Spy Chief Hints At Limits On Satellite Photos

An anonymous reader writes "Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, says that the increasing availability of commercial satellite photos may require the government to restrict distribution. 'I could certainly foresee circumstances in which we would not want imagery to be openly disseminated of a sensitive site of any type, whether it is here or overseas,' he said. This would include imagery on Web sites such as Google Earth, because the companies that supply the photos get help from the NGIA with launches." I had never heard of this particular intelligence agency. During the early months of the invasion of Afghanistan they bought up all satellite imagery over that country, worldwide, in a tactic later dubbed "checkbook shutter control."

Comments

NGA not NGIA

[DivineHawk]

Kind of like calling the USA "USOA" or the FBI "FBOI".

Re:NGA not NGIA

[osu-neko]

Actually not like that at all. But you are correct that it's officially the NGA, not NGIA.

Re:NGA not NGIA

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he actually means NIGA - the intelligence agency from the ghetto.

Re:NGA not NGIA

[Simon Garlick]

nga plz.

Re:NGA not NGIA

[Anonymous Coward]

You know... that was actually pretty funny.

Re:NGA not NGIA

[Anonymous Coward]

NIMA supposedly considered going with eNIMA before switching to NGA. Don't know how true it is but I have a couple friends that work there and they were the one's who told me about it. Don't know if they were joking or serious. The choice to go with NGA rather than NGIA apparently is due to a trend with agencies to go with three letter abbreviated names (i.e. NSA, CIA, and now NGA).

Jim

Restriction on restriction

[denoir]

They can try to restrict as much as they can, but the fact is that much of the satellite images used by for instance Google are from non-US commercial sources. The only thing they'll accomplish by a restriction is hurting US business. The images will still be available from European and Japanese satellites.

More realistic is that they have to learn to live with the fact that satellite images are available to the general public and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[garcia]

The only thing they'll accomplish by a restriction is hurting US business. The images will still be available from European and Japanese satellites.

Or US companies will just start doing more flyovers like they have been for Microsoft's Live Maps which offer views of locations from multiple locations (N, E, S, W). They are already trying to ban picture taking by civilians at various locations (what is this fucking North Korea?) and the flyovers will be next :(

Re:Restriction on restriction

[networkBoy]

FTFA:
They *bought* all the imagery.
You can restrict information in many ways you know.
-nB

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Ernesto Alvarez]

More like they paid for the information not to be distributed.
The same information can be sold many times, it's not something that can be out of stock.
There is always the chance of someone having the information and not wanting an "exclusive deal" with the US intelligence community.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...non-US commercial sources...

Terraists.

...images will still be available from European and Japanese satellites...

Either they are for US or against US.

...learn to live with the fact...

You must be new here. This regime does not "live with facts".

Re:Restriction on restriction

[ScentCone]

More realistic is that they have to learn to live with the fact that satellite images are available to the general public and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Um, it's not the NGA that would have to 'adjust their strategy.' It's the many facilities, run by everyone from the DoE to DoS to DoD to state and municipal entities, all of which would have to adapt to it.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[demachina]

Exactly. The U.S. bureaucracy in particular, and America in general has such a massive dose of arrogance they are under the delusion they can still dictate anything and everything to the whole planet.

90% of whats gone wrong in the last six years is almost entirely due to a acute arrogance mixed with bad case of ignorance on the part of the people in the Bush administration. That's a really dangerous cocktail.

Russia, China, the E.U., Japan and India all have respectable capabilities to build and launch satellites, and more are joining the club. When the Space Shuttle is scraped there is probably going to be a very long window in which Russia and China will be able to put men in to orbit and the U.S. wont. The U.S. tries to bottle up satellite imagery I'm sure Russia or China will fill the void just to poke a finger in the eye of the U.S.

To me this just sounds like another round of post 9/11 fear mongering.

The U.S. seriously needs to wake up to the fact that the biggest threat to its National security is its massive trade and budget deficits, broken education system, energy dependence on parts of the world it can no long control, and a plunging dollar because no one has confidence in the U.S. anymore.

If the U.S. were spending money on those issues instead of on an out of control defense industrial complex:

A. It would be a lot more prosperous and secure
B. The rest of the world would hate the U.S. a lot less and have fewer reasons to want to attack it

The best defense program the U.S. could invest in right now is a serious effort to improve car mileage ASAP and then to develop clean, renewable and affordable energy sources.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[SpaceLifeForm]

Totally agree.

The best defense would be getting rid of the elements
that are inside the US that are actively trying to
damage the US.

The current admin does everything, seriously, everything
wrong, which creates long term damage.

You can predict what their response will be to any
situation: whatever will create damage will be the choice.

The list is long. Katrina is a good example.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[networkBoy]

"There is always the chance of someone having the information and not wanting an "exclusive deal" with the US intelligence community."
not likely.
Money talks.
"sure you can buy it, it costs $"
"mumble mumble no redistribution, mumble pay $$"
"well, normally I get $ from at least three companies, plus many 1/$ from smalltime users"
"mumble, family, mumble $$$$$$"
"deal!, you want the disks?"
"nah, we got better, mumble, destroy"
-nB

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget CTU and "Division"!

Re:Restriction on restriction

[adarklite]

You can restrict a lot if you put your mind to it. The other countries will do as the US wishes because they don't want their sensitive military and intelligence data posted in a public forum as well. Quid pro quo. We don't want this information released to the general public and you don't want this information released.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[ishobo]

That plunging dollar has been helping our economy, making our exports attractive to foreign markets. Coporations also use the weak dollar to their advatange when repatriating their profits.

Russia has been helping us with our space needs for awhile; they have a contract in place with NASA.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[PayPaI]

90% of whats gone wrong in the last six decades is almost entirely due to a acute arrogance mixed with bad case of ignorance on the part of the people in the presidential administration. That's a really dangerous cocktail.

Fixed it for you.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[stanfer]

I see that the images will still be available from European and Japanese satellites. But ,in fact ,it needs time to prove it .

Re:Restriction on restriction

[argStyopa]

"The current admin does everything, seriously, everything
wrong, which creates long term damage.

You can predict what their response will be to any
situation: whatever will create damage will be the choice.

The list is long. Katrina is a good example."

If the current adminstration was able to cause Katrina, then perhaps that tinfoil hat isn't going to be enough.....

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Torvaun]

Personally, I'd rather see nearly out of control spending in defense R&D. Pretty much everything Defense has will trickle down. More accurate rifles go to hunters, better communications goes to everyone, better explosive compounds go to industry, better vehicles go to everyone, and the raw science developed makes all sorts of awesome stuff possible. Medicine, power, the works.

Defense has the money to spend and the motivation to spend it. I'd personally like to see more government sponsored think tanks like the Manhattan Project.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be a lot cheaper if they just fly their agents in and buy all the maps
and video tape the sites of interest. Gee, didnt Al quaida did that?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[wirelessbuzzers]

They are already trying to ban picture taking by civilians at various locations (what is this fucking North Korea?) and the flyovers will be next :( Once upon a time, it was considered acceptable that some information was unavailable to the public. For instance, the layout of nuclear facilities, the locations and materiel of defensive bases, or the site layouts and security measures of critical but vulnerable civilian infrastructure (dams, nuclear plants, hazardous waste facilities, fuel refineries, chemical plants, etc). It used to be that taking high-resolution pictures of such installations, systematically mapping the civilian and military infrastructure, and giving them out to foreign governments was considered treason. This was true for years in the USA, Canada, and wherever else in addition to "fucking North Korea." It seems reasonable that this should continue to be true.

The general public has basically no need for this sort of information, but a hypothetical attacker does. There may not actually be many terrorists or spies in the US right now, but there's a decent chance that there are some, and in the past they've been very interested in this stuff. Maybe they can get it anyway, but let's make them at least risk exposure to do their reconnaissance, OK?

You can rant all you want about security through obscurity, but the real world isn't a cryptosystem. The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline (at least, as long as photographing it is illegal). Furthermore, Kerckhoff's principle doesn't say that systems shouldn't be obscure, just that their security shouldn't depend on it. Obscurity is still a valid defense in depth.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[RobertinXinyang]

Go ahead and try to look at Google Earth in China. The closest you can zoom into is a drawn outline with major rivers. Satelite imagry is totaly forbidden. This is the country that, this year, outlawed private mapping activities.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[hey!]

I agree with your post for the most part, but let me play devil's advocate.

The US Government could absolutely stop the distribution of commercial high resolution satellite imagery, plus keep tabs on what satellite imagery people obtain, at least at the outset.

The method is simple. The method is foolproof to the point that it could only be circumvented by space faring nations. While it would be moderately pricey, but within the range of the kind of money it takes to fight the Global War on Terror(tm) it isn't that expensive. It would have many public benefits to offset the cost.

The downside is that it would destroy a private industry.

The method is simply this: The US Government provide a comprehensive, frequently updated database of high resolution earth imagery for free to any user who registers with their service.

Imagery of sensitive areas will be provided at limited resolution, or at high resolution but with sensitive details redacted. Organizations that could show a need for high res imagery of, say 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could obtain clearance upon showing need and proper safeguards.

An higher resolution version of the Rapid Fire MODIS system could be used to target environmental events such as disasters.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[infolation]

Very true, especially China which has shown it is able to take US intellectual property and successfully commercially exploit it, despite American disapproval.

If the US restriced commercial access to satellite imagary, China would step in to fill the void in the same way it has in the pharmaceutrical market, software markets etc.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

public has basically no need for this sort of information

Are you sure about that? Just by you saying that, out of curiosity I want to fire up Google Earth and find such sites, just to see if they are grayed out or how they look. In fact, does the general public 'need' to look at their house on the satellite map? Do they 'need' to see how Disnay World looks from space? - No they don't. Except for some specific applications people don't 'need' to use satellite maps, Their lives were fine before the Google Earth came about and they would probably been alrigh if Google Earth would have never been released.

The point is that people 'want' to look at those sites. Not because they will go there, or attack them or do anything evil, but just out of curiosity or because 'they can'. As the grandparent put it, the govt. can tell the US business not to map certain areas, but then Chinese, Japanese and European satellites will map it and, surprise, make it available on the net. Besides if the layout of some nuclear plant is the only thing that keeps that plant secure from 'teh terrorists' then we might as well blow it up ourselves because it is close to not having any security at all then.

The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline (at least, as long as photographing it is illegal)

Of course, except for blowing themsevles up and wanting to kill thousands of innocent civilians, such an attacker would _never_ break law and take pictures, right?

The secrecy of location / layout will not and should not be considered as a 'defence'. Because the govt. is reacting this way, means that they do rely, at least partially, on 'security-by-obscurity'. Instead of forcing the US business to gray out maps, they should adapt and accept the fact everything will be visible from space. The did that during the Cold War, I don't know why they can't hold the same assumption now.

but let's make them at least risk exposure to do their reconnaissance, OK?

Performing reconessance is not that difficult and I don't remember any terrorist plots being foiled recently because someone was caught doing reconessance. I do recall many photographers being harrassed for taking pictures of bridges, building and other such things, you know... the same stuff they have been taking pictures of the last 200 years or so...

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Once upon a time, it was considered acceptable that some information was unavailable to the public.

Once upon a time, it was considered that governments would use official secrets only to protect genuinely sensitive information.

That time has passed. Western governments have been caught with their pants down, repeatedly, abusing their privilege of withholding information from the public for political reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding the security of the nation and its people.

The general public has basically no need for this sort of information, but a hypothetical attacker does.

Perhaps, but (a) you were talking about detailed information relating to critical infrastructure, which is pretty close to being a straw man in a discussion about satellite imagery that clearly has many potential uses for the average person and probably doesn't show more than three big buildings in an L-shape, and (b) this question is really a matter of principle and not of specifics: should the presumption be that information must be released to the people by the people's government, or that the government may withhold information at will from the people?

My views on this one are pretty clear now: no political administration should be allowed to keep any information away from the public, without a clear national security reason for doing so, as determined by an impartial official observer not directly connected with or accountable to the administration of the day.

If you don't understand why the balance of power must be this way to protect the people, take a look at my sig, and then read a good book on 20th century history with that in mind.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

But a plunging dollar also implies that we don't have much worth exporting. Which is a rather bad thing.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

"The list is long. Katrina is a good example"

You are a friggin idiot. Katrina? Phhhaleeze! The problem with Katrina had little to do with the Fed and EVERYTHING to do with the city, county, and state government. Shit, if you are living in a area prone to hurricanes, would it not make sense to have some kind of emergency plan? Add to that, if you are living in a city that is BELOW sea level AND prone to hurricanes, then you are a friggin bozo for not being ready.

Sure it is easy to place the blame on Bush, after all, he is the one who is responsible for global warming. It is his fault everyone below him is a complete idiot - and EVERYONE includes the state government, county government, city government, and all of the people who have placed themselves in the situation to have to DEPEND on the government for their continued existence on this planet.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[SkyDude]

The best defense would be getting rid of the elements that are inside the US that are actively trying to damage the US.The current admin does everything, seriously, everything wrong, which creates long term damage.

Ummm...it seems the "current admin" hasn't done everything wrong

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

The damage is the rampant stupidy. Plain and simple. Back in the day, it was thought that if everyone is educated, they would be able to vote with their 'heads' and be accountable, intelligent citizens of a democratic country.

Now we are a mob, rulled by those who exploit our fears to their benefit. They yell 'TeH TerroRistZ!' and we give them all our freedom and run for cover, or attack randomly some country for a desperate show of force.

What we are is a bunch of lazy, fat, stupid but strong bullies with tons of nukes and high tech killing machines. The world despises us, but we plow through. Eventually we'll stop though. We can only run so high of a deficit and our IQ can get only get so low before others (EU, Russia, China) will start to laugh at us.

Yes, I still believe there is a future, just a different future, not the kind that we are headed to if we stay on this present 'course'.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[KlausBreuer]

No, no, they're not interested in causing damage.

They're interested in

a) making money, and helping out their friends in making money and
b) stroking their own ego.

They're not interested in anything else at all.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

Medicine, power, the works.

Remind me please, what branch of the millitary is working on a cure for cancer or heart disease?

More accurate rifles go to hunters...

Lord knows, the only problem in our society is those inaccurate guns. If we could only kill animals and each other more efficiently...we could eventually find a cure for cancer.. right?

I _might_ accept the "trickle-down effect" argument when it come to economy in general, as that is the big arugment of 'let the companies get rich as hell, we'll get a share of the pie eventually' crowd. But I am not buying the same when applied to the military sector.

In fact, the funding for NIH has been cut and the funding for federal student load aids have been cut, all as a result of funneling the money into the military industrial machine. And, if you are not aware of it, NIH is the agency that distributes grants to researchers to find the proverbial "cure for cancer". So it seems that the defense spending actually set us back.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A government can never make its country 100% physically secure in the real world. There are too many "key" targets in civilian infrastructure: transport systems; utility supplies (electricity, water, gas, etc.); government facilities; emergency services; the list goes on. You can't protect them all, because the number of people involved in security would then become so great that vetting them all sensibly would be impossible in practice.

For the same reason, no government surveillance culture will ever be 100% effective. You could monitor every communication in every medium around the world, and employ state-of-the-art software to filter it, and you still wouldn't have enough suitably smart and trustworthy people to analyse it all in real time.

