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Satellite Pics Going Dark?
isdale writes "Defense Tech reports the U.S. Gov't. is proposing to exempt satellite images from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The proposed exemption has already passed the Senate and awaits House/Senate conference committee this month. Not only does the exemption apply to Gov't. satellite images, but also any commercial satellite images the gov't buys and 'any... other product that is derived from such data.' That would include maps, reports, news footage, etc. This would heavily impact news gathering and probably the income of commercial satellite operators - who would only be able to sell to the U.S. Govt. And how big is the deficit already?" peter303 writes with a more optimistic story in USA Today " about building and launching a satellite for as little as $65K," as long as you can squeeze it into a 4 inch-cube.
So... MS perhaps won't be happy about this... or do they care
If you put in the exact address of government buildings in TerraServ's Satellite/Urban pictures they are blacked out. Even though you can put in a relevant location and pan to what is blacked out. =o
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In the end we are ALL disconnected....
Why not instead make this only enforceable during wartime? The government would have to pay to access the streams so providers don't lose out, and the guys with mapping projects could still get their lower resolution images.
Would this include the data from USGS at the Terraserver? If not what satelite pictures are available to us citicens, and where can I get a 72" poster of my home town before it becomes *illegal*. I was just thinking about FOIA a few minutes ago while I was reading comments on the Michael Moore article, I guess I better get what I can before I cant. Now if I could only find a notary(sp?).
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Would someone explain how they can do this? It's our (the taxpayers) money. Shouldn't we have free and open access to these pictures? I can understand having time delayed pictures in times of war, so that we don't show our hand. But honestly, what good does this really serve? Will I have to pay to get pictures of the earth, that I've already paid for (in taxes)? Well whatever happens, better start hoarding sattalite pictures now fellas.
During the height of the invasion of Afghanistan the government used taxpayers' money to buy up all the satellite images from the private, commercial satellite Ikonos. This allowed them to avoid the problems if they had just tried to censor it. Now they're trying to censor it straight out. The argument _then_ was that they needed to censor it to protect troop movements -- a valid argument. However there has been no release of this years old data which would allow us to evaluate whether what we were being told at the time was a lie or not.
So any info that belongs to the public, whether generated by public equipment or bought by public dollars, is to be secret from the public? But of course it will be available to government contractors, like Halliburton, under no-bid contracts that are also secret.
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make install -not war
Another nail in the coffin of privatize space ventures. Go Congress!!!
I think what you mean is "another nail in the coffin of privatized American space ventures". Anyone in Europe, meanwhile, interested in privatized space ventures would be dancing for joy at news like this; the U.S. congress would have just handed them a market on a silver platter.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Remember, in the war on terror "national security" trumps commen sense every time.
When we can build a handheld digital camera for less than $500? Heck- I bet with off the shelf parts any competant hardware hacker could build a cubesat for under $2000- Maybe the other $38,000 is the launch fees?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
How long before your GPSr goes dark, too?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Those satellite images are a loose cannon, recording illegal flights the government would rather keep secret. Like the Iran/Contra CIA/NSC drug/gun flights. Or the 9/13-14/2001 bin Laden family evacuation. Or whatever other secret traffic about which we haven't even heard in our complacent, compliant media.
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make install -not war
No offense, but has anyone considered that being able to obtain detailed government satallite imagery might not be the best thing in the world? It didn't matter when our only enemies had the same damn images from their own birds, but now are enemies don't run spy satalite networks so maybe we shouldn't be just giving it away.
I do security
They'll need one heck of a firewall around the US, so we can't just go to European sites for their images of our territory.
This accomplishes nothing, and is therefore obviously silly. There is a mindset back of it that seems to think only the US and US companies have satellite images useful for terrorist purposes. Actually, it's an incredibly close parallel to encryption, in many ways. It's going to hurt US companies, it'll push the supply of that data overseas, and it'll do nothing to stop the bad-guys from getting the data, either.
I should probably write to Bernie tonight, since it's beyond Leahy and Jeffords already.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
And about the other story: WOW. I would love the chance to send up a four-inch cube into space. God alone knows what the hell I would do with it -- I'm no electronics guy -- but the possibilities are simply too cool to be believed. I'd be tempted to go back to university and get an engineering degree just to be able to be part of a project like that.
But hey, who says that's necessary? $40K for a launch, even U$, isn't that much if you get a bunch of people together. There's people that chip in to buy an airplane -- how long 'til we see people (besides the good folks running OSCAR, that is) getting together to build and launch their own cubesat? God knows I'd be there in a heartbeat...
