Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Ingorance is Strength
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Sincerely,
Winston Smith
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.
Read radical news here
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
you had me at #!
The Russians are hungry for cash- why wouldn't they or the Chinese sell images that the US wanted hidden?
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.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
--
make install -not war
The US Constitution doesn't preclude the states from regulating public places.
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 ....
Infuriate left and right
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.
"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?
He makes wars, that's what defines him. So how is this in anyway surprising?
[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
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Actually, there probably isn't an area of the Constitution more unclear.
h tml), possibly because it would alarm the public if they saw it.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
--
make install -not war