Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Withholding Satellite Data
plover writes "Because of Congressional legislation passed quietly in 2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer distribute space surveillance data via NASA. There was supposed a three year transitional period where the data was to be made available via a NASA web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down hard, and NASA has decided to not rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to obtaining data from their site is that you agree to not redistribute their data. Of course, amateurs are still free to redistribute their observations, including those of classified satellites."
What reasons are cited for this development? Security?
A blog like any other.
Why isn't there some sort of community political watchdog site that informs us when things are "quietly passed"? Tell us about everything that's in the works, let us decide what we do and don't like.
Government, by and for corporations, of the people.
Before you flame me with narrowminded visions of brownshirts blotting out your vision, realize that this was Mussolini's definition, and it's what we've got in the USA. Then consider that the brownshirts aren't too far off, either in the future or in actual conditions today.
Fascism is the human face on the corporate body politic. And these days, the mask is off.
--
make install -not war
Now I can't seek out sensitive targets, so kindly provided by the enemy. What horrible irony that the Aggressor no longer provides me with my targets!!!
Waaaaa!
They neglected to say how the origional server went down "hard". Did someone hack it? Or did it just crash? I could believe that they would pull it after a hacking incident, but after a hardware failure, I can't see that they would just drop it after that. But oh well, yet another alphabet agency...
The government never does anything wrong, or stupid, or um... God I can't stop laughing. This is worth a karma burn.
I really have nothing else to say, this is just plain crap.
Let's all wait for the chorus of "Now I'm moving to canada"
Sometimes you really need to wonder what they're going to do with those images.
I prophesized that instead of taking the Hubble out of service, that they use it as surveillance, seeing as how looking at Alpha Centauri isn't too big of a deal. They could get incredible quality pictures if it were a spy mechanism.
The only problem is, what about World Wind? Am I not going to be able to have updated images now? Such a tragedy!
Does anyone know if "surveillance data" also includes digital photography from other government satellites and the Blue Marble/Earth Observatory?
Are there any plans to extend this ban to cover these categories?
Ofcourse, I mean, I am sure terrorists will be so much easier to track if they have to use commercial weather information services, like newspapers.
It had photos of Area 51, etc. Well that service is gone too. It's been down for years...
How hard is it to build a spy/telescope satellite ?
I found this site about building a miniature
Miniature Space satellite
A canadian cheapy.
Canadian Satellite
I think it would be cool if someone could put a cheap one in space from off the shelf telescope parts . Don't you think these prices for these orbitting telescopes are a bit farfetched ?
Once again knowledge resources are shut down for no reason at all. It seems the world in general is getting more and more shut out from Information.. how can ANY government claim this is healthy?
The dumber the people get the more they need help, the more help they need the more the 'powers that be' control them. The more they control them.. the closer to get to 1984.
I'm not into Space, but right now every day I hear more things are being hidden or shut down, yet we're still happy to waste money left right and centre on a war which was ment to be over 12 months ago, when we still have more armed forces there then any where.
Maybe we should stop thinking about how we're going to deal with the "next terrorists" and start thinking "how are we going to make life worth while so we have a reason to fight these terrorists?"
I like muppets.
Nasa has tons of servers...so, the "oh gee, the server went down, so lets throw our hands in the air and give up" thing doesn't compute. There are always backups of servers. I expect organized agencies to have backups. The 'Server went down so give up' thing only applies to AOL users.
The surveillance data that was being provided was of orbital information of satellites that the Air Force was tracking including corrections and orbital decay information. This has nothing to do with weather information.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
and i'm a us citizen
aren't i paying for this?
so what is the rationale to deny me what i have paid for?
the purpose of my government is to serve me, is it not?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I mean this should clearly be made illegal, I mean publishing information of existance of something secret. I am sure that the next version of the bill will correct this bug.
This is information about the precise orbits of satellites. This is what you would need if you want to shoot down a satellite.
They are not talking about weather photos.
