Essentially, open market spooks for hire, selling limited space intelligence to countries that can't afford their own space programs.
To be fair, they are Vikings, which probably counts as both pirate and terrorist, though I'd say it is a bit of a delayed response as the Icelandic haven't gone a'viking in simply ages.
As an aside, I have run into a few people recently who claim to be both vikings and anti-immigration, which I cannot help but find really funny.
It's much more practical for figuring out where ships which have their transponders turned off are.
Same goes for current generation state of the art optical satellite data, which is mostly useful for pretty pictures and environmental trends, but might be just about enough to prove you didn't park your car where you said you did if you're really unlucky. (This, admittedly, is the bit that might improve rapidly in ten years, but it's still not going to be particularly useful for targeted tracking of individuals, never mind dragnets)
Actually, he couldn't. He thought he could hide. But we find out in the ministry of truth and room 101 that everything he did "secretly", like writing in his diary or his rendezvous with julia, were known to the authorities.
But I agree, unless we wake up, I think a mix of 1984 and Minority Report style of dystopian future awaits us.
The Gestapo developed a man-portable set worn under a trenchcoat:
There has been a good amount of progress, but it really stalled for a while when ICBMs seemed to negate the importance of aircraft. The US had the quite sophisticated Northern Early Warning Line at one time to monitor all airspace in the North Pole. It’s very hard, even today, to get good satellite tracking there because it is a Pole.
The craziest thing I’ve heard is what the British tried before radar was invented. A Hoover Dam like wall 200 feet high that was supposed to amplify the sounds of planes approaching from Germany that would alert a human operator.
http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/locations/denge...
Comm signals at, for example, 3.5MHz wouldn't get through the ionosphere.
