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DHS To Share Spy Satellite Data Over the US
An anonymous reader sends us to the Wall Street Journal for the news that later this year the US Department of Homeland Security will begin sharing US spy satallite data with law enforcement and other customers. From the article: "...one of [DHS]'s first objectives will be to use the network to enhance border security, determine how best to secure critical infrastructure and help emergency responders after natural disasters. Sometime next year, officials will examine how the satellites can aid federal and local law-enforcement agencies, covering both criminal and civil law... DHS officials say the program has been granted a budget by Congress and has the approval of the relevant committees in both chambers... Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory... [A CDT spokesman said] 'Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous.'"
Hmm...so, should this info be made freely available to the US citizens, so we can monitor how well our govt. is doing things like protecting our border...where they are gathering in reference to peaceful protests, how well they're responding to emergencies (would have been interesting for Katrina to see them all standing around).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Let's be honest...Law enforcement isn't going to get much use out of this...there is too much data, and they have too few people and resources to sift through it all.
Geeks on the other hand, would have a field day. There would be AJAX pages tracking border crossers in real time, sites dedicated to assembling satellite photos of crimes in progress, the works.
Sure, you'd have to deal with lawsuits from every nude sunbather in america, but that's a small price to pay for freedom.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
and look forward to their snappy brown uniforms and leather boots.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory... [A CDT spokesman said] 'Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous.'""
Someone in a book suggested dispensing with privacy and have two-way transparency. The watchers get watched with the same degree of attention they watch us.
Google Earth already does this, scanning the international community for law breakers like the topless sunbather in Holland. e ss-sunbathing/>
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
Department, Commissariat (as in KGB) of Homeland Security -- what's the difference? The concept is the same, the purpose as well. There are still some details in implementation, but let's cut them some slack, they started just in 2002 so there's still much to be ironed out.
The real question is, does the population really believe any agency of this sort has a place in a democratic country?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Not if you're invisible too.
But really folks, is invisible surveillance really that much more dangerous than the visible kind? I don't think so. If the crazies are so worried, let them run around planting signs everywhere: Never Forget The Eye in the Sky!
Truth is, visible surveillance becomes invisible the moment it becomes ubiquitous.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The main point about obtrusive surveillance technologies is whether or not data from them is admissible in court. Like if the FBI tapped your phone without a very good reason and a court order, any information they gather couldn't be used against you. The thing with surveillance like this is that any data it collects probably would be admissible if the court viewed it like any other camera data. In any event, I think that we can mostly agree that satellite surveillance should be used for military purposes only and not to look for the kids who broke your window playing baseball.
Um, no.
The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building....According to defense experts, (spy sats) use radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"Mr. Allen, the DHS intelligence chief, says the department is cognizant of the civil-rights and privacy concerns, which is why he plans to take time before providing law-enforcement agencies with access to the data. He says DHS will have a team of lawyers to review requests for access or use of the systems.
"This all has to be vetted through a legal process," he says. "We have to get this right because we don't want civil-rights and civil-liberties advocates to have concerns that this is being misused in ways which were not intended."
Hmm...weren't all our wiretapping programs previously covered by laws, checks and balances? Weren't warrants needed back then for those? Oh right..times change...we don't need those any more.
Wonder how long they do this for the satellite imaging? I can't imagine it would take long to do away with that for them either....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Does the US government have any discretion when it comes to privacy? Oh well. I suppose they have their reasons. Guess it's about time to dig the tinfoil hat out of mothballs.
The game.
Everyone should paint messages on their roof.
"He went that way ->"
"Are you looking at ME?"
"Bite me"
"Nothing to see here, move along"
"I have a telescope and I'm looking right back atcha"
"No WMDs here either"
"I'm hairy and nude - you still wanna look?"
"Area 52"
See? Mess with their heads.
'Local' law enforcement are considered CUSTOMERS?
What kind of fucked up thing is that?
Heh. Yea, he's "cognizant" of them all right.
I can't see how this won't be misused. "Where were you on the night of the 1st?" "I think I was at home..." "Well you weren't! Here are the thermal satellite images to prove it!"