Does anybody read the article? Like the article says, this info is available, more accurately, from a global collaboration of amateur observers.
either that or its just "that left wing propaganda to make it look scary"
In the "Terms of Use" it states By continuing, you consent to your keystrokes and data content being monitored.
Have you metaroderated recently?
Everyone kind of missed my point. I was calling the government a bunch of terrorists for coming up with this whole concept of charging me for a service, then sending me to someone else and paying again to collect the data.
plover writes "Due to Congressional legislation passed quietly in 2003, the Air Force Space Command will no longer distribute space surveillance data via NASA. There was supposedly a three year transitional period when the data was to be made available via a NASA web site, but earlier this month their transitional server went down hard. NASA has decided not to rebuild it. (It was scheduled to be shut down on 31 March 2005 anyway.) The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to necessary to obtain data from their site is not to redistribute it. Of course, amateurs are still free to redistribute their observations, including those of classified satellites."
I can buy a deck of cards at my local drugstore for a buck, but that doesn't mean that it won't cost several thousand to send it into space.
English is easier said than done.
I'm a bit puzzled. If the U.S. is "withholding" satellite data, why is it still freely available via another web site? Less editorializing, more reporting.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Commercial site? You mean you pay for weather info? What about Weather.com? Wunderground.com? Or the govt website NOAA.gov? Or hell, turn on the radio at the top of the hour and listen to the weather.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
""The only way to obtain satellite data now is by signing up with the official Space-Track website. Part of the agreement to obtaining data from their site is that you agree to not redistribute their data""
,are not likely to care about breaking a contract.
Am i the only one thinking that people likely to abuse this information
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The data is still free.
Its the projections of the sattelites that are secret and should be. Why should we all care?
A powerfull land based laser could take out a satelite and a trajectory is needed.
Weather and other services are still available.
http://saveie6.com/
So I was reading through the "terms of use" and got to this line "... By continuing, you consent to your keystrokes and data content being monitored." The way it's stated is so ambiguous that it's scarry. Anyone else agree?
Last changes(of list of bright satellites): 10/6/3902
anyone care to explain?
No more on-line close up of Paris Hilton nude-sunbathing in the Carribean.
Someone with the resources to build a large enough laser (AFAIK 'large enough' is still larger than possible with current technology), can also afford to buy the tracking data, or do his own tracking.
I need another source of cute wallpapers..
budget.
Hubble cost something like $2B (?). Spy satellites like the Keyhole 12 are similar to Hubble, and would cost at least that much. This gives you 10-cm resolution.
Sure, you could buy a simple telescope, duct tape a digital camera and a packet radio transmitter to it, and blast it into space.
But building optics that won't break during launch, and can handle the temperature changes is another matter. Building an attitude control system (a cluster of miniature rocket engines, plus control system) is nontrivial, too. You'll need energy (solar panels, fuel tanks), also built to last in space.
Off-the-shelf? No chance.
50,000 $ to launch almost anything into space, curtesy of old "Mother Russia" and former (nearly bankrupt) space program.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
For years, the satellite industry has relied on celestrak.com for easy and open access to TLE's. I have written several applications over the years for satellite ground operations that ftp'd or wget'd from celestrak's ftp site. There is no ftp or http access directly to the files on space-track. You have to log in to the web site, navigate through their cgi crap and copy/paste. Its going to be a major PitA to rework this stuff. I don't have as much of a problem with the restriction of access to this data as much as the poor design of the site.
And contrary to popular belief, I think just about any US citizen can get an account on space-track if you sign up for it. There is a lot more to the story than NASA's OIG server crashing. The Air Force has been warning that this was coming for a very long time.
d_p
I thought the idea of burning out image detectors went out with orthicon tubes. Is hubble really that sensitive that the light of the earth is to much? Are we talking oversaturation or physical damage from heat? I'd always wondered if the real reason was that the resolution was too good - 1 dime over 300 miles or something like that...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
as subject..
