Satellites and Geopolitics

A computer science fable I heard once over lunch at Google: Cryptography researchers in an unnamed university in a northeastern US city in the early 90s discovered a way to use some obscure linear algebra transforms to speed up cryptography. They excitedly published their paper, but bemoaned the fact that their research was not practically applicable since no processors on the market had the linear algebra operation as part of the instruction set. It would be years until one could get the request through to manufacturers and all the way to the end user.

A week after their paper was published, Intel released a processor with the exact instruction they had been working on.

One of the researchers called up Intel to ask why they had included it. There was no real reason to use these linear algebra transforms except for working with cryptographic-like functions.

The NSA had asked Intel to put it in 3.5 years ago, roughly when the researchers had started working on the project.

It is an important note to add here that, technically, cryptography is classified as a munition by the United States government. Cryptography terrifies the government, and rightly so. A world where you cannot monitor the changes in public sentiment, where capital and labor can move without the knowledge of the government, is rightly terrifying. Every government’s natural reaction to this is to fund their own controlled research on cryptography and keep the public academic circles just a bit behind. Even to this day, it is likely that the NSA is about 10 years ahead of publicly published academia in cryptography.

Satellites operate in a very similar way, though there is less research to be done here, and far more engineering. The capabilities of satellites in the private market are a shadow of what the government is capable of. Government contracts dominate the satellite industry and given the incredible infrastructure costs of building and launching a satellite, it often makes sense to simply go for the highest bidder - the government.

For the government, it’s great to have this other party pursuing technology in the satellite space. Any new innovations can be snapped up, and if government capacity is ever hit due to a military strike or accident, the private sector offers overflow space.

This too makes sense - high quality imagery is incredibly powerful and dangerous. Imagine knowing precisely which car drove away from an important politician’s house in another country. Precisely how many people and trucks left a factory. You could derive fantastic intelligence from satellite data, especially with modern image enhancement techniques.

This wasn’t my original reason for starting a satellite startup, but it ended up being an illuminating time. Sufficiently advanced technology will draw eyes from the centers of power.