Carousel is a lie!
_Electric Eye_ - Judas Priest
Up here in space
I'm looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I'm watching all the time
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Always in focus
You can't feel my stare
I zoom into you
You don't know I'm there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
There's nothing you can do about it
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean
I'm elected electric spy
I'm protected electric eye
Protected. detective. electric eye
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"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
--Chag
There was a story a while back about the US military forgetting to tell the satellite imaging companies not to take pictures of Afganistan. Because they were late they had to pay to get those pictures of the market.
This does suggest that you are wrong. AFAIK whenever the US military doesn't want any private companies looking, they just need to say so. Yeah... i guess you *could* call it an offer they can't refuse.
- These characters were randomly selected.
They should go and classify it anyway.
The results are _not_ the same. Classification is subject to internal review, is available to the Congressional oversight committees, and expires after a certain period of time. Revalation of classified material is a crime with severe penalties.
This, however, is a way to toss the images into a black box and not let them come out except when the DoD wants to trot out selected images of their own choice. Not being classified, they wouldn't be requried to show the pictures to Congress, nor would they _ever_ become available to the public.
In general, if the result of using an existing mechanism is "the same", and they won't use the said mechanism, then you can bet the results are NOT the same.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
I read somewhere (sorry, it's been a long time) that maps of varies soviet cities were downright inaccurate for "security reasons."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This would only prohibit the release of data that is already prohibited from sale to customers other than the US Government.
As it currently stands, commerical imagery operators are prohibited from selling certain data to anyone but the government. Third parties cannot buy this data. However, there is nothing to prohibit someone from filing a Freedom of Information request once the government buys it. This would close that loophole.
And open another one - for the government to use to slam the door on FOIA requests, not just for the imagery, but for anything "derived from it".
Which means that the government could include a gratuitous satellite picture in any report they wanted to make exempt from the FOIA.
Just as the California legislature includes a couple school busses in nearly any appropriation bill, to bypass the voter-initiated constitutional requirement that appropriations bills requre a supermajority but lowers the bar on school funding bills. (A loophole that has led to the near bankruptcy of the state.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Capitol Hill, too.
How long before the terrorists look for targets by looking for blurs in the terraserver database?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Re point 1: I actually do believe that nothing should be exempt. I don't believe that the CIA should exist or has any business screwing around in the world, I don't believe that there should be secret technologies developed, I don't believe that there should be a large standing army with "defense plans". Why? Isn't that extreme? No, all of that stuff relies on security through obscurity and as we've seen with the longstanding Israeli moles placed high-up in the DoD, the history of Soviet spies etc. that information leaks all the time. The result is that the only people that this vital information about our lives and governments is hidden from is us: the ordinary citizens. Spies, armies and wars are all the extreme side of large-government and serve mainly to oppress ordinary citizens of all countries.
Having said that I suppose that that viewpoint will appear to "extreme" to many people reading this forum. To them I'd argue that there only ought to be FOIA-restricted data when there is some form of democratic oversight to prevent the government from declaring anything it wants to be a "security risk". The current proposal we're discussing doesn't do that so it's a grave threat to the limited form of democracy now in operation in the US.
Re point 2: CNN, Fox and the rest of the media are mainly outposts of government propaganda. I can't think of a large enough "leftwing" news organization in the US that could stump up enough money to purchase satellite imagery if the government were bidding against them. There are isolated journalists that might be interested in doing so, but most "journalists" are quite happy to retype and regurgitate the lines fed to them by their official sources (whether they're official embedded or not).
Add to this that the "satellite" companies are usually deeply entangled with the military and defense establishments and you won't see them doing much to rock the boat and advertise that they have embarrassing pictures to sell. Otherwise goodbye contracts, goodbye licenses.
These "shots at the war" are completely relevant and pertinent to the story. The war is probably why this story exists.
Ah, so they're only allowed to withold unclassified information from us if they don't let others buy it. So, they can keep unclassified information classified, just because...and this Freedom of Information Act works most of the time, except on occasion, even though the data isn't important enough to be classified?
I'm somewhat confused. Can you explain to me again why I can't look at unclassified information?
Calling it a black box is unreasonable. It's practically going to be less black than truly classified image intelligence, for example, and that's coming out after 30 or so years of delay from when it was taken.
