Marketing materials from space-based surveillance firm HawkEye 360 depicting how the company’s radio-frequency geolocation could detect a ship covertly visiting a port in Syria despite its AIS beacon being turned off.
This morning, space-based surveillance firm HawkEye 360 announced its “Strategic Cooperative Agreement” with weapons giant Lockheed Martin “on delivering sophisticated RF [radio-frequency] intelligence systems globally”. HawkEye’s current constellation of 21 satellites is trained to locate the sources of electromagnetic emissions with wavelengths ranging from roughly 2 meters down to 2 centimeters, with “Signals of Interest” including satellite phones, walkie-talkies, cellular towers, and GPS.
The announcement of HawkEye’s partnership with Lockheed came as part of a $10 million addition to HawkEye 360’s fourth major investment round — known as a “Series D” — with Lockheed Martin Ventures named as the primary additional investor, alongside unnamed “company insiders”. Despite not being a household name, HawkEye has long been considered one of the six most influential U.S. defense technology companies, as evidenced by serving as the ‘H’ in the popular defense tech acronym ‘SHARPE’, alongside data-fusion giant Palantir’s ‘P’.
In addition to former Texas Congressman Lamar Smith having formally lobbied for the company, former U.S. counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has been a special assistant to HawkEye CEO John Serafini. And the company’s advisory board has been packed with three former members of Congress as well as former high-level military officials, including former National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers and John Abizaid, the former head of Central Command who subsequently became Donald Trump’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. President Biden’s departed National Cyber Director, Chris Inglis, was similarly an early member, and HawkEye’s board of directors previously included the former Chief Technologist of Google Federal, Rob Painter.
Despite months of requests, HawkEye 360 has not responded to inquiries on either its alleged “strong” role supporting the military of the United Arab Emirates, or on leaked details of its technological approach obtained by the author. HawkEye’s alleged contract with the UAE Armed Forces was uncovered as part of the author’s ongoing reporting on imagery and location-analytics company Orbital Insight’s surveillance contract with the Indonesian government, codenamed “Project Alpha”. As part of Orbital CEO Kevin O’Brien’s presentation to an investor group last month, he noted that the “Emerati ISR leads” were a “Strong HawkEye 360 customer”.
A portion of the fifth slide of Orbital Insight’s September 7, 2023 presentation to the SATIF investment group which detailed the company’s plans to expand its military partnerships around the world. The fifth of the thirteen named targets was the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, which Orbital CEO Kevin E. O’Brien claimed to be a “Strong HawkEye360 customer.”
Beyond HawkEye’s alleged “strong” support for UAE military surveillance, perhaps the company’s largest public contract was a recently completed $5.8 million project with U.S. Naval Information Warfare Systems to monitor radio-frequency emissions in the Pacific. The company also received a 1.5 million euro contract in 2019 with the European Union’s border enforcement agency, Frontex, entitled “Satellite Radio Frequency Emitter Detection for Maritime Situational Awareness”.
HawkEye’s advisors have helped lead a large percentage of U.S. military and intelligence organizations — including the Central Intelligence Agency’s technical surveillance programs — and have included two former members of Congress who pivoted into lobbying, Norm Coleman and Lamar Smith. And so one can only conclude that HawkEye’s surveillance support for Gulf dictatorships is not an anomaly, but rather a corporate extension of official U.S. foreign policy.
Appendix
The full text of Hawkeye 360’s pitch to the Pentagon through the Vulcan contracting marketplace follows:
Source and Read More: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/lockheed-is-now-tracking-phones-and