The whole idea that central government can somehow "prevent terrorism" in some magic, blanket way is an illusion, and always has been. The idea that civilian infrastructure does not need to be conscious of its own security is an illusion, and always has been. If showing someone what a couple of rooftops look like at your nuclear power station is really enough to pose a serious threat, you might as well paint an X on the relevant spot and label it "bomb here", since you're obviously an easy target anyway.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

The US Government could absolutely stop the distribution of commercial high resolution satellite imagery, plus keep tabs on what satellite imagery people obtain, at least at the outset.The method is simple.

Wait, it gets more simple than that. Russia/China/EU create a web service that replicate Google maps, why? Just because they can. What's US government going to do, nuke everyone? Or start another meaningless war -- "teh war on teh satellite image providers". And besides we all know how hard it is to censor information by force (09F9...)

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

There may not actually be many terrorists or spies in the US right now, but there's a decent chance that there are some,

Can you say Fort Dix?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[tinkerghost]

Once upon a time, it was considered acceptable that some information was unavailable to the public. For instance, the layout of nuclear facilities, the locations and materiel of defensive bases, or the site layouts and security measures of critical but vulnerable civilian infrastructure (dams, nuclear plants, hazardous waste facilities, fuel refineries, chemical plants, etc). It used to be that taking high-resolution pictures of such installations, systematically mapping the civilian and military infrastructure, and giving them out to foreign governments was considered treason. This was true for years in the USA, Canada, and wherever else in addition to "fucking North Korea." It seems reasonable that this should continue to be true.

Once upon a time the taking of photographs of tresle bridges & buildings with interesting archetecture was not only approved of, it was encouraged. Now, the police come to talk to you & demand your film & then arrest you if you don't give it to them. Talk to members of the photography clubs in your area, I am willing to bet that at least one of them has either been arrested or had their film confiscated for taking landscape/archetecture photos. In MA/CT it's a known & growing problem.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[projektsilence]

You'll probably get a visit from the Anti-Terrorist Strike Force, also known as Team America, or the Department of Homeland Security for your 'terroristic threat' to blow up a nuclear power plant. Don't you know the gubment reads /.? ;)

Re:Restriction on restriction

[tinkerghost]

Actually this administration scrapped the FEMA structure & bundled it into homeland security without creating clear channels of communication - at the same time blocking a lot of the old channels.

Next they had a report that New Orleans was in danger from a cat 3 or better hurricane - a report that was frighteningly accurate - that they discarded because they felt the damage estimates were much too high. This is just one of many examples for this administration where they cherry pick the information to act on in order to further their private/political agendas instead of actually bothering to understand the situation and take action that might actually have a real & lasting benefit.

I've said it before - this Iraq war is just the Shrubs way of showing daddy his balls are bigger.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

That's so true. It happened to my friend in the pre-9/11 world. He was talking something about the president and how vulnerable he would be to assination or something like that on a public forum. There was nothing about anyone wanting to do it or planning or saying that it would be a good or bad thing. Before he knows it, FBI comes to his work to have 'a talk' with him and scare him with some macho 'we are all powerful, we pop the eyes out of the 1st Ammendment's skull fuck the sockets if we want to.' Then at the same time they send a team to his house to talk to his wife and 5 year old daughter. They sat the daughter down and asked her if daddy builds bombs in the basement... -- real story (search Kuro5hin for it). That all was happening as the real terrorists were planning their 9/11 attack. Gotta love our government...

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

Good comeback. You don't work for the NGA by any chance, do you?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[projektsilence]

haha.. now for telling THAT story, you're really going to be investigated.. have fun with the FBI.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[radtea]

The general public has basically no need for this sort of information

I have an epistemological question: How do you know what I need? And for that matter, how do you know what the 300-odd-million people living in the United States need?

It may "just makes sense" to you that no one anywhere has any need of any of this information, but there is a word for an epistemology built on what "just makes sense": faith.

I don't see why your faith should restrict my access to information, particularly when it is information that the public has been able to access for many, many years. Your statements about restrictions on information such as layouts of dams, refineries and nuclear plants are mostly false: as a child I toured several such facilities in Canada and the United States on family vacations They were open to the public, even to the extent of having viewing galleries over the turbine halls in some power plants, and being able to enter some dams and see the penstocks. No restrictions on picture-taking were in place, and in any case a sketch artist or engineer with a competent memory could easily have ascertained most of the salient details and recorded them subsequently.

This was in the days when the Cold War was still moderately warm, and the West was being threatened with extermination by people who actually had the capability to do widespread damage, rather than a bunch of rats in a hole somewhere whose dreams extend to shooting fewer innocent people than are killed every day by domestic violence in the U.S. In those days it was illegal to take pictures of bridges and other public infrastructure in the Soviet Union, but not in Canada or America.

So while the ubiquity of high quality aerial and satellite photography is unfortunate from a security standpoint, it is by no means clear why the highly speculative needs of the organs of the state should trump the public's undoubted need to oversee government and private installations by any and all means available, because we know from millennia of experience that if we ever let the organs of the state or private industry go unwatched for a moment that some individuals charged with the public trust will violate that trust in very dangerous ways.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Apoklypse]

and "in fact", (US government) nature abhors a factuum

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

Nah...wait someone is at my doo.DD:KSDFKFDSD HFKSDHFK adfkasdf

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame the people of the US, we didn't vote for the administration and I don't see the rest of you coming and liberating us.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[uradu]

> The general public has basically no need for this sort of information

As was pointed out by other posters, you could take this argument to the extreme and argue that the general public has essentially no "need" for just about any kind of information other than where to get their next meal from. This was the stance of many totalitarian regimes, including all the communist and fascist ones of the 20th century. Is that the kind of society you want to live in? A truly free society should take the opposite approach: the government should have to have extremely strong justification for keeping ANY information from the population that finances it and that it represents. How about this: if something is truly sensitive and must be kept secret, how about doing everything humanly possible to actually KEEP it secret and invisible, like a lot of things governments have managed to keep secret over time even under public scrutiny. The strategy of placing a proverbial elephant in the living room and then posting signs to move along because there's nothing to see, and making it illegal to look at that hard-to-miss elephant smacks too much of Soviet Union methodology.

Incidentally, there's still very little reason to believe that any credible threat will come in the form of highly sophisticated aerial weapons that require the kind of satellite imagery available on Google. Soviet technology has been leaking for almost twenty years now, and if anything the leaks are being plugged by the Putin administration. In terms of bang-for-the buck and reasonably available expertise, it's hard to beat what we see in Iraq on an almost daily basis: pack a huge truck that can provide a lot of momentum full of explosives and accelerate it at full tack towards the intended target, hoping that it will break through enough physical barriers to still create significant damage. This approach is cheap and benefits little from satellite imagery, but suffers from the significant downside of being immune to official hand waving and fear mongering regarding high tech terrorist weapons.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't believe a word of it.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[RagnarokGod]

see, that's the kind of thing wrong with (clearly) a certain sub-set of mods around here, this is obviously a +5 Funny, and it gets modded -1 - 'plain Lucy, please ...

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Sax Maniac]

Gee, what do... mod up the parent, or reply to your totally wrong rant?

He wasn't modded down, he probably just has bad karma and posts start out at -1. Click on the comment ID and see no moderation done to it. Click on his username and take a look at the posting history.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[mjbinon]

The general public has basically no need for this sort of information
I actually agree with this statement. Personally, I am a curious person, and I like to look stuff up purely for the sake of looking, but I'm also intelligent enough to understand that in some cases the need for security outweighs "curiousity". Such as the example given in TFA about the US paying to restrict satellite images of Afganistan during the conflict there. If doing this saves the lives of US soldiers, it doesn't bother me that I can't check out military camps in Afganistan from satellite pictures.

If I fire up Google Earth tomorrow and find that the Pentagon, Camp Pendleton, etc... are greyed out, I'm not going to lose sleep over it or decry the "loss of my rights and freedom".

For another example, while the location of Camp David is not exactly completely classified, the US government doesn't go out of its way to advertise, and in fact keeps that info pretty close to the vest. However, if you know where to look, which I do, and zoom in close enough in Google Earth, you'll see that there it is, not just visible, but plainly marked with a POI flag and labeled "Camp David". Personally, I feel this is undermining a reasonable security measure just a little too much.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[pipatron]

If doing this saves the lives of US soldiers

There's a much easier and obvious way to save the lives of US soldiers, but unfortunately I only want to provide that information on a need-to-know basis.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[aztektum]

The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline

So you're saying someone that REALLY wants to try and take out a nuke site is just going to say "Oh crap, no satellite images. I guess we'll just have to drive a truck through the gate!" The only thing the satellite images do is cut time off the initial work (understanding the layout) They will find a way to map the installation without it, then the real planning>>execution can take place.

Obviously you haven't been paying attention. 9/11 wasn't thrown together in 48 hours because they suddenly had an idea and used Google to fill in the blanks. The dingle berries just arrested in Pennsylvania didn't just start throwing out ideas last week. If someone REALLY wants to get this done, they will take their time.

Someone else has already pointed out that other nations will keep distributing these images, guaranteed. The almighty US isn't the only one with spy satellites. And a government with a security policy that primarily focuses on "making information illegal" shouldn't be trusted on principle. At some point (I'm sure they are now) they will use that as cloak and dagger to destroy any information that makes them look bad, "National security! Yeah, you understand. Move along."

Re:Restriction on restriction

[demachina]

Yea but that has nothing to do with the Chinese handing out imagery of the U.S. and U.S. military assets around the world.

I don't think this General was worried about suppressing detailed imagery of China on the Internet.

The one thing in this General's court is its true that Russia, China, India and the EU are probably about as paranoid as the U.S. is about the free flow of information they don't control.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[demachina]

"Satelite imagry is totaly forbidden."

I forgot to add, this is a really inaccurate statement. Satelite imagery of China can't be and isn't "forbidden". All those commercial satelites and a bunch of military satellites don't suddenly go blind when they are flying over China(unless China lases them some day). If Google doesn't have imagery of China its more likely just because China has bullied either them or the commercial satellite companies in to not posting it.

In a lot of ways its China's loss. I imagine there are all kinds of economically useful applications for that data they are screwing themselves out of. And its not like they are hiding anything from the U.S., E.U. or Russian satellites which are the potential military adversaries that matter.

I'm really skeptical there is actually that much in satellite imagery to really hide since you CAN'T hide it from adversaries with their own spy satellites. Thinking you are going to really hinder a terrorist attack by denying them an an overhead view of a target is kind of delusional. Terrorist and insurgent attacks will adapt to the information they have.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Torvaun]

Hey, remember hearing about those sonic bandages that can cause clotting? Those'll show up in the civilian market too. Of course the DoD isn't going to care about cancer, but there's plenty of stuff related to saving a soldier's life or getting said soldier back on the field faster that we can use on the outside too.

As far as more accurate rifles go, I wasn't trying to call that a major benefit, I was trying to show that there is very little that won't trickle down, even weapons will. My father has a 30.06 for deer, and that's the rifle used by army and marines snipers in Vietnam.

Again, I'm for the increase in R&D spending, not cranking out tanks and guns. The Manhattan Project are pretty much the only ones to deserve credit for nuclear power plants. Why shouldn't another one figure out that pesky fusion problem that's been plaguing the Navy? There are a lot of advances in R&D that will be made faster by the application of unimaginable resources.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[demachina]

I was going to place that caveat in my post but it was already getting long. It certainly is helping Boeing bury Airbus because they have a 20%+ price advantage on airline deals which are usually done in dollars.

The obvious flaw is our biggest trade problem is with China, and since the Chinese peg the Yuan to the dollar we can't gain any trade balance there because the currencies aren't floatng against each other to correct the forces driving the trade balance. To peg the Yuan the Chinese buy lots of treasuries so they are subsidizing U.S. debt and gaining increasing economic leverage over the U.S. at the same time.

As someone else posted here, the U.S. increasingly has very little to export.

Devaluing your currency does help competitiveness but it is a very dangerous game. As your currency devalues it makes foreigners stop investing in your economy or currency which causes it to devalue further. If the world decides dollars are worthless and switches to selling oil in Euros or pounds then as our currency devalues the price of oil explodes and then oil import completely offset any economic advantage of a lower dollar.

The only reason the U.S. economy and the stock market isn't in a complete shambles is because most big U.S. companies have globalized so they do great exploiting cheap Chinese and Indian labor and selling in foreign markets while the fundamentals of the U.S. economy is mostly in really poor shape.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[e-scetic]

I don't believe this is true of Canada, that taking photos of ANY place and trafficking them, to whoever, could amount to treason. I've never heard or read of such a thing.

It's Canada, for crying out loud, it's not like we're developing 5241324 different secret ways to kill, spy on, dissapear and torture people. We don't have a Los Alamos , Area 51, Gauntanamo or Cheyenne Mountain. The nearest thing I can think of is the various NORAD radar installations and there are plenty of photos of those floating around. Hint: They're really cute.

Come to think of it, I rather like that we don't have a lot of dirty secrets.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Snowtide]

Did they cause the hurricane no. Did they remove the funds for needed flood control work to finance the war in Iraq? Yes.

So, the administartion is very much responsible for the damage, flooding and deaths caused by Katrina.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[SL Baur]

The point is that people 'want' to look at those sites. I suppose it boils down to that and the fact that the American taxpayer has paid for most of it. I paid for it, let me see it.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drinkypoo]

You can rant all you want about security through obscurity, but the real world isn't a cryptosystem.

This is a logical fallacy. Not that the world isn't a cryptosystem (although that would explain a lot) but you're implying that security through obscurity doesn't work in the real world, because it isn't a system of cryptography, where the system doesn't work.

Security through obscurity doesn't work in crypto or in meatspace.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[gomoX]

Here's something you might want to consider.

In life, there are many situations where you need to take a decision based on incomplete or lacking information. These situations are usually mathematically characterized by what's called a Statistical Hypothesis Test. This type of test involves either the acceptance of a hypothesis, or the rejection of it.

As such, there are 2 possible error situations: either you rejected the hypothesis and it was true, therefore you were wrong, or you accepted it and it was false, making you wrong again. In general these 2 types of errors are very distinct and people generally try to minimize one respect to the other.

For example, in criminal trial cases, the system is so that for every innocent that goes to jail, many, many guilty individuals have walked out the door. This is because it has been decided that putting an innocent in jail is much worse, and that's the source of the classic "guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" statement. Many, many times, there *is* reasonable doubt and the defendant walks: he's "innocent until proven guilty".

When you argue about hurricane prediction, the dynamics are similar in concept but very different in shape. I am pretty sure the US Gvt. has many, many weather prediction consultants which have different opinions. This includes the very accurate report you mention, and probably some other now-not-so-accurate reports. The resources for city/state evacuation, OTOH, are pretty limited. Unlike criminal cases where a whole circus is thrown at the crime scene and police investigation for a simple situation, you can never have too many resources for preparing a state for a heavy hurricane if it wasn't planned from the start. Therefore the balance is shifted: no longer can you afford to make either type of error. It's a losing game! If you evacuate a city and nothing happens, a lot of money has been wasted - you might not afford to evacuate somewhere else next month. If you don't evacuate and it does happen, it's pretty bad too.

My point is: In every catastrophic situation there are people who made mistakes, and with Gvt. issues there is probably some paperwork proving it, too. Some journalist will dig it out and people will raise their hands demanding his blood. There is *always* a report that predicted it. But that's just half of the story. It is precisely because intelligence agencies are letting less and less reports slip through that people are complaining much more about their civil liberties.

Such is the nature of the game - you can't win 100% of the time.

PS: I hope this blurb meant something to a real english speaker (unlike me).

