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Spysats Keeping Watch on the U.S.
Anonymous And Slightly Nervous Coward writes "USA Today is carrying an AP story that claims three years' worth of domestic satellite surveillance courtesy of a DoD agecy called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Their work includes getting cooperation from entities pointing cameras onto private property such as hotels (all you HOPE and Defcon attendees, please wave for the camera). The agency seems to be taking the aw-shucks line on what they know and to what extent they evaluate the data they get, but it's clear that their mandate is seriously overpowering the oversight structures that would normally be watching it."
If the information here is so aw-shucks and harmless, then getting it released to the public under the FOIA should be easy. That way we can all benefit from it.
Repeat after me: "You have no right to privacy in public." (especially when you are outdoors)
Seriously, which three of you didn't already think the goverment was doing this?
- Necron69
Mapquest and Terraserver et al have been offering up USGS satellite photos for years. What they're proposing to do here is not a more intensive form of surveillance, but a more complete job of mapping. All the information retreived by this system, AFAIK, would just be used to construct, say, 3D models of public buildings and cities, all of which information is easily available to the average pedestrian.
Always a godfather; never a god. -Gore Vidal
You should care because the definition of what you should and shouldn't be doing can always be changed.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
I understand that when I am in a public venue I have no right to privacy. I think everybody understands that.
But what bothers me is that I am losing my anonynimity. The founding fathers never thought this one through, because there were no such things as databases that could keep images of all public spaces, faces, and events and allow cross-checking. That bothers me. If I decide to go down to the visit some local political nut-job to hear what they have to say, I don't expect to be catalogued and cross-referenced, even though I am performing a public act.
No, I have nothing to hide. And yes, I understand that everybody is nice and the government is here to help me. But last I checked, our system of government in the USA was not built upon "Aw Shucks", but a system of checks and balances that assumed that power corrupts. We seem to be forgetting this somehow.
GIS is amazing stuff. There are a number of great trade publications that can be had for free.
Here you can subscribe to a few for free.
Makes great bathroom reading material. Where this stuff really begins to shine is melding of a bunch of data into a 3-d model, as you've said. Take a aerial photo of a street, add other ground photos with accurate location metadata and a standard map for wireframing.
Then take a live video feed from a known point (or multiple points) and you can accurately transpose any movement onto a 3-d model for accurate viewing at any angle. Sort of like that fake first down line they have on football.
Multiply it by every camera at every hotel, etc, instantly accessable by unique URL and you have an "Enemy of the State" scenario actually becoming possible. That's the road this stuff is all headed. I think it will be wonderful for security and marketing but I don't really see any useful characteristics for the common man, besides navigation. I could be wrong however.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
They didn't go anywhere, dill-boy. You can still have congress look into the matter and the Supreme Court can still rule this unconstitutional.
They don't share your opinion you say? Well, then it must be corrupt!
According to Executive Order 12333, signed by President Reagan in 1981, members of the U.S. intelligence community can collect, retain and pass along information about U.S. companies or people only in certain cases.
I thought to myself: Why was this order originally imposed?
I mean, after all, we're talking about spying on US citizens here. Turns out, the law was passed in response to the intelligence agencies already spying on citizens. Reagan, and others, wanted to establish what reasons were legitimate to spy on their own citizens. Where were the citizens of the country involved in the process of making this?
Sources that would seem to support this.
Here's an idea. How about we quit giving current Presidents and congressional leaders the means through which they can enslave us? Everyone here does realize that the President can legitimately declare martial law right now as there are enough men and women in the armed forces right now that would not find this disturbing or even questionable. Very few Americans are exercising their right to own a gun, so there is nothing that can be done about it.
In the article the following quotes appear: The agency is not interested in information on U.S. citizens, stresses Americas office director Bert Beaulieu. "We couldn't care less about individuals and people and companies," he said. But that's not good enough for secrecy expert Steven Aftergood, who oversees a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "What it all boils down to is 'Trust us. Our intentions are good,'" he said. Considering my trust of the "good intentions" of spy satellite division of the government isn't exactly at a stellar magnitude, I want to know who is overseeing this group? Are there any regulations on this group and if so, who creates those? I'm not concerned due to any paranoia, I just want to know how much authority this group really has.
Its a sad commentary on the ignorance of Americans that you have to explain why Stalinist surveillence is dangerous...
But some of the most obvious things aren't being considered here. Do you think they'd stop at watching us, when they could plausibly listen too? We've all seen the spy supply catalogs that use laser microphones, that measure the vibrations in a pane of glass, haven't we? I'm wondering if they have one precise enough to aim at a residence or office window, and listen in. They might only be able to capture a minute or so, before the angle became wrong, but still...
I strongly doubt it, not from satellites, anyway. The angle would almost ALWAYS be wrong. Not to mention being able to aim a laser that precisely from the sat AND bounce it back off a medium designed to be tranparent, with enough strength to read it, etc.