Typical nonsense from the tinfoil brigade.
/. crowd won't pay attention unless you make a lot of loud noise.
A server supporting a system scheduled to end goes down a few weeks before that and the government decides not to spend the money to repair it. What's the problem?
The same data remains available. What's the problem?
The government -- any government with satellites -- doesn't want you or anyone else to know the location of its secret satellites. Why enable the very people those satellites are targetting to find out where they are?
And, what is that crack about legislation that was "passed quietly" supposed to mean? Looks like deliberate paranoia-mongering to me: those sneaky people in Congress passed a bill and didn't ven bother to jump up and down on TV about it. Guess they forgot that the
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
We don't have the money to keep photoshopping them out of the pictures. Those pesky aliens keeps showing up all the time.
The editorial post just hasn't used its veto power properly since Coolidge.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Democracy has not been successfully instituted on anything larger than a small (by modern standards) city or township. Any bigger, and the working model is a republic, not a democracy.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
fascism n.
1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
The source of the economic controls must be the government for it to be facism, apparrently. Try again, sir.
And watch out for anything political on Wikipedia: it's basically written by the editorial equivalent of slashdot posters. Do you accept as valid definition the things people post in the political bits of slashdot? (Hoping for a negative here)
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
No orbital information means that you can't make and especially share satellite observation forecasts with your friends
Site like Heavens Above will need alternate source to make their forecast. This is a shame, accurate forecasts were a bonus to amateur observers and essential to observe some satellites.
Those who haven't observed a -8 Iridium are missing something. They are spectacular
"NASA not distributing it the way it was done before" is NOT equivalent to "U.S. Withholding Satellite Data"
a sp to automatically download and convert Space Track data into CelesTrak data sets to help you with the transition. This will ensure you get the very latest data in the formats you are currently accustomed to...." (emphasis added)
n t-MUST be-fascist" fantasies of /.?
As CelesTrak says on their site, you can "...Register for a Space Track account today at http://www.space-track.org (only 4,000 users have done so to date) and use the application provided at http://celestrak.com/SpaceTrack/TLERetrieverHelp.
How is this "withholding" data, except in the "George-Bush-is-teh-debbil-therefore-the-governme
-Styopa
... images is that they can find out when their goverment is telling lies to start a war ...
They just aren't distributing the info through NASA anymore. The Article even mentions the name of another place you can go to get the information.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
NASA also has tons of data. Like, so much data that the abstract patterns of ones and zeroes practically has a mass.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I thought your missile defence was fully operational now ?
... ... ... ... ... ... ...
I'm sure I heard something about the
evil missiles of the infidels
and terrorists
being smote by
the
mighty hand of God
using His Very Cost
Effective Missile Defence Sheild to
Smite their projectiles from On High.
I'm with you, bro! Any American taxpayer who wants to dress up in a flight suit and land on a Carrier should be able to do so! It's high time those suits stopped acting like they own the fruits of our labors!
For a very good discussion on this topic and others dealing with observation of 'satellites', go to http://satobs.org/seesat/ and browse the messages on the topic.
/. opinions.
You will get much more than the
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
The president has liberated us from the forces of evil! I feel so free! I can feel all the freedom and all the democracy! It feels so good! Doesn't it?
