Not to mention that being ahead or behind has nothing to do with whether someone could steal one of your satellites. Avoiding it is pretty easy: put a small bomb on your satellite, rigged to go off if it detects tampering. A couple of pounds would be plenty, spacecraft are fragile. I don't think anyone ever did this, since this wasn't a serious threat.
Why even bother going to the great expense and danger of capturing someone else's satellite? Surely it's relatively easy to determine its capabilities by looking at the data being transmitted?
