Budget Issues Force Spy Satellites Into The Open

Korsair25 points out this article about a U.S. spy satellite program. "Quote: 'Over the decades, spying from space has always earned super-secret status. They are the black projects, fulfilling dark tasks and often bankrolled by blank check.' It also talks about some of the technology used to disguise or camouflage some of the operational satellites."

Comments

Appropriations disclosure

[dark_requiem]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the constituttion mandate that congress make publicly available a DETAILED ledger of expenses? Oh well, it's not like the US government cares about little things like their founding charter any more. After all, who needs a pretense of legitimacy?

Re:Appropriations disclosure

[temojen]

According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one's plans.

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu

Re:Appropriations disclosure

[ctr2sprt]

Congress makes available a detailed ledger of expenses. Of course, you don't expect it to list names of all our spies abroad, right? (They're still getting paid.) And you don't expect it to list every component going into our spy satellites. (Then enemies could get a better idea of how to build them.) And so on. So the "detail" is usually stuff like "$157 million for CIA payroll," but doesn't break down exactly who gets what. Similarly, we have "$3.2 billion for space-related defense projects."

Most of the "secrecy" really comes about by obscurity: our government spends over $1 trillion a year on various projects, all detailed on several thousand pages of a budget law. (Actually, on many, many individual bills, each of which are hundreds or thousands of pages long.) Remember that we first learned about these mysterious spy satellites because (a) they are in the budget; and (b) some Congresscritters noticed and started wondering. Remember the uproar about politicians being able to look at our tax returns? No great conspiracy (maybe a small one), it was just so buried in everything else that nobody noticed until it was (almost) too late.

I have a hard time keeping track of my own damn budget, and I spend less than 1/10 millionth what the government does. Think about the magnitude here. There's a reason that Congress typically hands out huge checks to various agencies instead of individual projects: it's simply not possible for 300-odd people, even with 100-person staffs, to micromanage every aspect of government.

Good argument for dramatically reducing the size of the government, isn't it? Although I doubt it will ever be possible to reduce ours to something which can be effectively supervised.

Re:Appropriations disclosure

[DM9290]

I think it's intellectually dishonest to pretend away non-discretionary federal spending. 3/4 of federal spending is in Welfare, Medicare, Medicade, Social Security and similar socialist programs. To ignore those and make a graph that appears to show more than half of federal spending is military in nature is outright fraudulent. Sorry but Congress CAN effect non-discretionary spending: by repealing or reforming those programs, duh! Meanwhile, count that spending as spending.

Stop being a sore winner. Republicans control congress. The deficit is not the fault of congress it is the fault of the political party in control at this time and unprecedented tax cuts for which the 10% most wealthy americans are getting 80% of the dollars! There isn't a shortage of money. There is a shortage of honesty.

The creator of that chart you are complaining about specifically explained what the chart shows, and says it excludes medicare or social security and explains why the author believes it should be excluded.

Interesting technology

[theufo]

Military spy satellites have always been superior in both resolution, contrast-to-noise-ratio and magnification to their non-military counterparts.

Now these previously secret optics technology are partially out in the open, what will be done with them?

I'm sure they could be used to greatly improve the imaging resolution of space probes for example.

(After an elusive secret society of slashdot users uses it for a frikkin earth-blasting-laser that is)

Re:Did us a lot of good...

[EvanED]

Actually, if you're referring to the Cuban Missile Crisis (and I don't know any other event you could be talking about), it wasn't satellite recon that gave us those shots, it was U2 surveillance.

We don't need them, until we need them.

[raehl]

This "We don't need spy satalites in the current climate so we shouldn't develop them" is EXACTLY the kind of "get what we need for right now" thinking that got us in trouble with 9/11 in the first place.

We can't just react to the situation we're in now. We need a broad base of capabilities to address needs we have now, AND needs we may have in the future, AND needs we have no idea we'll have in the future.

We got burned on 9/11 because our entire system was still moving from being extremely focused on fighting the cold war to being extremely focused on being able to fight two regional conflicts. So we got hit where we were vulnerable - global terrorist conflict.