Seriously. This is a wet dream for the cops.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Just pass the word to the Administration and its Congressional allies that those satellites are good enough to show nekkid women sunbathing.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Did you not read this at all?
They say that they're going to track your every move, and your response is, "Well, at least I don't live in that other place where they track my every move..."?
Maybe in England they're saying, at least I don't have to check the undercarriage of my car for GPS devices planted by the police without a warrant. (Of course, that's old news, so we've probably all forgotten about it by now.)
Besides, even if things are much worse in England (they're not), is that supposed to be some kind of justification for the gross invasion of privacy taking place? If our government starts deciding to randomly kill a bunch of its citizens just to demonstrate its power, would that be okay because there are other governments out there that randomly kill more of its citizens? Would you still say, "At least I don't live in that other country..." instead of actually feeling a bit of outrage?
No wonder this country is going to hell. With rationalization like that, our government will be able to get away with pretty anything it wants to.
c'mon this is /. if editors edited and readers read...
well at this point I am supposed to have a handy saying. Guess I'm not the "Insightful" kind of guy.
Anywho, this sorta data reminds me of the Google StreetView criticism. Is it really your privacy if anybody can see it? Then again, not everybody has access to a high powered, multi-spectrum satellite at their disposal.
Wait, I'm the ambiguous metaphor guy!
import system.cool.Sig;
The argument that private citizens should have equal access to this is an interesting one. Historically, satellite imagery from the NRO has been closely guarded on grounds of national security, because releasing it reveals details that might be useful to unsavory people about our satellites capabilities, orbits, and operating practices. There is of course, the additional issue of privacy. After all, not just any private citizen can have access to a wire-tap. Then again, a wiretap requires (in theory anyways) a warrant.
This doesn't quite strike me as uncharted territory. A satellite image is not fundamentally much different from an aerial photo (most people don't seem to realize that the majority of high resolution imagery on Google Earth comes from USGS camera-equipped aircraft). In fact, aircraft usually have the advantage of better resolution, the ability to schedule observations much more conveniently, and longer loiter times (you can't look at the same target for very long moving at 17,500 mph). The main drawbacks are they don't scan as large of areas, and your target can more easily see them, although it's hard to be sure if a plane is watching you or just doing flight training. Oh, and not many airplanes can fligh high enough to avoid an SA-2.
Actually, the Wall Street Journal author seems to have done a good job covering each of these issues in the article.
Regarding two-way transparency, if someone is being underhanded in exploiting that, it once again becomes unbalanced unless you have the resources to identify and address that problem. Net result: someone is still screwing with you, but you have less privacy.
Besides, we theoretically have checks and balances built into the system, but that doesn't stop people from using the system for their own purposes. If the system isn't perfect as is, I highly doubt it will improve by removing all restrictions on either side.
"cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data."
I find it pretty darn impossible to believe spy satellites can penetrate concrete, or even dense forest cover in the way that's implied as it simply makes no scientific sense. Nothing except neutrinos and a few gamma rays are going to penetrate a standard building (especially if it is multiple stories), but both of these would be impossible for surveillance.
Also, how exactly can something penetrate concrete, then reflect of skin & clothes before re-penetrating concrete again? It makes no sense.
1. Have 50 naked people spell out a "message"
a) very near the site of a probable use.
b) example: political conventions and protest site.
2. artwork on the ground, plastic warning tape (do-no-cross) is quick, cheap, easy to remove.
3. etc.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Reminds me of a little song I heard when I was growing up. Once upon a time, today's world would have been looked upon as the demented fantasy of a heavy metal band.
Up here in space,
I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives, think nothing of the kind!
There is no true escape, I'm watching all the time!
(CHORUS):
I'm made of metal, my circuits gleam!
I am perpetual, I keep the country clean!
I'm elected, electric spy...
I'm protected, electric eye...
Always in focus,
You can't feel my stare,
I zoom into you,
You don't know I'm there
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves,
My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove...
(CHORUS)
Electric eye (in the sky)
Feel my stare (always there)
There's nothing you can do about it! Develop and expose!