Very difficult: DigitalGlobe (then EarthWatch, with EarlyBird), Space Imaging (Ikonos), Orbimage (Orbview) all lost high resolution satellites before they became operational - these early high-res satellites were in fact based pretty much on off-the-shelf (but space qualified) parts. Landsat 6 was lost on launch and Landsat 7 suffered a crippling failure about a year ago. (BTW the EarlyBird launch on a Russian Cosmos, was said to have cost about $7 million, not 50 thousand). Having got it up there, and got it working, you then need a ground segment too, which is decidedly non-trivial.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
I know I have an exceptionally high IQ, but can't any of you figure this out. Connect the dots, the key bits of information where posted. Some high paid official read Tom Clancy and decided that terrorist could use this information to hide their activities when the satellite is overhead. The information is still available, but through a non-government website with an "I'll let you monitor all activity on my computer" EULA. Analysis or how to build a terrorist mousetrap: 1) Get some leverage on someone who runs a space/astronomy website - busting them for smoking pot is a Fed favorite. Oh, don't let them know you busted them. 2) Give them exclusive rights these data only if they use the EULA you provide. 3) Use said leverage to deflect any challenges to monitoring all access to said website. 4) Build a profile on all who access these data. 5) Filter out profiles that match genuine astronomers. 6) Red flag interest in satellites over sensitive areas. 7) Closely monitor all activity from suspect users, looking for anything that can lead to arrest or capture of terrorist cells. To any Feds that may be monitoring this: the above analysis took me less then an hour. My rate is $500/hour. Please contact me directly if you are interested in hiring me for more analysis.
Michael, 'zat really you?!?1
The only change here is that (a) they get to know who's accessing the data, and (b) those who access the data can't restribute it. This doesn't keep them from distributing the result of calculations based on the data, however.
Heavens-above.com has data regarding when satellites are visible from a given location on the earth's surface. I'm not sure if this gives any data on classified satellites. This site does currently still show orbital elements on the "orbit" page of each satellite's detail list - these are probably coming from non-Airforce tracking radars.
JTrack 3D is a great little java applet (warning, the applet loads in a separate window) that shows you a real-time view of near-earth space. You can even pull up description pages for each of the satellites shown. The "Launch/Orbital information" link on the detail page is broken, and seems to be the only part of this service affected. Again this is unlikely to ever have shown classified satellites.
Conspiracy theorists, take note. Every spacefaring nation on the planet knows where everything is in space including the orbital elements mentioned, to make sure thier expensive new pr0nosat won't crash into that random chunk of "damaged hardware that can't be de-orbited, oops" that's taking pictures of Osama's outhouse. This just keeps people from anonymously having the US Air Force do their orbit tracking for them.
Pavlov's Dog ate the bell, and now he's barking at Schroedinger's cat all the time... -Me
Mike Godwin may be a "mediocre SF writer", but to my knowledge, doesn't write sf. Even if he does, that would be like calling Heinlein an "undistinguished silver miner" - hardly looking at the important points.
And you're misunderstanding the point of Godwin's Law. He was only pointing out, semi-tongue in cheek, that debates on mailing lists and Usenet, should they go on long enough, always end up with a comparison to Hitler being made. Any stifling of discussion resultant is strictly peer pressure from other people who are either (a) using the concept as a rhetorical device or (b) truly and genuinely sick of a flamewar that has jumped the shark.
I forget what 8 was for.
Actually, according to this, Hubble does routinely look at earth. It mentions that it observes no details, most likely because it is essentially focusing at infinity. I suspect it looks at large, uniform areas such as white sands, NM for calibration purposes.
The telescope is for all intents and purposes, Hubble is farsighted, designed and aberration-corrected to look at things far away. The earth is pretty close. I think Hubble would need the large equivalent of reading glasses to accommodate this. This focusing ability may be wrong, because it would be difficult to explain the good images of the moon (see this post).
And how about if you vote for the guy who loses, and the winner goes on to piss on the rest of the world in your name?
Can I bitch then?
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
The Celestrak website didn't do a very good job of explaining what data it has, but it doesn't sound like it's all that big. The main data format seems to be a two-line record, so maybe 200 bytes, and I don't know how many satellites or pieces of space junk they're tracking, but it's probably on the order of 10K-100K of them. So that's probably 2-20MB of data, which you should be able to serve handily with any spare doorstop Pentium200 machine even if it's updated hourly. If it's 20MB, just put the sucker up on BitTorrent, and if it's 2MB, you might not even bother with that, or else put it up on your favorite P2P network.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I hope the peace loving French, recipients of Sadaam Hussein's billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi people can provide the world with such images for free.