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

"but there is a word for an epistemology built on what "just makes sense": faith."

Nope. That would be something like 'common sense'; faith is epistemology built on what once used to maybe make sense. Faith is a historical version of common sense, kinda like 'em fossils Jesus put in the ground to test the god-fearing Xtians.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[korekrash]

That all was happening as the real terrorists were planning their 9/11 attack. Gotta love our government...
For one thing, it doesn't matter what country your in or the government in power, if you talk about killing the leader it will probably not end well for you. Also, I don't understand how this is a bad story? It doesn't even sound like he was harrased. He was talking about killing the president, they stopped by and spoke to him and his family to get a read on if the guy was unstable or not. Since he wasn't removed from his workplace for questioning, they probably determined he wasn't a threat and went on with their day. Where exactly is the harm in this story?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[sgt_doom]

Thanks to the availability of commercial satellite photos, many were able to see the next-day satellite photos of the Pentagon after the 9/11/01 attack. I hope everyone noted the scorch marks still on the Pentagon's roof which clearly denoted a dead-center strike on that one wall.

Interesting how the one way to do the least amount of damage to the Pentagon (striking the wall using the most difficult flying maneuver instead of performing the easiest flying maneuver and striking the Pentagon's top to do the most damage --- and striking the one reinforced wall) was used.....

Re:Restriction on restriction

[korekrash]

This is like the, "Go away Cop, I pay your salary", argument. You also pay for Abrahms tanks, F-18 Hornets, Stinger Missles, etc. Do you honestly believe you should have access to those also? Com'on people, think out of your paranoid, left-wing browsing Linux box for a moment and come back down to the real world....at least once in a while....

Re:Restriction on restriction

[korekrash]

I just want to say that this is the first post I have ever encountered that was so moronic that I couldn't come up with any one reply. My thought process breaks down in light of such stupidity to a point that I am just speechless. Some of you slashdot readers really need to get out of your Linux box once in a while and think about things.....or turn 13 years old....I'm not sure which one is more prevalent, idiocy or naivety.....

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

turn 13 years old

I'll turn 13 in 11 years, buy my mommy says I am a boi already.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Omestes]

Unlike most of the other people replying to you, I agree.

If the government was working under the assumption that our enemies had access to detailed satellite imagery under the Cold War, why would they suddenly expect something different now? I'm sure they had defense of critical sites in mind during the Cold War, when the Soviets had access to the layout of sites, so why would these alternative strategies be suddenly obsolete?

Yes, the intelligence aspect would be harder than forcing private enterprise and individuals to block out any information, but intelligence would be stronger in the long run, since dedicated individuals still will find a way to obtain site information, even with American censorship. As stated, it would be impossible to block the data we already have in the public domain, and furthermore block international satellite imagery from entering the public domain.

I disagree, though, that the the publics WANT of this information plays that big a role. I want a nuclear reactor in my basement, and a tank, but that does not mean I should be granted access to either. I think the bigger issue is that the government does not want to adapt to new technologies, preferring instead to ban them, or restrict them. The world has changed, and you really can't fight that. We have the imagery, and that won't change, no matter how hard the government bangs the censorship hammer. We all have to adapt to new technology, and discover new strategies for security within the emerging paradigm. You can never go back.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[skotte]

Microsoft's Live site is, as you suggest, done by airplanes. Really the only way to get reasonably nice looking images fFor many purposes is to use a plane. Pictometry does some impressive work (No, I don't work fFor them, but my best fFriend does, and he regularly amazes me with what he's working on). Incidentally, any sections of map which which Pictometry hasn't photographed (or hasn't licensed to MS, yet) do not use satelite imagery on MS' live site; they use older aerial survey photos. As fFar as i know, Google maps uses whatever is already available fFrom satellite images, so they will be met with some problems on this new legislation, but the best images seem to be taken by airplane.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Jerry]

In fact, does the general public 'need' to look at their house on the satellite map? Do they 'need' to see how Disnay World looks from space? - No they don't.

And what right do you dismiss the rights of others?

Your failure to see opportunity for personal use in satellite photos doesn't mean they don't exist.

A friend of mind was disappointed because the view of his farm wasn't in the same high resolution as my house. Before I visit a place I've never been before I view it with GoogleEarth OR GoogleMaps (your "thinking" would nullify both sources) to see the best way to get there and what's worth my time to visit and view after I get there. There are many more reason but you get the point.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[ishobo]

The obvious flaw ... trade problem is with China

Yes, I understand that issue, I used to work in the forex industry. Irrepective of China, the weak dollar helps tremendously.

As someone else posted here, the U.S. increasingly has very little to export

This is not true. Food stuffs (both raw and processed), minerals, computer equipment, etc... Yes, we do not have the manufacturing base like China, but to say we have little to export is fear mongering.

As your currency devalues it makes foreigners stop investing in your economy or currency which causes it to devalue further

Again, not true. Foreigners have been investing in our economy at an incredible rate. I am not talking about Treasury bonds and notes. Expansion, buyouts, and stocks all have seen in increase of foreign activity, and the weak dollar gives them incentive to keep up the pace.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2 0F17FD3B5A0C718CDDAC0894DF404482&showabstract=1:

Growing number of Latin American companies are making big investments in US; new 'multi-Latinas' are aggressive, resourceful enterprises that are developing byproduct of market liberalization that swept Latin American economies of 1990s; these Latin American multinationals have even reached places like Wilton, Iowa, tiny prairie town; Brazilian-owned steel company, Gerdau Ameristeel, has become one of two biggest employers in town, importing management style and fresh capital to modernize and expand old mill and temper tough American labor union; last couple of years Mexican company Cemex has emerged as number one supplier of cement and ready-mix concrete in US, with almost 10,000 employees across country; Brazilian oil company Petrobras has become one of biggest players in deep-water exploration of Gulf of Mexico...

If the world decides dollars are worthless

I highly doubt it will get to that level. Remember, currencies do not exist in a vacuum. Major structureal changes, such as switching oil to use the Euro, will send shock waves throughout the world. The minor stock meltdown a few weeks back in China should be a reminder to everybody that the world's economies are not isolated.

most big U.S. companies have globalized

Most of the world has globalized, not just large U.S. companies. I worked for a 50 person small business that generated half of its income from outside the U.S.

fundamentals of the U.S. economy is mostly in really poor shape.

I do not see anything to indicate that. Despite weakness in housing, the U.S. economy is strong, with low unemployment and strengthening exports.

We do have some major issues that are looming: Social Security, Medicare, and the debt. Also, the growth in private health expenditures is a worry.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[ishobo]

There seems to be lots of fear mongering going on regarding the week dollar.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[LWATCDR]

Let me give you an example of some data that may be dangerous.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Barksdale+ AFB+LA&ie=UTF8&ll=32.4938,-93.665201&spn=0.002927, 0.005343&t=h&z=18&om=1
Those are B52s and those are their parking spots. While not realtime data with Google Earth at least you can get the latitude and longitude of those spots. That Air base like most the rest of the US has no real anti-aircraft defense systems it would be very easy to target those planes. You can also see a lot more than three buildings in an L shape. If that isn't good enough for you here are the weapon storage bunkers http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Barksdale+ AFB+LA&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=32.506468,-93.642467&sp n=0.002927,0.005343&z=18&iwloc=addr
  and just for fun some fuel storage http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Barksdale+ AFB+LA&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=32.518368,-93.66394&spn =0.001463,0.002671&z=19&iwloc=addr
and just to show you how good these images are these are some older aircraft they have on static display at the base. This is a B52 with a Mig-21 fighter next to it. I am not an expert but the photos are good enough even for me to identify pretty small aircraft. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Barksdale+ AFB+LA&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=32.518368,-93.66394&spn =0.001463,0.002671&z=19&iwloc=addr
I am not saying that I like the idea but to dismiss it seems less than honest. This is not a black and white issue.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[RealGrouchy]

More realistic is that they have to learn to live with the fact that satellite images are available to the general public and adjust their strategy accordingly. Exactly. Just like the RIAA has with p2p networks!

- RG>

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

While not realtime data with Google Earth at least you can get the latitude and longitude of those spots. That Air base like most the rest of the US has no real anti-aircraft defense systems it would be very easy to target those planes.

Really? What are you going to do, poke the screen with voodoo needles? I rather doubt that anyone with the will to "target those planes" has access to a handy air force.

I am not saying that I like the idea but to dismiss it seems less than honest. This is not a black and white issue.

Granted, that's true, and there is some degree of risk in this. There is also some degree of risk in advertising the exact location of a shopping centre or railway station, where many civilian targets could be hit at once and they are far less capable of defending themselves from anything relevant to this discussion, but we don't hide those, do we?

So while I'll agree that the situation is not entirely black and white, I think it's nearer 99% grey than 50%. :-)

Re:Restriction on restriction

[tinkerghost]

The report in question is the final report by the Army Corps of Engineers - it is supposed to be the report that FEMA, the states, and the Federal Govt all base their spending & planning on. The NO report was set asside in favor of one of the reports it relied on. This is however fairly moot, even if the report had been taken seriously, there was no time between the issuing of the report & the hurricane to reinforce the levies.

Even if that were not the case, the incorperation of FEMA into Homeland Security was a cluster fuck of the highest order. More than any other single issue, the total collapse of the coordination/communication between FEMA, HS, National Guard, and the Red Cross turned what was a huge natural disaster into an even bigger societal one. We had water sitting on pallets for weeks, while people were drinking contaminated water because the people who knew where the water was needed didn't know where the water was.

There are always & will always be mistakes, but in his mad dash to make sure we're all safe, the Shrub has pretty much fucked up every internal system we had to deal with these problems. That's not a mistake, that's incompetence.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[wirelessbuzzers]

This is a logical fallacy. Not that the world isn't a cryptosystem (although that would explain a lot) but you're implying that security through obscurity doesn't work in the real world, because it isn't a system of cryptography, where the system doesn't work.

Security through obscurity doesn't work in crypto or in meatspace. You didn't read what I wrote, did you? Kerckhoff's principle (the original statement of "security through obscurity is bad") says basically that obscurity shouldn't be the main line of defense. Having it as a defense at all is a trade-off: you expend effort maintaining obscurity, have fewer eyes on the system to find problems, but you may reduce your vulnerability to attackers. It's not security through obscurity, but security assisted by obscurity. It's a defense in depth.

In cryptosystems, because in most cases the system will be available for analysis offline, obscurity buys you very little against a determined attacker. There are a lot of cryptographers that might find problems in your system, and if you want it to be secure against a determined and technically capable attacker, it ought to survive scrutiny from them too. Note that, despite these trade-offs, governments keep their ciphers secret. This secrecy is an entirely reasonable defense in depth if you employ as many cryptographers as those governments do.

Because the physical world is not a cryptosystem, this trade-off is different. An attacker has to be physically present to break through your obscurity, and that exposes him to risk: it makes the defense in depth more valuable. Furthermore, it is not as easy to change security measures on a physical installation. Finally, there are more physical security experts available than cryptographers, so you may be able to get an adequate design without opening it to the public. Therefore, there are more situations where obscurity is appropriate.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[wirelessbuzzers]

So you're saying someone that REALLY wants to try and take out a nuke site is just going to say "Oh crap, no satellite images. I guess we'll just have to drive a truck through the gate!" The only thing the satellite images do is cut time off the initial work (understanding the layout) They will find a way to map the installation without it, then the real planning>>execution can take place. Certainly any will try to map the facility. They might succeed, or they might be caught casing the joint and be put under surveillance. They might infiltrate the facility, or they might be caught by a background check. If they just snoop around, there will probably be information in the fly-over photo that they're missing or have in lower quality. In other words, high-resolution photos of the site (fly-overs more than satellite shots) not only cut time off the initial work, they also reduce risk and increase correctness.

Someone else has already pointed out that other nations will keep distributing these images, guaranteed. The almighty US isn't the only one with spy satellites. I was mainly talking about flyovers (which have much more resolution than satellite photos), as that was what GGP was talking about. Other nations had better not be doing flyovers of our facilities and publishing the data. And obviously, once pictures are out, we can't get rid of them, but we can try to reduce the number of new facilities that get photographed, and in what resolution they get photographed.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[dsgrntlxmply]

I recall extensive diagrams of some systems of several nuclear power plants, being on open shelves at one university's engineering library in the early 80s.

If it's not on the NYT best sellers list or Oprah's list, it should probably be locked up. A population who have actual interests and capabilities, apart from one closely monitored and soon-to-be-offshored job in a major corporation or institution, followed by watching television and buying imported plastic crap at big box stores, is a population of suspects.

Today I helped some university students to MAKE something out of small cheap components and scraps of wire, the old-fashioned way. It felt mildly subversive by be-a-consumer-only standards, and it felt good.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[amRadioHed]

That Air base like most the rest of the US has no real anti-aircraft defense systems it would be very easy to target those planes. I think the perimeter of at least 4000 miles between the US and any potentially threatening nations serves quite well as an anti-aircraft defense system. Or do you think there's actually a chance a North Korean bomber could sneak across the ocean and hit us under cover of darkness?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[SL Baur]

You're comparing the wrong thing. High quality maps have been unrestricted and widely available for fifty years now. There's also never been much in the way of restricting civilian access to flight - get a camera and rent a plane and you can have all the aerial photos you want. The knowledge has been available for a long time and it's rather stupid to think there's any security in restricting it now.

You also pay for Abrahms tanks, F-18 Hornets, Stinger Missles, etc. Do you honestly believe you should have access to those also? Other things being equal, which they, alas are not, I believe in citizen access to all that and also believe that governments need disarming not citizens. The leading cause of death in the 20th century was government whether by war or outright slaughter. I used to play NationStates and my fictional nation of Altair featured a highly competitive domestic market for backyard tactical nukes. The discussion used to live at http://merit.jink.org/ but I don't know whether it's still there or not. It's a pity that would never work in today's world, oh well.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[LWATCDR]

Okay I guess you have never heard of a UAV. How about this little toy http://tam.plannet21.com/. It doesn't take much of an explosive payload to damage or destroy a fully fueled plane.
I hate to even post something like this for fear it will give the law makers ideas but even if you scale it up to the size of a small homebuilt like a Quickie or LongEZE you have an effective cruise missile.

You ask and I can show you options.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[LWATCDR]

Your right nobody could use an Aircraft to strike at a US target. Not in our life time...
Yea right.
I am not really worried about an ICBM or bomber. Those we can handle but what about a hijacked cargo plane or even a light plane filled with explosives, or even a small UAV like this one http://tam.plannet21.com/?

The US air defenses are so poor that one September 11 we couldn't intercept any of the planes that hit the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Even after the World Trade Center got hit a plane go through to the Pentagon and would have gotten through to any building in the capital. So no I don't think that the US air defense is good enough. For goodness sakes at least put some SAMs around our military bases.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[drgonzo59]

Are you a effectively a happier person now than you were 5 years ago, before Google maps? You think you are, but I don't it is the case.

You completely misread my post. The point was that people will 'need' to use Google maps to see their house just as much as they would 'need' to look at the nuclear reactor on the other side of town. They are both just about as much of a 'need'. In reality they are 'wants', unless you starve to death , or get sick if you cannot look at GoogleEarth (and there might be rare situations where this will be the case) you want to look at your house, you want to look at the militry installation next door to your house.

If your friend is seriously upset, up to the point where his life in impaired because he couldn't see his house on a high resolution map, you might want to advise him to seek psychiatric help. Serious OSD, depression or pshychosis should not be overlooked.

