intelligence, but we enable it.”
© Copyright 2006, DefenseNews