Because the warmongering Americans, recipients of Sadaam Hussein's billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi people, can't?
Yes, the government is a bunch of terrorists. Republicans are a bunch of terrorists. Christians are a bunch of terrorists. Everyone you disagree with is a terrorist.
We get it.
damaged by dogma
Anyway, they don't have usable lasers that powerful. For example the same reason that orbiting death lasers are impractical, the reverse is impractical. If you could make a laser that powerful, it's either nuclear (And, duh, if the terrorists have nuclear ability we're already in trouble.) or it would suck so much power they'd cut you off the power grid.
And trying to hit something four feet wide from, at minimum, 100 miles away, using standard positioning data, is just absurd. (Assuming a beam narrow enough to do anything.) It's like keeping what county you live in secret so people can't break into your house. Um, whatever.
And part of me suspects this is as intelligent as keeping the launch time for the space shuttle secret until 48 hours before the launch, but telling everyone the date....when they only had one launch window per day. If we now where the satellites were, we logically should still be able to find them. (In fact, we can find them anyway, with no data at all! They're flying overhead in the sky! We can just look for them!)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This data concerns surveillance of space, not surveillance from space.
There are no "images" distributed by Space-Track
Building an attitude control system (a cluster of miniature rocket engines, plus control system) is nontrivial, too.
ObNit- you really, really don't want to use rocket engines for attitude control. Venting possibly condensible gases around a mirror you can't get to is a bad idea.
Hubble uses reaction wheels for attitude control. I assume the KH-es do the same. (Great bit from The Hubble Wars had a CIA spook commenting that Hubble was basically a KH-11-class spy satellite, just pointing the other way.)
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Aiming it at a precise spot with utterly no wobble: quite tricky
Doing all of the above in a hard-to-detect package: remarkably difficult.
Otherwise, everyone would be doing it.
Not keplarian - TLE (NORAD 2-line elements).
They have some values in common, but TLE's are different, and are used more often for satellite tracking.
Yeah, you might use a TLE to target a satellite, but if you're sophisticated enough to shoot down a satellite, you'll have the resources to construct your own TLE's from observational data.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
FUD and tinfoil hats or perhaps not.
You have to download an application to convert the data into a useable format.
As another poster pointed out the terms of use snippet "... By continuing, you consent to your keystrokes and data content being monitored." is a bit interesting.
Taken together you have given permission for someone to monitor your keystrokes as well as given them the means to do so.
I would be interested in the results of someone monitoring the data being sent from the local system after this application was installed.
And yes, it's quite possible that this is nothing but a fanciful lark. But keyloggers are not uncommon, nor are people or groups who want that data so it seems reasonable to take a look.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Please. NORAD has never released TLEs on the United States' classified satellites. The only data they ever provided was for locating weather, geosynchronous, communications, nav and other civilian / foreign birds, and other big junk like abandoned rocket boosters. There's not a sensitive bird on that list, and there never has been.
That's not what the article was about. The article was about two separate events: NASA terminating their mandated OIG support a few weeks early due to a hardware failure, (it's understandable even if it's violating the terms Congress laid down.) But more importantly, it's about them no longer providing unfettered access to absolutely, totally harmless data. What's the risk in letting anyone (terrorists included) know where the GPS satellites are? The weather satellites? Civilian commo birds? They're 60 miles straight up in space! I can't do anything to them and neither can anyone else. (Or, to rephrase, the only organizations capable of harming those satellites are already capable of tracking them.)
More specifically though, why do I have to sign up on a list to get this data? "You want freedom? Register yourself on this list of free people." WTF is up with that? I could almost understand it if they requested me to pay for the bandwidth I use, but this is simply tracking me for the purpose of tracking me. I want to know why.
Finally, the crack about "quietly" was in regards to this legislation being passed in 2003, and it took a NASA server failure two years later for me to find out about it.