The point of the post was that what people want is just as important and there will be a company that will eventually supply that. You though , seem to be convinced that looking at Google Earth is a need, something like the need to eat, get medical help or wear clothes. I think you are a little confused...

Re:Restriction on restriction

[RockDoctor]

For instance, the layout of nuclear facilities, the locations and materiel of defensive bases, or the site layouts and security measures of critical but vulnerable civilian infrastructure (dams, nuclear plants, hazardous waste facilities, fuel refineries, chemical plants, etc). It used to be that taking high-resolution pictures of such installations, systematically mapping the civilian and military infrastructure, and giving them out to foreign governments was considered treason.

Fair enough point. But not particularly relevant.
A number of years ago I was flying home from work, and by coincidence my helicopter passed over a high security prison which was undergoing some building work (Peterhead prison, for what it's worth.). Everything in plain view, and if I'd wanted to snap a couple of pictures and sell them to criminals looking to bust their boss out of there, I could have. About 30 seconds later we flew over an old granite quarry near Boddam. Normal quarry, about 200ft deep into solid granite, stopped quarrying when they got to sea level and the water problems got too bad - just the sort of place you'd want to build a hardened NATO bunker into, which the rumour mill has as exactly what they were doing in there. Look down into the quarry - and all I can see is the roof of an industrial marquee covering the whole base of the quarry. All the building work going on under cover from prying eyes. Regardless of whether they're 40,000km up (geostationary), 150km up (Space Shuttle and US military spy satellites that the Shuttle launched so many of), 500m up (us in our paraffin budgie), or 5m up (Jimmy Bond about to abseil into the quarry with his camera and a white cat).
I was driving round the perimeter fence of the Spook-HQ at Cheltenham a few years earlier on the way to the pub, and I thought "what would the Spooks give to be able to put their listening centre 10 miles from the nearest public road?" I guess the answer is both "A lot" and "Not enough", because they've not done it. Then again, they simply couldn't do it without leaving the country.
I was exploring in some popular stone mines near Bath a few years later when we came to a flooded stretch of passage. Then we spotted the little red light at the far end of the straight tunnel. "Oh dear - that's the back door into the UK Government's main nuclear bunker. We must have taken the wrong turn at the 5-way junction a couple of minutes ago." Bye bye, wave at the squaddies watching the cameras.

The military have been camoflaging buildings while building them, and disguising their nature by misleading or anonymous construction patterns, since at the latest the First World War. You're lucky to be living in a country that has room to put Spook bases 50 miles from a town, or to build a nuclear processing plant without everyone in the town you build it in knowing it's ground plan in some detail. But if your military planners have gambled on that distance being enough ... well frankly they've been fools.

Of course, if you look at the satellite versions of those Google links, you'll see one of the other problems. It's not censorship (per se), it's the fog that we call "the Haar". Might be that someone has persuaded Google not to buy-in new photos of the area, but since everyone in the area knows what happens in that quarry, so what?

Re:Restriction on restriction

[bronsinbound]

No, but they are working on it . Unless the American people put a stop the the increasingly 'Gestapo' mentality that is running government, all of us are really screwed! Start writing your Congressmen -- the women won't listen, as any married guy will tell you;^) The Senate doesn't listen very well either, but you should write just to be a thorn in their side if nothing else.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[cbacba]

Twenty years ago, the notion of a 1 meter resolution private satellite sent the intellegence community into a tizzy. Once upon a time people often had to die to get that sort of intel.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[Anonymous Coward]

I also agree with this (that obscurity is a defense mechanism). Steganography relies on security through obscurity. Spies have successfully used steganography to avoid capture for years while providing information. People basically think that a painting is something else entirely, or don't see the information on that paper at all, passing it right up. However, I'd have to say that obscuring a digital map in one place totally screws up the obscurity part, and lets a potential attacker know where to concentrate further information exploration. Because you've obscured a digital map from one source doesn't mean it will always be obscured. It just marks that place as a potential target. Then, when a zero day map comes up from another country's satellites, you just grab that up and look at all the places that were grayed out in the other map.
Therefore, the most successfully hidden places will be those that look like any other building in an area and are not grayed out.

Re:Restriction on restriction

[argStyopa]

"Such is the nature of the game - you can't win 100% of the time."

No, but you can make great political mileage from COMPLAINING about it 100% of the time. That is totally certain.

panic?

[blhack]

While i understand the logic here to an extent, it is a bit of a knee jerk reaction. If somebody really needed ariel photos of a place for illicit purposes it would be MUCH easier for them to obtain them from a balloon, or even an airplane. Not to mention the fact that they would be much more up to date. Its not like google earth has chloe sitting there hacking into the secret reserved spy satelite and feeding a live stream to the turrists.

Re:panic?

[Anonymous Coward]

While i understand the logic here to an extent, it is a bit of a knee jerk reaction. If somebody really needed ariel photos of a place for illicit purposes it would be MUCH easier for them to obtain them from a balloon, or even an airplane.

Have you ever tried this near military locations? And what kind of sentence did you get?

Re:panic?

[Grave]

This has more to do with restricting access to imagery which might compromise potential or ongoing military action, I believe. To me, that makes complete sense - why allow your enemy to get a nice overhead view of your troop buildup if you don't have to?

Then again, I did not RTFA, so maybe I missed something.

Re:panic?

[timmarhy]

all the online images are 12 months out of date. for any real military sense they are useless. in fact their worse then useless, their incorrect.

any military that uses it as a primary source of information is laughable.

Re:panic?

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, right. SO MUCH easier using a ballon or airplane to get those "needed" photo's.

Just as a practical demonstration go ahead and try to get photos of sensitive areas, such as area 51, using a simple ballon or airplane. Let me know how it goes.

Re:panic?

[gtall]

Yeah, your right. We regularly move our building around about every six months just to confuse the terrorists.

Re:panic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean ariel photos like this?

Re:panic?

[alx5000]

You got a point there, but think that killing, say, 1000 civilians (bombing a mall, p.e.) causes more terror among the population than killing 150 army soldiers in Base X.

Re:panic?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the online images are 12 months out of date. For any real military sense they are useless. In fact, they're worse than useless, they're incorrect.
Any military that uses them as a primary source of information is laughable.

There, fixed that up for you.

Re:panic?

[smellsofbikes]

For the record, I have some lovely pictures of the approach to an aircraft carrier, straight down the deck, taken from the window of a Cessna 152, from within 100 yards of the TFR surrounding Bangor outside Seattle. The pictures aren't fantastic since I was using a P{A,O}S digital camera, but if I'd had my Nikon with the 300x lens, I bet I could've gotten much better shots.

May you know them better as...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had never heard of this particular intelligence agency. They used to be called Defense Mapping

on control of information...

[User 956]

Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, says that the increasing availability of commercial satellite photos may require the government to restrict distribution.

Reminds me of the old saying, "Beware of he who would restrict you from information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Re:on control of information...

[Pantero Blanco]

Reminds me of the old saying, "Beware of he who would restrict you from information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Isn't that from Alpha Centauri? 1998's not old, and I don't know of it from any other source.

Re:on control of information...

[Urusai]

That ain't no dream, buddy.

Re:on control of information...

[Yartrebo]

I just looked it up in the game, and it is indeed from the game. That line is quoted as being said by 'Pravin Lal,' while things the game quotes from outside sources are referred to as 'datalinks.'

Re:on control of information...

[Anonymous Coward]

1998's not old

Get back in your wheelchair you fossil! That's almost a whole friggin decade ago!

Re:on control of information...

[cowwoc2001]

Give me a break.

You didn't have unlimited access to satelite photography in the past, how is restricting said information in any way going to make them the masters of you. Governments have had this information for years and citizens did not.

Censorship is also a loaded word here too. They are not censoring your freedom of speech nor anything which you have inherit rights to. You, as a human being, do not have an inherit right to any bit of information that might exist on the face of the earth and it is silly for people to claim that restriction of information of any kind is censorship. It simply is not.

Stop wasting your days away on conspiracy theories. They're dumb and counter-productive. I'm not saying governments are always right but people have been overreaching as of late, wanting everything - immediately - for free. I think this says more a reflection of the selfish behavior of our generation than anything about our governments.

Re:on control of information...

[clickclickdrone]

>1998's not old
If it's your birthdate, no, if it's your age then...

Re:I claim this first post for pi!

[Wonko the Sane]

just so you know, you've got a typo in there

A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[r_jensen11]

Ingorance is Strength

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Sincerely,
Winston Smith

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Ingorance is Strength
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery

Sincerely,
Winston Smith

I'm sorry, why is this funny? Sounds pretty inciteful (yah, I can spell) to me.

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[Jarjarthejedi]

Google it, it's a quote (mixed up but accurate nonetheless) from 1984 by George Orwell. I believe the GP is commenting on how this act is a very Orwellian move by the government, trying to restrict information. Personally I have to agree, most countries have spy satellites, at least ones that are considered powerful, and so really if the terrorist's have any links to any countries, no matter how obscure, this won't matter. This is really nothing more than a solution to a problem that doesn't exist...a solution which won't work...remind anyone of anything *cough cough* DRM *cough cough* copy protection *cough*

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[r_jensen11]

Sounds pretty inciteful (yah, I can spell) to me.

Yah? How about "Ja," "Yea," or "Yeah"? But Yah? Dictionary.com defines as "an exclamation of impatience or derision."

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[Blakey Rat]

remind anyone of anything *cough cough* DRM *cough cough* copy protection *cough*

Do you need some Sucrets? Maybe you should have called-in sick to Slashdot today.

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Don't laugh, but as of today... The UK has a "Ministry of Justice".

Re:A Message from the Ministry of Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

Minijust?

You americans are living in intelligence hell

[unity100]

and service hell to boot.

nsa, fema, homeland security (what the fuck is that), cia, fbi, this new thing in the article now, count as much as you can im sure there are more.

i started to often think which rules your country - congress, senate and president, or these "service" organizations.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[MeNeXT]

Did he touch a nerve?

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

a nerve? More like more hate ramblings from another country.. like England maybe? where they have.. lip reading cameras... hah.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[gsfprez]

you can be jailed for going over the speeding limit by 20 mph, there are more cameras than people, its illegal to own GPS recievers that tell you where the speeding cameras are, new speeding cameras that identify individual cars and time you over long distances to see if you broke the average speeding limit, and now they're going to watch your every single move from the A4 and thru London, and send you a smegging bill.

I'd rather live in the US than in England.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

These big $$$ people are bound to come to our countries and screw us up when they bring us their "civilization". It's not that the US is bad, it's simply that their laws are actually enforced, and they have too many rules and loopholes (and lawyers) that will eventually reach us all for the sake of keeping big business owners happy (hello, copyright inquisitors, welcome to my our beautiful land). Unless we (people in the US included) get complaining and not accepting it instead of flaming at each other for our stupid governments that bows down to big money so easily.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just that there's also the NRO, the INR, that DIA, the Department of the Treasury intelligence division, the NIC, the NCTC, the NSA, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Naval Security Group Command, the Air Intelligence Agency, the Energy Department Office of Intelligence, the INL, the DS and the Information Security Oversight Office.

http://www.fas.org/irp/official.html

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[megamerican]

Your rant doesn't fit into the argument of this article in the slightest. If the NGA tries to restrict satellite imagery again like it did in Afghanistan it will effect everyone, not just Americans. There most likely won't even be a complete blackout in an area. They might restrict the most current photographs that would show American troops, but showing a picture taken in 2000 or another arbitrary date that doesn't show sensitive information wouldn't need to be blocked. It would be dumb to think that the NGA would publish photos of American troop movements or let others do so.

In this country we have a system of checks and balances, so no one of the three branches rule our country. Certainly none of these service organizations do either. Their budgets are way too small and most have direct congressional oversight. Our system is far from perfect, but it works well. This is not the place to bash America, or any other country.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[StikyPad]

homeland security (what the fuck is that)

Fatherland was taken.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anomolous Cowturd]

You know you're headed for disaster when your only consolation is being better than the English.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

a nerve? More like more hate ramblings from another country.. like England maybe? where they have.. lip reading cameras... hah.
We're not the worst! We're not the worst!

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Bananas]

Such a fucking loser. Get out. Look outside the US. You're living a fucking police state and you don't even know it.

Not all of us are sleepwalking. Some of us are still awake, but lack the ability (funds?) to get out of the country in one piece. Keep in mind that we're not entirely made of "uniformly thinking" people - yet.

Of course, it doesn't help that the voting process has been rigged, and that the populace really doesn't have a choice or say in the matter.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[FireFury03]

I'm assuming you're talking about England here...

you can be jailed for going over the speeding limit by 20 mph

This is bogus - you're only going to get jailed for doing 20mph over the limit if you kill/mame someone in the process.

there are more cameras than people

Where'd you pull that statistic from? Sure there are a lot of cameras, but nowhere near that many.

its illegal to own GPS recievers that tell you where the speeding cameras are

Completely bogus - GPS receivers and speeding camera maps (and the combination of the 2) are completely legal.

new speeding cameras that identify individual cars and time you over long distances to see if you broke the average speeding limit

Not over long distances - over short distances such as a mile or so. You're talking about the SPECS cameras, which many consider to be much safer than GATSOs since they don't cause hard braking. (Note: I'm opposed to speed cameras, but I don't see how you can claim that SPECS is worse than GATSO).

I'd rather live in the US than in England.

It seems that you're basing this almost entirely on bad information.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Torvaun]

In Rodina, names take you!

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

to correct you a bit, at least from german view

gps receivers are not illegal, but maps with static speeding cameras are a crime here in germany

we have the "maut" system now for trucks on our highway, which is planned to be used that way when they get it through the legislation - austria started that last year already! and this is not over short distances

now where it would be better to live - that's a really difficult question and depends on what you await from the place you want to live...

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[clickclickdrone]

>England maybe? where they have.. lip reading cameras...
Oh man, don't give Blair ideas - he'd love that one. Thank God he's going soon, not that Brown's much better mind.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[hey!]

What protects people in the US and in the UK our our Constitutions.

Not necessarily a written constitution, which the UK does not have, but the one that people carry around in their heads. That constitution is much more powerful.

By the US way of looking at things, the fact that the UK doesn't have a formal Constitution means there is nothing that keeps them from going back to the Restoration's powerful monarch with its Bloody Assizes. Except that there is a deep and broad consensus across all sectors of society about what the rights of UK's subjects and the limitations of its government.

Likewise in the US, our official Constitution is overlaid with so many generations of legal exegesis that the framers would hardly recognize its operation. My mother in law was a friend of the late Archibald Cox, the Watergate Special Prosecutor. He remarked during the Iran-Contra affair that what brought Nixon down in Watergate was that the people rose up against him. It was not a violation of the legal Constitution that brought Nixon down, it was a violation of the implicit constitution that Americans carry in their heads. Reagan did as much or more to violate the Constitution, but he did not step over the line that in the collective consensus of the country represented an unforgivable excess in his exercise of power.

This is why we Americans must be particularly wary of attempts to bend or twist language; it is an attempt to bend and twist the meaning of the consensus by which we allow ourselves to be governed. Whether it turning "war" into "police action", or "suspect" into "unlawful combatant", every time we allow a substitution of plain language, we lose a bit of our Constitution.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[unity100]

in your country you have MANY checks, but not as many balances. its a secret service/service heaven now, since bushes came to power. thats the main point of 'the argument' i made.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

NGIA...National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Actually NGA.

