There is a smaller populous in Australia, so the electronic signals coming and going is more limited. It provides for less noise to signals sought by the military.
Any Australian noise could probably be filtered out.
July 21, 2013
Philip Dorling
...A Fairfax Media (click here) investigation has now confirmed a primary function of the top-secret signals intelligence base near Alice Springs is to track the precise ''geolocation'' of radio signals, including those of hand-held radios and mobile phones, in the eastern hemisphere, from the Middle East across Asia to China, North Korea and the Russian far east.
This information has been used to identify the location of terrorist suspects, which is then fed into the United States drone strike program and other military operations.
The drone program, which has involved more than 370 attacks in Pakistan since 2004, is reported to have killed between 2500 and 3500 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, including many top commanders.
But hundreds of civilians have been also killed, causing anti-American protests in Pakistan, diplomatic tensions between Washington and Islamabad and accusations the ''drone war'' has amounted to a program of ''targeted killing'' outside a battlefield. This year, the Obama administration acknowledged four American citizens had been killed by strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2009.
''The [Taliban] know we're listening but they still have to use radios and phones to conduct their operations; they can't avoid that,'' one former Pine Gap operator said. ''We track them, we combine the signals intelligence with imagery and, once we've passed the geolocation [intelligence] on, our job is done. When drones do their job we don't need to track that target any more.''...