Just as ignoring that threat was a mistake in the past, deciding to scrap any equipment related to threats not currently present would be just as grave of an error, one we should hopefully avoid discovering in hindsight.

Re:We don't need them, until we need them.

[JohnnyCannuk]

Funny, I thought 9/11 was indirectly caused by decades of US government support of brutal regimes throughout the Middle East.

More directly, it was caused by Dubya ignoing Richard Clarke for 8 months, by initially cutting the FBI's funding for anti-terrorism activities and by ignoring an NSA briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in America" in August 2001 while he was on vacation.

Clinton shares some blame for 9/11, but remember, the same people who are now blaming him for NOT going after him back in 96-99 are the ones who said that, when he TRIED going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 96, he was shooting cruise missles as a diversion away from the Monica Lewinsky affair!

Can't have it both ways: either he tried to go for it and the Republicans slammed his efforts as a diversion or he didn't go after him enough, according to Republicans. Well?

Bin Laden escaped and 9\11 happened because of internal US partisan politics rather than ANY "focus on fighting the cold war". The warning and urging were there, but politicians, especially GWB, didn't listen.

THAT is the problem, not any military navel gazing. The military is one of those few organizations that is actually designed to change quickly when ordered to do so...no politician had the guts to give the order.

How would most people know...

[wasted]

...how useful they are/were? The US intelligence agencies are not likely to tell folks where they got what information if they don't have to. For example, if information concerning the locations and orientations of anti-aircraft weaponry was obtained via satellite, the information would likely be passed to on-scene commanders, but not to CNN or such, so the average person is not going to know how effective the satellites are.

Re:mmm yeah

[dabigpaybackski]

blank checks rock...

Yes, especially if you happen to be a "defense" contractor...

"Thank you, Congressman, for your stauch advocacy of this worthy project. The $11 billion you allocated for the fiscal year will fund additional research in order to get this system fielded. Um, by the way, we noticed that you are retiring soon. Perhaps you would like to lend your national security expertise as a consultant to our "advisory board," in exchange for a modest stipend, of course." *wink*

"Why, I think that I might be able to set aside a few hours a week with your fine company. After all, it's a matter of national security." *wink*

Re:Novus Ordo Seclorum

[armyofone]

Oh yeah? If that's true, then why don't the headlines ever read, "Psychic wins Mega-Lottery!!"? ;-]

Stealth Accounting

[Doc Ruby]

FTA: "The reason why, Aftergood explained, is because congressional appropriators are free to spend the money without being held accountable for their actions."

One central problem in our American government is the pursuit of necessarily secret projects, while our government is controlled by a system of oversight for accountability. Some projects are kept secret from the oversight, and at least some of those get out of control. Reagan's Iran/Contra operation violated several laws, as well as conflicting with several foreign policies regarding both Iran and South American drug cartels. And these satellites apparently violate any sensible cost:benefit*risk analysis. Just as extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so does extraordinary secrecy require extraordinary legitimacy. We can't know about the essential secret operations that succeed despite lack of oversight. But the repeated abuse of secrecy, merely to cover up "enormous boondoggles" as reported in the article, threatens the specific project goals, as well as the ability to run *any* government project without oversight. It's now an open secret that the Federal Government is collapsing under its own weight, along fault lines of abuse huge enough to be seen from space for generations.

That's an aerial photograph

[Solandri]

That picture was shot from a plane. Terraserver uses both satellite and aerial photographs. The satellite photos are typically about 25m-2m resolution. Aerial photos are used for higher resolutions.

If you do the math, the theoretical resolving limit for a 2.4m mirror (Hubble's size, which is about the same as the KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites since they're all launched from the space shuttle) works out to about 5cm in the visible spectrum at a 90 mile altitude. That's under optimal conditions. They might be able to see if you're wearing a watch, but there's no way they can read the time unless the government has figured out some way to bypass the laws of physics.