Small Satellites, Law Enforcement, and Combating Crime Against Humanity

Abstract

The strategic uses of balloons, aircraft, and then satellites have been an established practice to carry out reconnaissance, remote sensing, monitoring, and intelligence both for military and law enforcement purposes starting several centuries ago. The use of satellites for this purpose started with the Corona spy satellite. Today reconnaissance satellites are used by a number of countries for strategic purposes. These spy satellites are typically large in mass and volume and highly sophisticated with very high spatial resolution. The small satellite revolution has shown that small satellites of much less cost and size can be used for many new purposes that range from industrial espionage to surveillance for law enforcement purposes by a growing number of countries. Further remote sensing satellites with time-stamped imaging have also been used in international courts to provide visual images to document attacks against towns and villages that have been described as crimes against humanity and even genocide.

Small satellites have become able to offer a range of new capabilities. These new capabilities have included much more frequent temporal resolution – sometimes providing coverage more frequently than once a day. They have also been able to provide updated information at much lower cost and with augmented data analysis that have provided valuable to police, coast guard, United Nations peace-keepers, and others charged with law enforcement and border protection and even with protecting the world against crimes against humanity.

This chapter explores some of the ways that new small satellite constellations can be designed to carry out improved forms of law enforcement, strategic defense, and even new ways to combat crimes against humanity. These new capabilities can sometimes work with a variety of capabilities from cubesat systems, to microsats or minisats, to large-scale satellites or various types of high-altitude balloons or aircraft such as UAV, or other means, in order to provide a full range of surveillance and observation capabilities. The primary focus of this chapter is on satellite imaging. Nevertheless the opportunities now presented by small satellite constellations for law enforcement and related activities from zoning enforced up to combating crimes against humanity are numerous and still growing. Today such satellite and high-altitude platform capabilities include position tracking, RF-geolocation detection, artificial identification system (AIS) monitoring, and in the future perhaps monitoring of wireless messaging and conversations.

While small satellites in the area of law enforcement and other strategic services are not a unique capability, they can combine with other resources to provide valuable service capabilities for detection, monitoring, security planning, enforcement, and legal prosecution. These capabilities can include optical, infrared and new infrared imaging, radar, as well as augment the abilities for tracking and monitoring such as AIS, near real-time tracking and identification, and entirely new capabilities such as RF-geolocation.

This chapter describes some of the innovative ways that small satellite constellations can offer security officials, law enforcement officers, and even jurists useful information to undertake law enforcement, protection of the peace, and valuable information that can be used in court cases to help to prosecute crimes against humanity and international criminal cases such as drug smuggling, fishing and pollution violations, and illegal trafficking across national borders.