Before that used to be NIMA

Before that used to be DMA/DLA

Pretty much the same bureaucracy in each iteration. I have met many geniuses working in this agency. Too bad they are working with a comparable amount of idiots.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[oddaddresstrap]

homeland security (what the fuck is that)

Fatherland was taken.

And Motherland, besides being taken, was thought to be too "sissy".

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Hatta]

According to NPR, there are 16 US spy agencies.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[unity100]

is this number before W.Bush adm, or after W.Bush adm ?

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Hatta]

I believe it's at present. The story I linked to was about a class created to encourage cross agency participation.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Alchemar]

No one in the administration was smart enough to spell Gestapo correctly.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[unity100]

apparently 'intelligence people' are becoming an elite class of citizens, a state inside the state.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

NGA is not new. It's the old NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. They had a real complex about not getting to be in the 3 letter acronym club, so they renamed themselves to play with the big boys.

Re:You americans are living in intelligence hell

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bogus - you're only going to get jailed for doing 20mph over the limit if you kill/mame someone in the process.

Actually, in Minnesota - you can be jailed if you're over 30 mph over the speed limit for those nay-sayers. Ask any cop.

Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[Tjp($)pjT]

The European satellite imagery is also for sale and can be had in multi-spectral and .5 meter resolution. There are too many commercial satellite image providers and sources to make limiting access unrealistic. Governments can put up there own and collect the data, state sponsorered para-military can just use what their sponsor obtains and high altitude aerial photography can be purchased for almsot any local on an on-demand basis. The "bad guys" have this info easily no matter what is done, all they prevent is sending a picture of your house captured from above to your friends and family and such. All it takes is money to purchase the imagery and at better resolution than most free sources, as well as IR and various other wavelengths if desired. India and China launch satellites too and make satellites. With current known technology it would not be tough to collect the imagery and resell it just to tweak the NRO/NGIA noses.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[chill]

And .5 meter is the limit. His point is the NGA forked over over $1 Billion to help companies launch satellites that get better than .5 m resolution, and by law -- U.S. AND European, IIRC -- they are supposed to degrade the image to .5 m before selling it to non-approved clients.

They have $$, and money talks. So much so that during the beginning of the Afghan war, they simply BOUGHT UP EVERY SAT PHOTO AVAILABLE of the area for months.

Half-meter resolution is good. If you know what you're looking at, you can identify makes and models of vehicles. But they're probably talking about ~.1 meter resolution which is more like "Hey, look -- he dropped his wallet while exiting the factory red 2006 BMW Z4 with the black rag-top. Wow, get a load of the rack on that blond he is with!"

Considering Europe can't even get Galileo off the ground, they don't seem like likely candidates to rush into the skies with super-spy sats.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[Karthikkito]

Galileo also has one of the weirdest funding models that I've ever seen...I'd imagine that a spy sat looking for .1m resolution would get a significantly larger -- and more sustained -- chunk of the budget.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[b00le]

There are no commercial European satellites with .5 metre pixel capability. The only commercial European Remote Sensing mission currently is SpotImage -- Spot 5 has a 2.5 m capability.

For all those who ask 'how hard can it be?' (shades of Top Gear...) entry level into the commercial Very High Resolution satellite business starts at around half a billion -- don't forget the ground segment. Even future missions are not planning to go much below .4 metre: the problems of handling huge data volumes, programming the satellite acquisitions, and the trade-off in covereage are not worth the gains in sharpness for most commercial users. The US military can get down to about 10 cm (allegedly), but are believed to use highly elliptical orbits (and huge, Hubble-sized telescopes) which would be inmpractical for commercial operators. 10 cm is not as good as Hollywood has got: the last episode of '24' showed what was supposed to be a Landsat image - only it was thermal infrared at about 1 cm updated once a second (as opposed to 15 m every two weeks or more...)

The Man may well have bought 'all the coverage of Afghanistan' -- from a single operator. The Ikonos mission (1m pixel) was the only one operating at the time. The US Govt. does retain 'shutter control' rights of all the VHR missionslicensed by them - which is all the current VHR missions. That will change - especially with COSMO-SkyMed, a constellation of all-weather radar satellites with a max. resolution of >1m, coming soon.

There's a intro to VHR satellite imagery here.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[Rich0]

Who's to say that the EU/China/etc wouldn't cooperate fully. Right now only a few countries can launch satellites with these capabilities, and while they'll certainly use them against each other I'm sure a gentleman's agreement exists that they keep 3rd parties from getting access to sensitive stuff.

Besides, you can restrict satellite operation one way or another. If a 3rd-party balloon showed up over a civil-war battlefield offering imagery to the highest bidder it would simply be shot down. I'm sure any army with the capability would consider disabling or destroying 3rd party satellites if it were strategically necessary. It would be tolerated to some degree, but if a company didn't play ball when the time came to gather forces for some major sneak attack, I'm sure there would be "technical difficulties" - perhaps jamming of some sort, perhaps a spy planted in the operations center of the company operating the satellite, perhaps lasers, or perhaps an ASAT of some kind. Most likely it would just be the right amount of cash in the right hands and an appeal to "patriotism" of some kind. Unless we're talking about a major tension between superpowers whatever country the satellite owner is hosted in will just ask for a fine from the world court to save face and it would get paid or not a decade later long after the actual military conflict is decided.

Keep in mind we're talking dual-use technology. If the NRA showed up in an occupied nation issuing "hunting rifles" to anybody who wanted one I'm sure just about any nation with troops there would put a stop to it. Satellite imagery isn't as black-and-white as guns, but at particular moments I'm sure nations will want to make it scarce.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[clesters]

>With current known technology it would not be tough to collect the imagery and resell it just to tweak the NRO/NGIA

It would also not be too tough to have SPAWAR just blow the satellites out of the sky with another satellite if they feel like it. I'm pretty sure they already have a plan made up for the Russian satellites which could easily be adapted to whatever is needed. Legal? probably not, but the last time I checked it wasn't exactly legal to just take over other countries based on a bullshit exaggerated threat.

Re:Somewhat pointless, horse, barn, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This article

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2006/november/geoeye.html

quotes 16 inches/ 41cm. Last year. It seems VERY likely that 41cm is not as good as it gets. Even 10cm seems easily feasible. 4.1cm does not seem Tinfoil hat time. Even if they aren't there yet,without question they will be - the advantages are just too great.

Coming soon to a country near you...

[Kuroji]

I'm sure that Congress will pass a bill restricting the distribution of satellite imagery attached to something else that must pass in the near future. Something innocuous and large like a budget or telecom related bill.

On the plus side, the images that are already out there are staying out there, so some things like Google Earth are just going to become outdated, but they've already been doing this in some other circumstances - ever try to look at any of the buildings in DC for instance?

Re:Coming soon to a country near you...

[strikethree]

On the plus side, the images that are already out there are staying out there

Actually, that is not true. I used to be able to zoom in quite close to my house and now I can not zoom in quite as close. They are actively removing imagery... What is weird though is that you can see my missing trailer (blown away by a rocket) here on Camp Victory in Baghdad, Iraq. Why would there be better imagery of a military installation in a war zone than of my house where there is little danger?

strike

Re:Coming soon to a country near you...

[petermgreen]

afaict the better imagary on google earth is arial photography not sat anyway.

it may simply be that they replaced older imagary with newer but lower res stuff or a license agreement expired or that they are keeping the best stuff for those who pay for the higher editions of google earth.

Re:Coming soon to a country near you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely spot-on. Honestly, for REALLY good imagery, just fit 32 Canon EOS-1Ds cameras with nice, high quality telephoto lenses into the underside of your common-or-garden Boeing 747 and go flying. Fly most of the major commercial routes around the USA and you should have a selection of superb high-value targets phtographed in exquisite resolution. If the Chinese/Iranians/British/Russians/French whoever haven't though of this, they should be ashamed of themselves - it's almost comically easy, and updatable much more readily than Google Earth. If I were the Chinese goverment, I'd make sure all of 'our' state-owned international airlines had planes BRISTLING with espionage/mapping/GIS technology - SO much cheaper than satellites.

Re:Coming soon to a country near you...

[Anonymous Coward]

ever try to look at any of the buildings in DC for instance?

From Google Earth? Just a few minutes ago. You can see a lot of detail. In addition, Washington DC is a town where their 3d building feature works. (New York City in the Skyskrapper district is another one) Your point was?

torn between privascy and rigth to know

[uncreativ]

I really don't like the government telling us what information we have the right to have. (sigh) guess we've gone too far down the rabbit hole on that one.

I also really don't like the idea of companies making imagery of my property available to whomever wants it. My business is my business and is not for sale. I guess preventing that from happening is futile as well.

Re:torn between privascy and rigth to know

[Tuoqui]

You could always cover you property in a giant tarp. That way they cant see whats going on underneath it...

Ofcourse that only works if you have a relatively small property.

Re:torn between privascy and rigth to know

[Score Whore]

Or a relatively giant tarp.

Re:torn between privascy and rigth to know

[Barny]

Comes back to the use of personal anti-satalite weaponry, so long as its not ballistic or laser you should be fine.

If you are charged with destruction of national property you can ask them where it was clearly labled, and of course claim that you thought it was a meteorite and you were upholding your right to bear (admittedly a little overpowered) arms to defend your home, family and country.

Of course they would just throw you in jail with no charges and claim 6mths later that "army contractors have finnished testing of a new weapon", but there would be one less eye up there...

Re:torn between privascy and rigth to know

[Duhavid]

And, you can put advertising on the tarp.
Rent it out, you know.

Re:torn between privascy and rigth to know

[pla]

Comes back to the use of personal anti-satalite weaponry, so long as its not ballistic or laser you should be fine.

Why not laser? Sure, most of us can't get ahold of anything even nearly powerful enough to destroy a satellite, but you'd really only need to blind it to have the same results. "Oops, looks like you decided to take a picture of my house while I, uh, "calibrated my telescope" - You really should warn me before doing flyovers, I come out here almost every night".

Naturally, though, I agree with your final sentence, and plausible deniability doesn't mean squat if they just throw you in Gitmo forever without a trial.

Censorship of satellite photos?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy while you can.

Slashdot Strategy Sessions

[Anonymous Coward]

"we would not want imagery to be openly disseminated of a sensitive site of any type, whether it is here or overseas" This guy has it all wrong - they should be opensourcing these images, not closing them off. Let the denizens of parents' basements across America search for signs of Osama. We could have slashdot strategy sessions:

slashdotter 1: 'We need to lure them with a weak force down the center, then surprise outflank them - it worked for the Carthaginians.

slashdotter 2: 'You asstard: the Carthaginians were destroyed - the Romans sowed their fucking fields with fucking salt. someone mod this dipshit down

Re:Slashdot Strategy Sessions

[SmackedFly]

Right, salt during

Re:Slashdot Strategy Sessions

[SmackedFly]

Oops, to finish my post. Salt was at that time enormously expensive, the romans would have gone broke had they tried to salt the carthagian farmland. It didn't happen... They did however, burn the city to the ground, which might have been part of the reason.

Will the images out there stay out there?

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

We are talking about a government that has removed things like nuclear-plant schematics from libraries. There are many plans and censuses and charts which were once freely available, but if you the average slashdotter want them now, then you'd better have made copies before now or know someone else who has.
It's easy to take down a website. I see fanfiction websites (think "derivative works") disappear all the time. The government can't keep satellites from other nations from taking pictures at whatever resolution, but they could make Google take Google Earth down.

Spy Chief Hints At Limits On Satellite Photos

[JackSpratts]

good luck on that one pal.

Re:Spy Chief Hints At Limits On Satellite Photos

[Anonymous McCartneyf]

So, how many of us plan to launch satellites in the near future?

I welcome...

[blahplusplus]

... our capitalist overlords!

NGA = NIMA

[Dolphinzilla]

NGA (NGIA in the submission) the artist formerly known as NIMA - not a new organization just a different name...

Re:NGA = NIMA

[Danny Rathjens]

Not In My Atlas?!

Re:NGA = NIMA

[niXcamiC]

New name, same great flavor.

Suspicious Cloud

[limegreenman]

A certain agri-chemical plant, embroiled in a dioxin controversy, is conveniently obscured by cloud on google maps http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=new+plymou th,+new+zealand&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=-39.062691,174.024 376&spn=0.002878,0.00559&t=k&om=1&iwloc=addr/. Surely a better solution?

Re:Suspicious Cloud

[ObjetDart]

Hey, that looks exactly like a screenshot from Sim City when you've zoned too much industrial in one place. You should put in some more parks.

Re:Suspicious Cloud

[slayermet420]

Ummmm, you said it's a "suspicious cloud" over a "chemical plant"? You ever stop to think that it could be "smoke"? That's what it looks like to me.

Re:Suspicious Cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the edge of a cumulus cloud to me. Zoom out a little.

Re:Suspicious Cloud

[bloobloo]

Methanex Motunui closed two and a half years ago.

Re:Suspicious Cloud

[MichaelSmith]

Isn't that why NZ is called the land of the long white cloud?

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maps are classified documents! ...oh wait...

Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a ...

[Doc Ruby]

There are already plenty of public places in the USA with posted signs prohibiting video/photos.

These restrictions are clear violations of the Constitution, which creates no power for our government to prevent our recording public places. Not to mention absolutely unamerican in attitude.

There's so much accumulated destruction of America to fix now that it'll take generations to even catch up to where we could be, not to mention all the new problems accumulating while we're catching up. If we can even reverse momentum at all.

Its for our own good, folks.

[sizzzzlerz]

It will keep up safe from them evil terra-ists should they decide to follow us home using Google Earth to find their way. Besides, knowledge is way over-rated anyway.

oh really...

[toby]

During the early months of the invasion of Afghanistan they bought up all satellite imagery over that country, worldwide

Did they buy everything Russia has*? How? Is it really credible that Russia would enter into some kind of clandestine NDA over this material? And what would it mean if they did? We can assume that the US government has more money than $GOD to execute its evil. But what would be the motive here? To prevent before-and-after comparisons? Did they buy up all Iraq's too?

* - There must be a substantial archive of Afghan intelligence somewhere in Russia, as a legacy of the 9-year war.

Re:oh really...

[jim_deane]

If you're referring to nine year old intelligence images, you might as well give them maps of Kansas and label them "Afghanistan".

Nine year old data, unless it is part of a "then and now" data set or some specific study about historical trends, is useless.

Re:oh really...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they buy everything Russia has*? How? Is it really credible that Russia would enter into some kind of clandestine NDA over this material?

Russia likely has more common sense than to sell any of their state-of-the art stuff to one of our adversaries. If they did, it would be a damned shame if those pesky Chechens had access to some awesome imagery of the Kremlin.

It's the same reason Russia had better keep a handle on its man-portable nukes: they might have a suitcase bomb that somebody got a hold of, but if it goes off in the US I'm sure we still have some SADMs that anybody opposing Russia would love to have.

Sell RPGs and antitank missiles all you want, but there are some lines you do not cross, lest you reap what you sow.

Re:oh really...

[Rich0]

Most likely all the nations that in public decry US policies in private have all kinds of secret agreements in place with the US on national security matters. Sure, they don't talk about it with the voters, but in private the powers in charge manage to work out compromises to meet their various ends.

The US isn't concerned with the Chinese government taking pictures of troops in Afganistan. They're concerned with a Chinese company taking pictures and selling them to the Taliban in real time.

