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

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.

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: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.