Turning every radio into a radar

Someone presented a passive radar system using an RTLSDR receiving TV broadcasts reflected off of nearby planes at a 2017 GNURadio conference. If amateurs can do it, you can bet the military has already designed, built, tested, deployed, and retired a similar system.

This isn't exactly a new subject, the same concept powered the first radar guided missiles in the 1940s (enemy is illuminated by a ground or airborne radar, missile tracks the reflection).

I'm fairly certain I've already read an article in an IEEE magazine talking about this topic (passive radar via cell towers) a few years ago.

I'm not usually one to notice when I'm reading an article written by AI, but this one is really bad. Tone put me off from finishing it.

This is not new as the article claims: Passive radars using FM broadcast and 2G GSM were used in the 1990s Yugoslav war.

> For network operators, it raises a different question: could the infrastructure that already generates subscriber revenue also generate a second, sensing-based revenue stream?

Are there people who experience positive emotions in reaction to sentences like these? I just… even in my days when I thought social good came from states/organizations downward rather than from humans upward… even then, when I thought a God’s-eye view was achievable, that more and better measurable data were the way to get there, and that the main barrier to effective social regulation was poor legibility… I feel like even then this would ring craven and avaricious to me.