And the issue isn't with historical photos for the most part - it is with real-time data collection. If you want to mount a massive surprise invasion you need to stage equipment a few days in advance. Satellites can spot that equipment and give advance warning. So can people on the ground, but the US Air Force probably works hard to make sure that there aren't many people on the ground in the appropriate places, and if there are, that their radio transmitters and telephone exchanges don't work anyway.

Modern warfare is all about controlling access to information. If you know where the enemies troops are, and the enemy is blind, then you can divide and conqueror and every match-up will be against overwhelming force. War is one activity where NOBODY fights fair.

Re:oh really...

[Anonymous Coward]

During the early months of the invasion of Afghanistan they bought up all satellite imagery over that country, worldwide

Did they buy everything Russia has*? How?

I think they are more interested in the commercial satellite images, to which the public & media would have access, rather than those of foreign governments. The imagery involved in the "chequebook shutter control" was that of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and at the time there seems to have been only one commercial satellite imagery provider. This allowed the US government to negotiate an exclusive contract for the Afghanistan and Pakistan pictures.

In the years since, many more companies have entered the commercial satellite business, and so it would probably be next to impossible for the US to enter into enough exclusive contracts to suppress such imagery again.

Agency names

[Galen Wolffit]

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency used to be the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), but they changed their name sometime in 2003 or 2004. They wanted to play with the "big boy" intelligence agencies, all of whom had three letter acronyms, so they changed their name and added a hyphen - they're now known as NGA, not NGIA.

Other people have satellites

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russians are hungry for cash- why wouldn't they or the Chinese sell images that the US wanted hidden?

is that peter norton?

[Anonymous Coward]

it just occurred to me that, for as long as i can remember, i have assumed that the slashdot censorship icon was peter norton--of norton utilities fame--with tape over his mouth.

now i'm not so sure.

Intelligence Agency?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you click around the NGIA website long enough, you will wind up at an open Netscape LDAP server, where you may freely search the agency's employee LDAP tree. There are some visible admin links, but I didn't click any. Most of the information is mundane, but each search result included full name, employment status (contractor/fte), sex, and user ids. Hint: you get there through a link in a PDF available on the site. You might not find that information interesting, but others might (it is a government intelligence agency, after all).

I question the legitimacy of any intelligence agency this sloppy. I bet they have as much depth as the DHS.

Re:Intelligence Agency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look out, they'll be after you because you haxxored them! Obscurity is security, and you didn't respect their securitah!

Re:Intelligence Agency?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I question the legitimacy of any intelligence agency this sloppy.

I hope slashdot will let me make an anon posting today.

I know quite a few of the people who work in that office, because they provide a great deal of Geospatial data to us research types, to the USEPA, to the USGS, to state agencies, etc.

The thing I wanted to point out is that many of them could, if they chose, greatly increase their salaries if they wanted to work in the EPA, USGS, or for a municipal survey organization. They choose to stay at the federal level either because it is a good way to start a career, or because it's important to remain there until retirement (there are vanishingly few employees in-between). It's a different kind of Dilbert Principle that's somewhat unique to government work.

Re:Intelligence Agency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any more info on this?

For profit division

[SpaceLifeForm]

Link

The Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is the distributor of public sale National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) topographic maps, publications, and digital products.

Re:For profit division

[swilly]

Better Link

While you are there, check out their Kids Site. I can't make up my mind if this is funny, sad, or both.

NIMA changed their name to NGA when they realized that all the cool agencies have a Three Letter Acronym (TLA). Without a TLA, they weren't being invited to the best parties, so they changed their name to National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Using the dash to make a TLA out of four words is a great conversation starter at these kinds of parties.

Re:For profit division

[Anonymous Coward]

While you are there, check out their Kids Site. I can't make up my mind if this is funny, sad, or both.

WARNING: That link is not to be used while intoxicated. Trust me on this one.

Re:For profit division

[Gazzonyx]

While you are there, check out their Kids Site. I can't make up my mind if this is funny, sad, or both.

WARNING: That link is not to be used while intoxicated. Trust me on this one.
My friend, I just visited and I assure you; I cannot handle this trip sober. On the bright side, you'll be able to forget it, whereas I must now live with it. There are just some things you can't unsee. I, most unfortunately, do believe that talking planets and satellites fall into this category. I think this confirms something or other than Hunter S. Thompson once said... I'm not sure what, but it has to !

"Launches"??

[retrogameguy]

I guess they didn't read Slashdot a little while back on how Google Earth gets the images they use. Not all are from space - they also use planes, hot air balloons - really anything that can get high and have a camera attached.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[gadzook33]

Right, but this is a totally unrealistic view of the world. If government buildings are public places, you should be able to photograph those to, right? You should be able to photograph the invasion plans for Normandy, right? I'm as afraid of the slippery slope of censorship as the next person but surely the answer (as usual) is actually somewhere in the middle.

What for?

[snowwrestler]

What is the strategic weakness exposed by satellite imagery, that is not exposed by the other myriad sources of information that are available? So you can see the top of the White House on Google Maps. So what, anyone can see it from the Washington Monument or the Hay Adams.

Important strategic installations are already satellite-proofed because of the Russians. The rest doesn't matter because there are so many other ways to find out the same information.

This is just like the time a National Geographic photographer was denied permission to photograph a bridge becuase of security concerns. He pointed out that if someone wants to know where the bridge is, they can read a map. If they want to see it they can drive over it as many time as they want. It didn't sway them and in fact he was told if he went up in the helicopter he would be shot down. Morons.

Re:What for?

[Rich0]

What is the strategic weakness exposed by satellite imagery, that is not exposed by the other myriad sources of information that are available?

If you're talking about Google Earth - probably not too much.

If you're talking about realtime commercial satellite imagery, that could be worth quite a bit. If you're planning a terrorist attack on a motorcade, being able to watch it live from space would be a nice capability to have. If you're a 3rd world nation being able to see lots of planes stacking up on the deck of an aircraft carrier offshore might be useful information.

Most recon is time-sensitive. If companies don't play ball the US they'll probably see their satellites getting jammed for a few days at a time - or maybe a few weeks. Or they might see their own governments clamping down. The US doesn't care that satellites are snapping photos of military formations if the attack is over by the time the satellite is able to transmit the photos. Then again, general footage of combat tactics is something the US probably would want to keep a lid on (then again most nations that care about such things have their own government satellites).

I think that banning Google Earth photos of bridges is getting a bit silly. On the other hand, realtime survailence can be a different matter and I think that it is rightly regulated to some degree.

Re:What for?

[dashslotter]

>So you can see the top of the White House on Google Maps. So what....

The main concern is that the enemy will know which chute to bomb when they fly over with their x-wing fighters.

How to mirror google earth

[pair-a-noyd]

Is there a way to wget (or similar method) the entire contents of the google earth system to a local server(s) so as to have a local system that can't be taken down/controlled by information supressionists?
I'm no fan of google but a local, isolated copy of their google earth system could perhaps prove useful if for some reason it ever falls under some sort of restrictions or is even shut down..

I have no idea how much space the server would consume but I would guess it's a lot.
But hey, 500gb drives are regular $129 at newegg now. Building BIG data retention systems is easy and cheap now.

Re:How to mirror google earth

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is there a way to wget (or similar method) the entire contents of the google earth system to a local server(s) so as to have a local system that can't be taken down/controlled by information supressionists?"

That's easy. Download USAPhotoMaps, the free...shareware program. All the map data gets downloaded to your local HD and is there for ever and ever.

Re:How to mirror google earth

[clickclickdrone]

>Download USAPhotoMaps
This may come as a shock but there's actually other people and places outside the USA so this is a partial solution at best.

Restricting information

[Brett Buck]

What they are concerned about, of course, is not Google Maps and static data like that. They are very concerned about these foreign concerns sharing near-real-time tactical information, i.e. there's a brigade camped out at Lat xx, Long xx. and they have 4 tanks. This would permit active use in targeting and attack planning our troops.

          The US are perfectly justified in using any means possible to deny the enemy this information. Of course, our allies will refuse to supply it, if they do not they are not our allies but are aiding the enemy. If they can't talk them into not sharing it, they will try to buy it, but if they can't or the operators refuse, they are perfectly legitimate targets and can and should be taken out. And it's certainly feasible to do so.

        This isn't some sort of Goddamn game, we are talking about our troops lives here.

            Brett

Re:Restricting information

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh... It's not exactly like Google Earth is near real-time.

Re:Restricting information

[Anonymous Coward]

"If they can't talk them into not sharing it, they will try to buy it, but if they can't or the operators refuse, they are perfectly legitimate targets and can and should be taken out. And it's certainly feasible to do so."

Of course, by this argument the Saudi terrorists were perfectly justified in attacking the WTC.

This is the Bush justification of murder. I want you to do this, and if you don't, you are a legitimate target. You are either for us or against us! We have bigger guns!

Have you worked out yet why the world is against you?

Re:Restricting information

[Yetihehe]

Please, thinkofthetroops.

Re:Restricting information

[Anonymous Coward]

"This would permit active use in targeting and attack planning our troops."

If that were the issue, then you restrict it for 6 months or a year, and then let the imagery go (it's outdated). If that's not enough time for certain sites, then you increase the delay for those, selectively. The U.S. could easily negotiate a "buy first/highest bid" contract with all the satellite imagery companies to get exclusive access to imagery from those sites, and set terms for the exclusive period. But the information should be released eventually. Heck, even spy satellite pictures collected by the U.S. at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Corona (?) program) were eventually released.

"This isn't some sort of Goddamn game, we are talking about our troops lives here."

Protect the troops in an operational sense, yes, of course. But it is ridiculous to use concerns about troop safety to justify every conceivable action. As a normal part of any healthy democracy we should question our leader's decisions. Asking the question: "Is this step *truly* necessary?" is not being disrespectful of the troops on the ground or what they are doing, and, frankly, I'm tired of hearing that excuse offered as the rationale for every decision. I am *fully* supportive of the troops, but if you think that politicians aren't sometimes using troop safety as an excuse for bad or dubious political decisions, or advancing their political agenda regardless of *actual* operational issues, you're fooling yourself.

There's some obligation on the part of ordinary citizens to make sure that when troops return to their home country they don't find that the place has been converted into a restrictive police state with "freedom" only an illusion. Otherwise, what are they fighting for?

Protect our troops, but not via unnecessary compromises of basic principles. Consider the rationale *carefully* for policies. Taken to the extreme, you could argue that given the world-wide distribution of U.S. military operations, satellite imagery shouldn't be publically available from any of it, in order to "protect the troops".

Re:Restricting information

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't some sort of Goddamn game, we are talking about our troops lives here.

I hope you pulled off your sunglasses in a dramatic way when you typed that. It's a gripping scene. Follow it up by wrapping yourself in the American flag...or just go watch another $MICHAEL_BAY_FILM.

India is the only other country ..

[viksit]

..to offer that kind of imagery at the resolutions of 1m or less. There's no way people are going to sell their rights - especially if they're foreign governments.

ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) is the world's third and only second non-US supplier of 1-m imageries and perhaps the most competitively priced; the data comes at a premium of nearly 40 per cent. Some data is internationally priced at $18-20 per picture of a sq km.

From http://www.india-defence.com/reports/3031

Restrictions? Laughable.

Re:India is the only other country ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Restrictions? Laughable.

If India pisses the U.S. off by not controlling this I can see Musharraf having access to imagery that will make anything India has pale in comparison. Maybe throw in a couple of squadrons of F-35s and pilot training at wholesale cost in for good measure.

How dare they....

[hcmtnbiker]

Whatever will I do without 10cm resolution aerial photos of nuclear power plants? Honestly, when the time comes up that i need that, that's when I'll bitch, not now.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Doc Ruby]

Of course I should be able to photograph the public parts of those buildings, like the parts I can see from the street. Of course I should be able to photograph the Normandy invasion plans, now that the invasion is over a half-century old, and they're in a museum.

And of course the interiors of "public" buildings that are actually classified/restricted (including offices requiring appointments), and new plans still closed to public access, should not be photographed without proper authorization.

That's why we spend so much time and money building public buildings: they control access to their interiors.

This situation seems like a basic reality, while trying to stop photography of public exteriors is a basic fantasy. Part of the simcurity that pretends to protect us but keeps us scared into obedience by merely obscuring both how vulnerable and how safe we actually are.

Can you receive and decode this stuff yourself?

[ikekrull]

I know that weather satellites transmissions can be received and decoded using a PC easily enough - I wonder just how much more difficult it would be to decode signals from imaging satellites from your own dish?

I'm sure they use some type of encryption, but you know, thats not always (e.g. HD-DVD) the barrier it is supposed to be. Also, recent events such as the Tamil Tigers hijacking satellite bandwidth makes me wonder just what might be possible.

Anyone do any satellite hacking?

Re:Can you receive and decode this stuff yourself?

[b00le]

Nothing to it - all you need is a 12m tracking dish capable of keeping up with a Low Earth Orbit Satellite on a circa. 90 minute orbit, hardware capable of handling the huge bandwidth required (a single QuickBird scene of about 272 km^2 runs to gigabytes, then you can hack into the satellite to persuade it to unload the raw data from the on-board solid-state memory to your PC which knows how to process it into system-corrected data and then...

look, forget it. Weather satellites are geostationary, and the pictures they send are small. There's a intro to VHR satellite imagery here.

Re:Can you receive and decode this stuff yourself?

[PhxBlue]

Nothing to it - all you need is a 12m tracking dish capable of keeping up with a Low Earth Orbit Satellite on a circa. 90 minute orbit, hardware capable of handling the huge bandwidth required (a single QuickBird scene of about 272 km^2 runs to gigabytes, then you can hack into the satellite to persuade it to unload the raw data from the on-board solid-state memory to your PC which knows how to process it into system-corrected data and then...

I have one of those at work, but they won't let me play with it.

Re:Can you receive and decode this stuff yourself?

[Rich0]

I'm sure most military satellites use pretty carefully encrypted transmissions. The NSA does all kinds of cutting-edge R&D on crypto and are probably years ahead of everybody else. Commercial satellites are probably more easily defeated, but we're not talking about DRM, so there is no reason they couldn't be made extremely secure.

The problem with DVDs is that the decryption key is handed to EVERYBODY with a DVD player - it is just hard to get at. If the player can read a DVD, then somebody with physical access to the player can figure out what the keys are.

With satellite links you lack physical access to any component of the link - so the limitations of DRM do not apply. If a satellite link used AES properly it would essentially be impossible to crack. Even if they used relatively-easy-to-crack DES it wouldn't be the sort of thing you could take apart in your basement with $2k worth of equipment.

Re:Can you receive and decode this stuff yourself?

[staplin]

Plus they'd see the hacking from the downloaded telemetry, and send someone to visit your ground terminal. Unless, of course, your 12m dish is mobile, and your neighbors didn't see you wheel it into your oversized garage.

Reasons

[mholt108]

the reason for this does not seem logical.. almost as if they would like to keep dark areas of the world .. so they can still have wars armies etc that most people are not aware of .. i cannot see the release of information leading to more conflict / suspicion / paranoia etc. but the restriction of these new sources of information would help perpetuate old prejudices and fear of others. how do i mistrust mistrusting Arabs / Chinese /Americans when i look into their lives and see that their struggles are the same as mine. so the restriction of information can only benefit those who thrive in the dark and who will loose power or income if we know what they are doing (if it is not legitimate) .. so more power to google earth i say.
m

down with the man!

[saltmiser]

More examples of the man trying to ruin perfectally good online data. If they fully had it their way, they'd probably fully dub out every government funded building...