Not cost effective at all, unless it was a permanent location they wanted to bug -- like an embassy or federal building. Even then, there are easier and more cost effective ways.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
DPRK? Iran? Saudi Arabia?
MM--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
I actually do have a piece of aluminium (English spelling) foil in my wallet. It's spread in that little 'secret zipper compartment' at the back of the wallet, thus becoming the 'outer' layer of the closed wallet, aside from the leather of course.
Since I put it in a couple of months ago, I have flown on four domestic airline flights in the US and two international onces between the US and Canada and the security folks did not give me trouble for it at all. (They were more concerned with the metal in the zipper on my fly, and the security guy actually felt up my crotch at one US airport. That was after they whisked my shoes away for explosives-testing. Though this seemed to have nothing to do with the fact that I'm a brown guy, as this only happened after the wand-detectors kept alarming at those locations. And no, I did not wrap my thing in tinfoil.)
Let's take a bunch of senior congressmen (the kind who get the juicy oversight committee jobs) who have long histories of spending 1/4th of our tax dollars on the largest military in history and give them the job of oversight for whizzy tech projects out of the Defense Department. Sounds like a recipe for success to me!
Oversight is useless unless its done by and for public interest. Fat cats who regularly porkbarrel for the defense industry are not for the public interest.
Actually, the AP article does not explicitly state that this agency is directing satellites to acquire new imagery inside the U.S. Perhaps, they are, perhaps they aren't. Personally, I'm not too worried about anyone watching my public activities. If I was concerned about seeing me, I'd stay home.
Of, course, who's going to exercise oversight of all those Russian, Chinese, French, Indian and Israeli reconn satellites?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
What it means is that anything the government doesn't make speicifcly illegal for you to do is legal. So they can't say "Well you can't do that because we didn't make a law saying you can," they have to make a law saying you CAN'T before you aren't allowed.
Nowhere in there is public privacy or anonymity implied or stated. I can't find anywhere in the constution that it talks about public privacy, in fact. It talks about being secure in your house, person, papers, etc which is taken to mean that your private property is off limits except with a warrant, but nowhere does it talk about any right to be left alone in public.
I think the problem is that people confuse privacy and anonymity. You have a right to privacy in that the government can't search or look in your house without your permission, can't tap your phone without permission, and so on. That's privacy. What you want in a right to anonymity, which is the ability to be unkown and unwatched in public. Sorry, that's not a right that's listed or implied anywhere.
It also doesn't seem very natural. Seems that if you are in public, you are subject to being watched. In almost every store I go to there are security cameras watching what I do. This doesn't seem unnatural to me, I appreciate that I am not anonymous and invisible in public. If I want privacy, I retreat back to my house, close the door and draw the blinds. The government knows I live there, but then they didn't need a satalite for that, my Driver License and tax payments tell them that, but they don't know what I'm doing there unless they can get a warrant to check it out.
Just remember that the 9th and 10th are NOT saying the government can't make new laws to restrict rights. If they said that, the constution would be all we'd have and that's not much. They say that UNLESS the government makes a law restricting something, it's not illegal. That's not the case in all societies, in some the government must declare something to be legal, or it's illegal by default. The 9th and 10th just say that if the feds have no law on it, the states may maek a law, and if the states have no law, the people are free to do it and that just because some rights are listed, doesn't mean you don't have more than that unless a law is passed.
As far as I know, the NGA doesn't operate like the CIA or FBI, in that it doesn't involve itself with surveillance of indivuals or businesses, etc directly. It basically gets tasked to geospatially analyze an area or scene. In addition to doing 3d modeling (which can be used for mission planning, etc.), (using LIDAR to map sniper vectors, etc), capabilities include identifying materials on the ground from space-based or aerial assets. (Multispectral or Hyperspectral analysis) Much of the agency's ability to analyze is derived from commercial or unclassified platforms. On the opposite side of the spectrum (pun intended), much of what national asset capabilities are used for are, in effect, as a highly accurate reference. So, when you are classifying endmembers in a hyperspectral satellite image, you use classified geo-referenced imagery to pinpoint a targeted area. Geospatial is absolutely amazing, and like the first poster stated, I can't believe more people aren't involved in it (good for me). It truly is an area that is blowing up, and offsetting the losses in other IT areas. One of the main reasons for that is that it's not only pressing buttons and coding all day long. It involves elements of programming, analysis, geography, geology, hydrology, ground-truthing (field work) and countless others. It takes alot of knowledge in many fields to be an expert. Many experts have one niche, and know relatively little in others.
I'd rather the US government stop creating terrorists. Then we wouldn't have to go looking for them.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons - think about it for a second.....do you think they would advertise this if it were in place for certain groups in the military?
"Special ops soldier - tell us where the GPS tracking device is or we start cutting off body parts one at a time!"