Just because the mechanism isn't explicit doesn't mean it will stay black. Any future President or Secretary of Defense could at any time release the data hold on that data. And such things do happen, regularly.
A lot of satellite imagery that I have seen deals with climate measuring. It's not clear from reading the proposal itself if this "unclassified" data is included.
<AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie mode="On"> might be a handy way to keep those filthy pinko commies and terrorists from showing evidence of climate change and messing up our plans to use up as much as possible before The Rapture(tm) comes, using our precious, precious unclassified photos...</AluminumFoilDeflectorBeanie>
That's the part that gets me - they're talking SPECIFICALLY about "unclassified" (i.e. NOT "Top Secret(tm)", etc.) information. The recommendation in the proposal explicitly mentions, in effect, the fact that, well, they COULD just classify the stuff that they don't want to show to potential commie terrorists (or the people who paid for it e.g. US Taxpayers) but that's just so inconvenient to have to do...
More grist for the Aluminum-Foil-Deflector-Beanie-defended conspiracy mill (from the proposal):
"Compelled[by the FOIA, etc.] release of such data and imagery by the United States under FOIA defeats the purpose of these licensing agreements, removes any profit motive, and may damage the national security by mandating disclosure to the general public upon request. While the data and imagery could be protected from disclosure under FOIA by classifying them, the United States prefers to keep them unclassified. Unclassified matter is more easily shared with coalition partners in contingency operations and with State and local officials in disaster relief and homeland security operations.[emphasis added]
It's terrible to think what horrible disasters could befall the US while we dare to "remove any profit motive" from taxpayer-funded "remote sensing" (which, presumably, includes imagery from sources other than satellites as well?) projects. I know I would feel safer if I wasn't allowed to look at this unclassified material that I'm paying for... And, gosh, I also feel better knowing my highly-paid legislators are Doing Something(tm) about, um, I guess terrorists or environmentalists or something.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Little known fact (in the U.S.):
During the Bush propaganda run-up to the 1991 Gulf war, the Bushies (same guys as the current Bushies, hence the name) put out the "fact" that Saddam Hussein had amassed troops on the border of Saudi Arabia. Stopping that massive invasion of Saudi Arabia was one of the major reasons to start the war.
Here's the part the U.S. has total amnesia about: news organizations, after the war, simply requested satellite photos of the Saudi border in question at the time we insisted the Iraqis were amassing its invasion.
Guess what? There were no troops there. Empty land. The troops story, like the Iraqis-threw-preemies-from-incubators crock put out by a Washington DC PR firm, was a "misstatement", as the same Bushies still call such things today.
Or a big, fat, loathesome lie.
Now, here in '01 the Bushies have created exceptions from the Freedom of Information Act. Lookee here, three years after that, they are using that questionably legal tactic to shut the hole in the wall of their fake universe that tripped them up 13 years ago: the presence of a camera.
They really don't like cameras, unless its in the hands of the police, taking YOUR picture when you dare to protest the Bushies in public.
If a third party places cameras in orbit, I guarantee they will threaten the owners into compliance with their demands, or they will reserve the right to blow them out of the sky.
This isn't flamebait. This is a scream. They are blindfolding us and gagging us, and they don't even bother to justify it. They just assume we won't care. And they are right.
This law makes perfect sense to me...
This law simply aims to close this one back door. Anyone who disagrees needs to RTFA. There are existing laws on the books limiting dissemination of satellite imagery (and for good reasons). It is these existing laws which contain the FOIA backdoor. The door simply needs to be shut.
The larger problem stated in the subject is one of appropriate security classifications and subsequent timeliness of declassification. It super easy to stamp "CLASSIFIED" or "SENSITIVE" when the item in question may not really be either.
Also, the article mentioned images from war-zones that were sufficiently aged as to question the appropriateness of maintaing any security classification. I think that there are many factors to consider other than simply, "The image is 2 months old, release it!". There is a great deal of information in aged imagery that could be had if one were diligent and intelligent enough to extract it. Take for example, and image of Baghdad that happens to have some tanks and HUMVEES in it and is 6 months old. Seems innocent enough, until you start looking at multiple images of the same or similar scenes. When enough small bits of information are available, the "enemy" could interpret troop movements, tactics, deployed strengths, etc...
That being said, an image from Afghanistan showing a sheep herd and a single transport truck on a dirt road from 3 years ago shouldn't be deemed "SECRET" because there is no small bits of 'intel' in it.