It's not wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to them. It's not wrong. To them, it is exactly right, because it is exactly what they want.

Can't comprehend that behaviour? I urge you, and anyone else who is continually asking the question "why, why would they do that?" to research Ponerology, or failing that, Psychopathy. Our planet depends on it.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[njchick]

The US Constitution doesn't preclude the states from regulating public places.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[gadzook33]

Yeah, the outside of those building are sensitive (maybe not classified but that doesn't really matter). There's no difference between the security posture of a nuclear silo and war plans. They don't have those signs up because they're worried about you photographing the building, they have signs up because they're worried about you doing recon on the security detail. But then, that's sort of self-evident, isn't it?

No pictures!

[iminplaya]

Has anybody hinted at putting limits on the spy chief?

War czar for president

Reverse monopoly will stop that

[A nonymous Coward]

This is really funny -- sure, it worked once. But each satellite company has a monopoly on selling their own imagery, and once they realize how desperate the buyer is, they can jack the price up sky high. You want exclusive? Great, 100 x normal. For the first day. Then we will negotiate the second day at 1,000 x normal and see about the third day tomorrow. What, you are in a hurry? Well, sit down, have some tea, let us talk ....

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, sit down. Some random satellite imagery company and the military of the most powerful nation in the world. We may not be able to control the insurgents in Iraq (and even in that case, the problem isn't so much that we can't suppress the insurgency - it's that we can't do it without significant losses and without starting a civil war), but the US military can still hurt some some company in a more than a thousand ways.

Ever want to launch a satellite from US soil again? Great, we'll talk then. Ever want to do business with a US company again? So, about those images... Your engineers need a security clearance? Interesting. You have an office in $random_country_we_are_invading, right next to the Chinese embassy, and want our Marines to help get your people out? How about that?

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[GnuDiff]

Imagined answers:

>Ever want to launch a satellite from US soil again?
Nah, thanks, Russian/Chinese soil works just as well for us.

>Ever want to do business with a US company again?
We prefer selling to the EU, Russia, Africa and god knows who else. Actually, it is the US companies that want to do business with us. If they can't - too bad for them.

>You have an office in $random_country_we_are_invading
Why should we? The US is stretched to deal with Iraq itself as it is, pretty good bet they can't spread their forces to the rest of the world as well. Egypt sounds nice at this time of year, or maybe Greece. Then again Russia has always been a favourite, and they don't care about satellite imagery for businesses as long as their military gets their copy of Pentagon for wall posters.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[drgonzo59]

Ever want to launch a satellite from US soil again? Great, we'll talk then.

Well, your first assumption seems to be that the government is actually organized and keeps track of things. Going by the recent experience with the terrorist attacks that wasn't the case.

You have an office in $random_country_we_are_invading, right next to the Chinese embassy, and want our Marines to help get your people out? How about that?

"Oh, company x from country y didn't gray out our reactor z. Then 10 years later, their civilians are being killed, we can help them but we'll let them die, ha, ha!". Is that you view of our government? -- That's pretty sad. Or, is that how you act, you bully everyone because if they don't listen, you'll let them die?

The point is that there are other countries, besides US, that can launch satellites, that will not necessarily dance to the US music. Eventually those nuclear site images will appear some place on the internet, and we all know how easy it is to censor information on the web (09:F9:1...)...

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[zero_offset]

What makes you think it didn't happen that way this time around?

I casually know the guy who owns Space Imaging. He's an old friend of one of my oldest friends who runs a GIS company and uses tons of satellite and aerial imagery (usually of military bases, actually). These companies already operate under a vast and complex body of regulations about who can and can't get pictures of various places, so this was probably a smaller step for them to take than most people are assuming.

There are a few things to keep in mind:

First of all, they're businesses, and for most businesses, practically anything is possible if the price is right. That probably offends the wild-eyed idealism of the typical slashdotter, but slashdot is probably the last place you'll find much understanding of life in the real world.

Additionally, most of their income is derived from custom runs. So it's a pretty safe bet that the government wasn't really denying all that much information to the general public.

Finally, it seems pretty unlikely the government was buying imagery. It seems far more likely they were paying these companies to not produce it in the first place. In other words, the company says, "We average $50K per month in custom fly-overs, so if you want a 6-month moratorium, cut us a check for $300K." Certainly it was more complex than that, but I'm sure you get the gist of my point.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[elrous0]

We prefer selling to the EU, Russia, Africa and god knows who else.

You mean the same EU, Russia, and Africa that the U.S. is already able to bully into harassing, arresting, prosecuting and even deporting their own citizens?

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[OldeTimeGeek]

Ever want to do business with a US company again?

They really don't even have to go that far.

"Thank you for your business. As you chose not to comply with our request you are now in violation of our existing contract, which shall be terminated immediately. Also be advised that you will be removed from the GSA's approved vendor list, meaning that no governmental agency will be permitted to contract for services from you. In other words, we hope that the millions of dollars you have gotten from us have been invested well as you will see no more. Have a nice day."

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[Zeek40]

Imagined answers (continued): >We've been looking for a few satellites to test out our new ground based anti-satellite missiles and lasers on. Yours look like they're just the right size! uhhh.... let me get back to you on that price.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they just shot your satellites down when you took pictures of things they preferred you wouldn't? It's not very difficult from a technical standpoint and probably pretty deniable too. Personally, I wouldn't antagonize them.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[demonlapin]

they can jack the price up sky high

Even when the buyer has, say, classified military technology at hand? I'm sure they were all paid well, but I'm also quite certain that if they hadn't agreed there would have been an iron fist inside that velvet glove, starting with temporary blindings of the satellite and going up from there.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[GnuDiff]

Yes. Because harrassing, arresting, prosecuting and deporting their own citizens is no priority stuff for countries that are used to or murdering">slaughtering their own and nearest neighbours. Retrial for Ponosov? Give me a break - as long as he has nothing of value to Russia they'd extradict him to the US as long as the US promises something good for it.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[GnuDiff]

Sorry, that should've read: Because harrassing, arresting, prosecuting and deporting their own citizens is no priority stuff for countries that are used to slaughtering their own and nearest neighbours.

Re:Reverse monopoly will stop that

[GnuDiff]

Pfft. This was already mentioned in some nice ./ comment earlier, that there are 2 main modes of operation how the people in the US talk about their relations to the outside world:
- there is the law you know, why don't country X abide by it?
- how about we drop a big bomb on you?

Fortunately, that is not fully how the world works. If it did, the US would be down in the drain along with the rest of it by now.

I really liked George Carlin's monologue after Gulf war. It's called "Killing brown people". Too bad he seems to be not risking speaking anything like that now (then again, I haven't checked), as it seems to be even more on spot than before.

The least we can do

[snoggeramus]

The least we can do is to register as a 'New User' on their site. Nothing like 100,00 Slashdotters to bolster the ranks of national security.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the outside of those building are sensitive (maybe not classified but that doesn't really matter). There's no difference between the security posture of a nuclear silo and war plans. They don't have those signs up because they're worried about you photographing the building, they have signs up because they're worried about you doing recon on the security detail. But then, that's sort of self-evident, isn't it? If you make sensitive material visible to the public then it's no longer sensitive. You can't put something in plain sight and then claim it's secret information.

nga

[Anonymous Coward]

another great saying that totally applies is. "When you give up liberty for the sake of secuity, you will have neither in the end."
Think it was Ben Franklin

NGA successfully restricted aero data

[brg]

FWIW, this is also the agency that successfully pulled Dafif, a huge database of periodically updated worldwide aeronautical information historically available for free to the public, off the public Internet. Here's a brief story about it and where you used to be able to get it. So in a sense this sort of statement is very much in character; this guy is probably "just doing his job". He is a DoD employee, after all.

Now, they will probably have a much tougher time pwning all the satellite images, especially in future, because they aren't the sole provider of such images. The right answer is probably competition, i.e., for more commercial providers to get satellites up... makes it that much harder for any one agent (or agency) to corner the market, anyway. And TFA seems to suggest that that is indeed happening.

It does sort of seem like a basic drawback of so-called open-source intelligence (which has nothing to do with "open source" per se) that everyone else pretty much has the ability to get at it too, if they look hard enough. Perhaps the complaint is that now they don't have to look very hard at all.

Re:panic?... For a second there...

[Anonymous Coward]

... i thought you were going to say something about current (and needless to say but i'll mention it anyway hi-res!) satellite imagery of Chloe sunbathing starkers, but i was disappointed. Oh well...

It's an allergy.

[Ihlosi]

Do you need some Sucrets?

He's just allergic to BS.

Re:It's an allergy.

[Anonymous Coward]

> He's just allergic to BS.

Yipes! He'd better log out of Slashdot fast, or he might go into anaphylactic shock! :(

You have a war president

[Anonymous Coward]

He makes wars, that's what defines him. So how is this in anyway surprising?

High res photos on Google Earth are not Sat

[hughk]

Isn't it true that much of the high resolution photography on Google Earth and similar services is derived from standard aerial photography? Mapping is a commercial activity and aerial photography makes an invaluable contribution to the modern cartographer. The photographs are a byproduct of the process as well as a product in themselves.

Re:High res photos on Google Earth are not Sat

[f4hy]

yes. the physical limits of satellite images are far worse than the images already on google earth. Diffraction causes images to have a hard limit on stellite resolutions proportional to the size of the lens. We would need to have HUGE satellites with giant cameras to be able to take pictures that equal the resolution that of aerial photography.

Re:High res photos on Google Earth are not Sat

[b00le]

Look at the copyright notices: DigitalGlobe generally means satellite imagery from QuickBird (.5m resolution), TerraMetrics = Landsat 15m medium resolution. The aerial imagery is from various suppliers. Aerial imagery is more likely to be censored by national agencies (e.g. The Netherlands shows a lot of censorship, even right in the middle of Amsterdam
(http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=3 0.5494,47.669935&spn=0.040728,0.065918&z=14).
Aerial imagery may also be older, though most of the QuickBird imagery on Google is not very new,

How to stop companies selling pictures of home

[TheMCP]

1) Paint a picture on your house. Heck, you could even just paint an interesting geometric design on it. Just make it interesting enough that people wouldn't laugh at you if you called it "artistic expression". Stick a copyright symbol on it somewhere. If you're feeling particularly zealous, take a picture of it and register for a copyright with the copyright office.

2) Identify company selling pictures of your house showing the picture or design you painted.

3) Sue them under the DMCA for selling pirated reproductions of your copyrighted "artistic work" (aka the paintjob on your house).

Re:How to stop companies selling pictures of home

[Ed_1024]

Even better: Paint 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on the roof of your house. Build a large structure/plant trees/mow grass/make crop circle with the same information...

Re:How to stop companies selling pictures of home

[MisterMoney]

4) Profit?

Re:How to stop companies selling pictures of home

[freepay]

Put child porn on your roof, and then it will be a crime for anyone to possess the image.

Surprised it's taken so long

[clickclickdrone]

I was on Microsoft Live's maps last night (first time) enjoying the birds eye view of my house (really impressed, can see individual items in the garden and my car parked outside). I then wondered how much sensitive stuff was allowed so I scrolled over to a military research place near where I live. Almost nothing is known about his place apart from its existence and that it's something to do with testing & research. Well, it was all there. I spent an hour looking at the bunkers, tanks, gun emplacements, various buildings, roads, railways etc. I was amazed I was allowed. I then moved over to an island nearby that is shared between military and farmers - non residents need a pass to visit. That was all there too.
With a bag of goodness like that online, I just don't know where to 'snoop' next!

Re:Surprised it's taken so long

[CatrionaMcM]

That's not what I found. I was browsing Google Earth a couple of months back, looking at the coast of Scotland. There's a British Naval base reasonably near a town my family live in. The photos of the town and its surrounding countryside were reasonably well defined, for a rather rural area. The base looked like someone had deliberately blurred the images. You could just make out lighter coloured blurs that could be ships in a dock, and some things that could be carparks, bunkers or shopping malls. It's hard enough to work out what a building is used for if all you can see is the roof, but you couldn't even be sure if these were buildings at all. I've no real idea why this was done- to be honest, I wouldn't expect the UK navy to have enough influence to tamper with the satellite images bought by a private company. It may be so blurry because they were forced to use lower-resolution images- taking photos from orbit would be less of a security issue than from a helicopter or a jet. (I'm assuming that's how Google gets its better quality shots of cities and things.) In both Google Earth and Microsoft's maps, it looks like more attention is paid to America than other countries- the images are sharper, even in the countryside, and seem more recent. It would be more noticeable if any pictures of military bases had been tampered with. Has anyone tried looking at Area 51?

Re:Surprised it's taken so long

[Enigma2175]

Area 51

Re:Surprised it's taken so long

[clickclickdrone]

This was in the UK so I suspect they have levels of secrecy. Sounds like a challenge to see what's blurry or not ;-)

GCHQ UK

[Bowdie]

I live round the corner from GCHQ Cheltenham, and there are signs every few meters on the fence stating that it's a restricted area and that because of the official secrets act, I cannot photograph it. That's ok by me, as both google and live both have razor sharp images of the building and surrounding land.

I've lived there for so long, the site no longer holds any interest for me, but it does kind of make a mockery of the ruling. Hell, in the live bird's eye view, I can see my car on my driveway.

Dramatic Exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

GP was doing dramatic exaggeration, but his points show evidence of truth in them.

1. CCTV Cameras were at 4-5 million last time I looked at the stats. That's an insane number.

2. You can be arrested for driving offenses now, in fact any offense is now arrestable. And any arrest allows detention without action for 24 hours. A policeman can arrest you for an offence he pulled out of his ass (e.g. disobeying a police officer) and detain you for 24 hours with no further checks, take your fingerprints and DNA, perform a search of any electronic devices you have (e.g. your cellphone) and then charge you under a different offence later. Best not to piss them off.

3. It is illegal to use a radar detector. They are considering making it illegal to own one.

4. I'd rather live in neither place, I've had several brushes with the law while in the UK. I match some profile that causes them to stop and search me (so far 4 times). Sometimes it makes me angry and the policeman will often threaten some arbitrary punishment if I don't comply. Last time it was, 'stop complaining or I'll have your car towed under the terrorism act'. It all looks great on the TV when policemen are heroes and bad guys are thugs, but I'm just an ordinary person and it's not great. The place is a nightmare.

Re:Dramatic Exaggeration

[Gordonjcp]

1. CCTV Cameras were at 4-5 million last time I looked at the stats. That's an insane number.

And the US has mandatory monitoring of every single phone call. I consider my phone calls more private than what I might do walking down the street. I don't care if someone sees me picking my nose or scratching my arse. I *do* care about my phone calls being spied on.

Re:Dramatic Exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

I match some profile that causes them to stop and search me (so far 4 times) Wearing a Lone Ranger mask and Y-fronts back over your tights may not be illegal, but it's definitely not advisable.

Re:Dramatic Exaggeration

[clickclickdrone]

>And the US has mandatory monitoring of every single phone call
Sorry to ruin your day but they monitor the world's calls (pretty much) via Echelon. With a major node in the UK, you can be sure that's one country that gets included.