John
What's the risk in letting anyone (terrorists included) know where...
...why do I have to sign up on a list to get this data?
...this is simply tracking me for the purpose of tracking me.
...the crack about "quietly" was in regards to this legislation being passed in 2003, and it took a NASA server failure two years later for me to find out about it.
Presumably, someone believes there's risk in allowing anonymous people to learn where these things are located. That's a different risk than the potential to destroy them. And, they are considerably higher the "60 miles straight up".
Again, presumably, because someone wants to know who's looking at it. You haven't lost any freedoms, just your anonymity. Life is full of that and it doesn't retrict you.
I doubt anyone is going to actively track anyone using this service. Costs way too much.
I want to know why.
Ask them.
Whose fault is that? Hundreds of bills were passed in 2003. Do you expect someone to wake you up and tell you about each one? Congress publishes them all; call the GPO and get a subscription.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
It's just another stupid story spit out to take everyone's mind off the real issues.
Like oh let's see
Nationally banning electronics, digitized data and insecure networks from the United States elections.
Because it's an improper use of technology that is being abused to domestically attack our government by controling every issue and denying the right to vote to the people.
Everyone who has sworn an oath to protect the president, The United States of America and the constitution of the United States of America against all threats both foreign and domestic should be really busy right now.
My advice is the next time you vote you need to file an election / fraud complaint form and turn it in locally at your precint.
Your right to vote was denied.
The moment your vote was digitized, it literally disappeared. It traveled at the speed of light and vanished, and because humans can't see or physically go that fast they can not audit it in that enviornment.
Therefore it didn't count.
Since it didn't count, your right to vote was denied.
the people in pre-pre-emptive strike Iraq
This sig is intentionally blank
It was indeed corporate based. The corporations were the new fiefs and their leaders the new feudal lords. The fascist dictator stood at the apex, like the kings of feudal times. Corporations were not just business entities. You also had worker corporations, the military corporation, etc. But the entire society was organized in a rigid structure that allowed no criticism and little choice.
The system in the USA seems to be evolving towards a softer neo-feudalism, sort of like the Republic of Venice.
I would expect that with the new means of communication at our disposal, better education, less working hours, we would evolve towards more direct means doing politics. Athenian style democracy. There are some subtle hints of this being in progress, but the existing structure is resisting and trying to move in the opposite direction.
I was not referring to terrorists but countries like North Korea and Iran.
Yes building a laser that can zap something almost 300 miles away is hard but surely easier than building an atomic bomb, which both of the countries listed above are already doing.
Spy sattelites are quite problematic for countries that dont want to piss the US off but at the same time want to hide stuff from the UN. Spy satelites are what is used to obtain the data besides drones.
Satalites are visible to the naked eye if you go out into the country at night. They are only a around 200 miles away.
A portable laser with a super concentrated beam that is large with a precise aiming is surely possible with enough resources.
http://saveie6.com/
To shoot a laser through hundreds of miles of air and have it be powerful enough to even slightly affect a satellite (And I'm talking about screwing up the images here, which might works because the imaging system is so sensitive.), would require a huge amount of resources, and an amazing power supply. It's doable by any nation that can send thing into space, but, at that point, you have to start wondering why they don't fire a damn missile at it.
To disable a satellite? That's an absurd amount of energy. If you didn't have a nuclear reactor, I guess you could build one into a power plant or something. But there's no fucking point. It's like trying to design a surface-to-air screwdrive for taking airplanes apart in midair. Shot a missile at it and stop screwing around.
We're talking laser's that are heavier to haul around than nuclear missiles, require more power when used than a city of a million people do at the same time, and can be disabled with a frickin handgun. And the only concept people have come up with require large amounts of really exotic materials. This is not a militarily useful concept.
I mean, if we could build lasers that could do that, we would. But we can't even build lasers we can mount on tanks and use to shoot soldiers or other tanks.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?