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.

Comments

Already Done

[CatDogLordOfTheRoot]

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

BUt isn't this our money?

[cyberworm]

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.

Logical continuation of earlier censorship.

[crush]

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.

Ignorance is Strength

[Doc Ruby]

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.

But think of the terrorists!

[l0ungeb0y]

Remember, in the war on terror "national security" trumps commen sense every time.

Re:eye in the sky

[thelexx]

_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

--------

Ball bearings in a 4-in tube?

[Chagatai]

I recall reading a sci-fi story wherein someone effectively stopped satellites, space exploration, and any other spacebound equipment by launching some sand or ball bearings into orbit. As this stuff was travelling around the earth at about 40,000 mph, anything in its path would suffer damage at a minimum or be shredded at worst (think about the paint chips that were found embedded in the Space Shuttle's window an inch or two deep). The damaged stuff, in turn, would further wreck other objects, in perpetuity. Out of morbid curiosity, can any rocket or space scientists estimate what would happen if one of those little tubes was filled with some abrasive agent? I realize, of course, that some would fall back to the earth and some would escape orbit, but how plausible is that sci-fi idea?

Re:End of another domestic market

[Rakshasa Taisab]

And they *OVERPAY* them to not distribute or sometimes even take photos.

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.

How long before we're like USSR

[Lead Butthead]

I read somewhere (sorry, it's been a long time) that maps of varies soviet cities were downright inaccurate for "security reasons."

Re:Story Misleading

[crush]

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.

Re:Hmm

[xmas2003]

Wonder what I have to do about the satellite pictures of my house - am I OK if they had been taken by European sats, but not OK if from US sats?!?

On a hopefully unrelated note, I noticed the following in my web server logs:
149.101.1.128 - - [07/Sep/2004:08:48:12 -0600] "GET /faq/satellite_photo/ HTTP/1.0" 200 4449 "http://www.terraserver.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02 (CK-DNJ702R1)"

That IP address resolves to wdcsun28.usdoj.gov ... and the referral of www.terraserver.com is pretty odd too ... and 10 minutes later, the IP address 149.101.1.116 (resolves as wdcsun16.usdoj.gov) looked at the same page ... but so far, no other accesses from 149.101.*.* addresses - have the black helocopters been dispatched?!? ;-)

Inconvenient reality? Just say no!

[Catbeller]

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.