Re:Dramatic Exaggeration

[Marcus Green]

No the information in the post wasn't an exaggeration it was just wrong. Commenting on some slightly similar information that might be true, doesn't make the original information any less wrong.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[djmcmath]

Please don't think that signs saying "Don't take pictures here" or "Cameras forbidden" are uniquely American in any way. The rest of the world sees fit to ban cameras in all kinds of interesting places. Why, if you set up a tripod in front of St. Peter's Basilica, the guards will come over and stop you, and they're very serious people. Further, you'll have to remind me where in the Constitution it says "The government shall make no law respecting the Citizen's Right to use their camera," a statement I find highly unlikely given that the first cameras didn't even exist until more than a hundred years after the Constitution was written.

This whole attitude of "American sucks" is so frustratingly ignorant. It's like you have never been out of the country, have no perspective on what's going on in the rest of the world, and take all of your information from other Slashdot posters.

Now we know why Cryptome.org was taken down.

[Lost Penguin]

This comment, coming on the heels of the take down of Cryptome.org, smells...

I suspect the images on Cryptome are what motivated his comments.

Google Maps not gospel

[Tom Womack]

NGIA is the map-making part of what used to be the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the consumers of vast amounts of black-budget money.

There are all sorts of censorships in Google Earth, from the glaring (there are no roads or cities in Israel!) to the moderately glaring (you can count planes at Beirut airport, not so at Ben Gurion) to the subtle; I had a friend out at the RAF base in Basra a few months ago, and was a little alarmed that there was one-metre georeferenced imagery of the camp available - though since the camp's still there and the impacts on it seemed fairly random, it would appear that the local insurgents didn't have GPS-guided mortar rounds. Or possibly GPS was jammed over the camp -- after all, the airmen in the camp know where it is already -- though maintaining the navigation hardware in planes when you can't test it in-base would not be fun.

That made the British news, and maps.google.co.uk now has no GIS information for Iraq at all (in fact, no GIS from the Egyptian border to the Indian border), though it still has sub-metre imagery of central Basra

( http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=30.5 20642,47.844225&spn=0.005093,0.00824&z=17 ) - I don't know whether the bridge is still a pontoon-bridge.

Basra International Airport, which I was only able to find after doing a Google search and finding a Soviet map of the area

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asi a/basra_1990.jpg

now shows suspiciously devoid of planes and buildings:

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=30.5 494,47.669935&spn=0.040728,0.065918&z=14

My favorite Google Earth oddity is the Mondrianised patch of the Netherlands here

http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=52.248443,4.4 4&spn=0.007239,0.016479&t=k&z=16&om=1

Noordwijk is the home to ESA Mission Control, but that shows up on the map without trouble. I'm by a long way not interested enough to spend a hundred Euros getting myself to Holland, walking down Albert Verweystraat taking photos of the buildings, and seeing which one belies the fact that it's labelled National Marine Conservancy by the platoon of marines outside.

Re:Google Maps not gospel

[Anonymous Coward]

The NGA was formally NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency) but they changed their name because it didn't have Intelligence in the name like the other intelligence agencies. Before they were NIMA they weren't technically an intelligence agency they were the DMA (Defense Mapping Agency) created in 1972 but with the Clinton Administration restructuring they were combined with analyst parts of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) in 1996.

Re:Google Maps not gospel

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Earth was funded by the NGA.

More like Censorship via Copyright.

[zotz]

[During the early months of the invasion of Afghanistan they bought up all satellite imagery over that country, worldwide, in a tactic later dubbed "checkbook shutter control."]

More like Censorship via Copyright right? Isn't this play on the rise? By private individuals as well as governments?

all the best,

drew

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=zotzbro

Re:I claim this first post for pi!

[SkyDude]

Please don't feed the ACs. It only causes them to stay in the pond and poop in it.

Re:I claim this first post for pi!

[zero_offset]

PiNazi.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[hey!]

Actually, there probably isn't an area of the Constitution more unclear.

If you are out doing something in your fields, anybody can observe you.

If you are in your house, what you do is private.

In between -- things get murky. Anybody can walk up to your front door an knock of course, but the area in the immediate vicinity of your house, call the curtilage, has an intermediate level of protection. People can't poke around it with impunity to find things out about you. They can't stand in the bushes outside your window to hear voices drift out.

Technology makes this convenient distinction tougher to maintain. In Florida v. Riley, a Pasco County deputy used a helicopter to spot marijuana plants growing in a greenhouse that the defendant had screened from the road. The trial court accepted the defendant's motion to suppress, resulting in a flip-flopping cascade of reversals that ended with the Supreme Court ruling that since the officer had a perfect right to fly over the defendant's home in a helicopter, any observations he made were admissible.

On the other hand, in Kyllo v. US (2001), the SC held that the use of thermal imagery to detect marijuana cultivation inside the defendant's home amounted to a fourth amendment search. However, the decision did not set clear guidance on this issue, other than a sense that this use of sensory enhancement technology doesn't pass a kind of "sniff test".

So, arguably observation of curtilage areas from a favorable vantage point is allowable, but the use of sensory enhancement technology to obtain information that would otherwise have to be obtained by intruding onto the defendant's home or curtilage is not allowable. Extreme magnification and high resolution sensors in space might well count as sensory enhancement.

In Dow v. US (1986), the SC ruled on a case that bears on this; Dow sued the EPA because the EPA used aerial imagery to inspect a Dow plant when Dow officials had denied them entry for an inspection. The SC allowed the use of aerial imagery, but offered a number of possible justifications of this; it is not clear what combination of these justifications are necessary or sufficient. These justifications include: The imagery was taken from navigable airspace; EPA has statutory authority to investigate and enforce regulations; the EPA was not violating state laws regarding trade secrets; the areas between buildings in an industrial plant more resemble "open fields" than curtilage (i.e. it doesn't tell anybody about what is going on inside buildings as much as the overall activity on the site); it was not using any technology that was not available to the general public.

Overall, I think this leaves the issue of satellite imagery -- excuse me -- up in the air. Is it a technology available to the general public? Does the degree of technological sensory enhancement matter (as possibly implied by Kyllo)? Does the ubiquity and unobtrusiveness of observation make a difference?

My sense is that the state of commercially available satellite imagery sets the expectation of privacy an individual has. Up until recently a person could expect his property to be photographed from space maybe once or twice a year at resolutions of about 10 meters/pixel. However, it is now possible to obtain on demand imagery in the 0.7 meter/pixel range -- about as good or a better than most aerial photo surveys. In fact this resolution is so good, the company which provides this service doesn't have any examples in their imagery gallery (http://www.satimagingcorp.com/gallery-quickbird.h tml), possibly because it would alarm the public if they saw it.

How about pizza boys?

[mangu]

...the real world isn't a cryptosystem. The attacker has less time to study your nuclear site security offline

This is in CNN about the planned terrorist attack on Fort Dix: "The men had surveyed a number of bases but settled on Fort Dix because one of the defendants said he knew the base "like the back of his hand" because he had delivered pizza there, Christie said."

If you look into the details of almost any criminal or terrorist attack on physical installations, there's someone infiltrated there in a legal job, or someone who has a close relationship to an employee.

All the aerial photograph can show you is the general layout of the place. Although that is useful by itself, it's not enough to plan anything. It's not enough to know a building is there, you need to know what's inside, you have to know the guards schedules, which doors are locked, who has the key, internal building layouts, and so many other details that aren't shown on Google Earth.
 

Re:How about pizza boys?

[skotte]

hear hear! Well spoken.

Adding to that, Google maps isn't actually what I might call helpful in determining building layouts. Looking at the roof of my workplace, fFor example, you'd never know half the building is a warehouse, and the other half is a random mashup of sprawling offices, and somewhere inside one office is a cash-box, and somewhere in another are several boxes of macbooks, and somewhere inside another office is a set of very expensive golf clubs. Just seeing the top of the roof doesn't tell you any of that.

NGIA - stop crying foul

[freedom_india]

I read a tale somewhere:
A lion was terrorizing all the animals in the forest. It caught a mouse, shook him read bad and asked him: "Who's the king?" The fearful mouse answered: "You my lord".
It continued to catch and shake deer, swans, foxes, etc.,
And then it met an elephant. With the usual dumb swagger (imagine Bush in this), it went up to the elephant, slapped him, and demanded who's the king?
In answer, the elephant caught the Lion, threw him up and down for a few times, and then bored, threw him away 50 feet angrily.
What did the Lion do?
After the fall, it woke up, shook the dust, and told the elephant (same tone Bush uses to veto bills): "Hmmph. just because you don't know the answer does not mean you get angry."

Similarly, just because the private agenices are kicking NGIA's ass does not NGIA cries like a child and goes to mommy for protection.

If NGIA is a man, let it duel with the private agencies.
  But then none of Bush's agencies, FCC, FTC, NGIA, CIA, FBI have the backbone for a straight discussion or fight.

And we still claim we are an open democracy and celebrate July 4 !
What an irony !

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most online sattellite/aerial images are months, if not years old. Other than getting a general idea of this building is here, or that road leads there - the data from online maps are more or less useless from an intel perspective. And it only shows the outside of buildings, not what's inside of them. Information with real potential to be dangerous more often than not comes from sources on the ground.

If there's any restriction, it shouldn't be about what sattellite photos are taken - but how soon anybody is able to access new data.

And on a side note, blacking out or degrading resolution on public maps in an obvious manner just draws more attention to that location. Curiousity seekers will want to know what's there. This could lead to photographs from the ground, which is probably the last thing folks blocking the data would want.

Re:Google Earth Created 4 NGA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like Google Earth wasn't created for the NGA in the first place before it was bought by Google.

They're Already Laughing

[quanticle]

We can only run so high of a deficit and our IQ can get only get so low before others (EU, Russia, China) will start to laugh at us.

I'm pretty sure they're already laughing. And, in the case of China, they own so many US Treasuries they can afford to laugh all the way to the bank.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Doc Ruby]

This story is about the US "spy chief", not a state org.

When a state prohibits recording publicly viewable places, then we're just arguing about whether it's completely stupid - if the state's constitution creates that kind of power for it.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Doc Ruby]

I have been to every continent on which people outnumber penguins, and I have the pictures to prove it. Including pictures of people trying to throw me out of various picturesque churches.

I certainly don't think government censorship, even specifically banning photography of public places, is "uniquely American". I've been engaged in the US end of the "droit de regard" debate for well over a decade, though I can cite French examples.

Complaints by Americans about unamerican activity of our government (and its people) are not "ignorant". They are the American way: part of the process of petitioning the government for redress of grievances, as well as free expression and any number of other rights we explicitly protect according to our Constitution. You want to talk about ignorance, look to your comment about the Constitution needing a "right to use their camera", when government powers exist only so far as the Constitution explicitly creates them (and the states don't prohibit them).

It's like you live in the fake America in the Rush Limbo show, where no American ever leaves their hick town, except to go to Disneyworld. Naturally a free, informed American exercising my full rights and demanding my government protect them frustrates you. There are plenty of other countries where that's the way they do it, but not in my America.

NIMA=NRO+NPIC+DMA

[decsnake]

and NIMA was formed by merging the formerly far less scary Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) with the bastard children of the Air Force and the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC)

Fun with alphabet soup!

Re:NIMA=NRO+NPIC+DMA

[DragonWriter]

That's not quite true; NRO still exists independently, though some functions were transferred to NIMA.

Time permitting...

[Anonymous Coward]

These restrictions are clear violations of the Constitution, which creates no power for our government to prevent our recording public places.

I couldn't resist this... troll, or no.
Just what, do you suspect, did the people use to record public places, in the days of the framing of the US Constitution? According to Wikipedia,

The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce.

The US Constitution was ratified, and government under it's auspices began, some time around 1789.

Think about those dates, for a bit.

Re:Time permitting...

[Doc Ruby]

The Constitution does not have an expiration date. Your subtroll post is worthless in every way. Think about thinking about the Constitution before you post.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Doc Ruby]

You mean like the ones on NJ Turnpike toll plaza leading to I278-W?

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[Doc Ruby]

The Constitution isn't "unclear" on the right to record public places, it's silent. The people have a right to security in our homes, through only reasonable searches. The absence of a Constitutional power to stop our photography of public places means that power doesn't exist.

The other points you make are relevant to the story's subject, satellite photography. Technology changes the basic human rights into unbalanced privileges. Like driving a car, or carrying a gun, those freedoms are based on restrictions, because not everyone can or does have them. Buildings themselves are technology that we use to protect our rightful privacy. When someone invades that privacy, using technology or even just naked techniques, we use the government to stop them, to protect our rightful privacy. When the government is the invading party, we run the government to prevent such abuses, where private action can rightfully be stopped only once the act is committed.

The government strategy of buying up exclusive rights to privately sold images is an interesting strategy, as it does not interfere with any rights. However, those images must be available to the public once the government's justified timeframe of restricting them has expired. A legit process protecting info from public access during only the actually required timeframe is one of the most urgent reforms our Info Age government now demands.

three letter name envy

[WUNHJazz]

Until 2004, the NGA (not NGIA) was known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA). Perhaps they felt that having one fewer letter in the acronym gave them increased spy-cred in Washington.

National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

[DragonWriter]

I had never heard of this particular intelligence agency.

That's possibly because its a fairly recent rename, it used to be the "National Imagery and Mapping Agency". But its also not one of the big-name sexy ones that gets cited in the news a lot like CIA, DIA, or NSA.

Re:National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

[rjk191]

Before it was NIMA, it was the DMA (Defense Mapping Agency).

I worked there for 4 years as a contractor - as a developer on the front-end for the imagery systems...

Re:international doesn't help

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past I believe they bought the shutter for france's spot sattelite as well... I would assume the deal is that if you're providing intelligence to an opposing force, you're fair game, so basically the sattellite owner is put in the position of either getting paid off, or having their very expensive sattelite destroyed... what would you choose?

Doesn't work against people with more tanks than u

[fantomas]

"Sue them under the DMCA for selling pirated reproductions of your copyrighted "artistic work" (aka the paintjob on your house)

Might work against another individual or even evil corporations/commercial organisations selling photos of your house, but don't go round trying to sue people with access to more tanks/missiles/secret 'rendition facilities' than you. It really doesn't work, they really don't need to care about your country's law if they don't want to. These guys really don't respond well to people shouting "I know my rights" at them. They want to take a photo of your house, they are going to do so.... :-)

NGIS

[crmartin]

I had never heard of this particular intelligence agency.

It's a name change. used to be NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office.

Of course, now I have to kill you.

ANPR Cameras

[Anonymous Coward]

Not over long distances - over short distances such as a mile or so. You're talking about the SPECS cameras, which many consider to be much safer than GATSOs since they don't cause hard braking. (Note: I'm opposed to speed cameras, but I don't see how you can claim that SPECS is worse than GATSO).
 
Actually I think he's talking about Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) cameras. These are digital cameras that are spread out over long distances, such as a large stretch of the M42. They read and record your numberplate and measure the amount of time it took you to get between any two cameras, if you were too quick, you are automatically issued a speeding ticket. These cameras are also linked into the DVLA database, so if your car doesn't have current road tax, an MOT or is not insured, you are automatically fined for that too.
 
  I travel pretty regurlarly on the stretch of the M42 that has these cameras, there are big signs warning you that 'Active Traffic Management' is in operation. The amazing thing is that the system does actually work, nobody speeds. During rush hour the speed varies between 50-70mph to help keep the traffic moving in the congestion, the end result being that there are very rarely traffic jams. Overall I personally think these cameras are great, nobody has the right to speed and these cameras are finally doing something about it.

Re:Don't Look! Up in the Sky! It's a Bird! It's a

[rts008]

Are we invading Normandy AGAIN??

Why? I know the French didn't jump on our Iraq plan, but isn't this a bit extreme?