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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.
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.
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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.
just so you know, you've got a typo in there
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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.
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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.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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?
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.
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
NGA (NGIA in the submission) the artist formerly known as NIMA - not a new organization just a different name...
I think he actually means NIGA - the intelligence agency from the ghetto.
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.
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make install -not war
nga plz.
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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 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.
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.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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.
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.
"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.
..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.
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
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.
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make install -not war
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?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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's just allergic to BS.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
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).
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!
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
[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
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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.
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make install -not war