I feed upon your every thought, and so my power grows!
(CHORUS)
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm protected, electric eye
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm elected
Protective,
Detective,
Electric
Eye!
- Judas Priest, Electric Eye, 1982.
Not bad. Pretty much got everything right. "Keeping the country clean" as the excuse for the power grab. "Elected. Protective. Detective." as the correct chronological order in which to implement it.
(I'm going to try and ignore the video for Turbo Lover and the suspicious resemblance to the cyborg-on-a-motorcycle sequence from Terminator 2. He wound up getting elected as Governor, and you'd think that if a hair metal band really had come from the future, they'd have at least hinted at the Governator in a backwards-masked portion of the track... There's such a thing as taking pop culture too seriously, after all.)
Great. Will they be reading what is on the screen of your ipod and send you a demand for proof of purchase of the song?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
not just there, they just put up another one on the main drag of Capitol Hill in Seattle.
That's not in England. It's here.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Think thermal energy.
Sure, they cant id the people in teh living room sucking on that hooka, or see what anti American propaganda you are reading, but they can tell that people were at the crime scene, ( and then track you in daylight once you leave the building ) or that you have a hidden grow room in the northwest closet..
So its not totally useless.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One word: Resolution. When one pixel might or might not represent a huge boulder, that's one thing. When it represents darker pigment on the tip of your left nipple, that's something else entirely.
Ever hear of adaptive optics? Multiple aperture arrays? Interferometry? The amount of money and technology available to the US government moves the bar right out of your reach.
No, think of it this way: It's some person half a continent away looking into your yard despite your privacy fence, watching your significant other sunbathe, nude. Without a warrant, an invitation, or anything remotely resembling a good reason.
What this means is that in order to attempt to be secure from unreasonable search (again, see the 4th amendment) from individuals in the employ of an invasive and out of control government, fences are no longer going to be sufficient. Now we're going to have to roof our properties too.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes and LE are customers of Glock and Taser International and GM. News flash! LE doesn't make all their own equipment! You wouldn't like it if they did. It would be the worst quality most expensive shit you have ever seen if they did.
Creative Demolition
Law enforcement can't just make arbitrary searches; that's what the fourth amendment is about. If you hold a reasonable expectation of privacy, then fourth amendment rights apply, even in the face of advancing technology. The use of infrared cameras to look for marijuana grow lights is illegal without a warrant, for example. Similarly, even though it is feasible for there to be a microphone planted inside a phone booth, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy inside phone booth. So, LEOs need to get a warrant before they can bug a phone booth.
Also, there are some traditional privacy rights which can interact in interesting ways. For instance, you have the same privacy rights in the area immediately around a house (the curtailage) as you would inside. The curtailage includes any areas under a roofing overhang, and any areas generally bounded by fences, hedges, and other physical obstructions which would prevent a ground-level observer from peeking in. So, even though your back yard is open to the sky, both aerial photography or satellite imagery requires a warrant. Viewing from a nearby tall hill doesn't.
Law enforcement can already use commercial satellite imagery (within 4th amendment limits), or their own aerial overflights (again, within limits) to get images just as readily as they could from the US government. For the scary things people are worried about, they can already do them if they are willing to break the law themselves. Using military satellites would be just as illegal.
"Everyone breaks the law"
Dead people don't.
They do if you don't bury them properly, or bury them in your back yard.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
We know they're watching Muslims & registered Democrats. Will Blacks, college grads and Republicans be next?
Or are they already watching Republicans (just to keep them in line) and moving towards watching Muslims, Dems, Blacks & Grads?
As an aside, how come nobody in those Congressional oversight hearings ever asks "are you monitoring/wiretapping/e-tapping/watching me or my staff or my colleagues?"
Maybe they already know the answer.
A book about the Corona spy satellite project (ISBN 1-56098-830-4) discusses how spy satellites altered the Whitehouse view of the 6-Day War. In a throwaway line, it mentions how planners reacted when there was "only daily imagery available". That was in 1967. One assumes that the daily temporal coverage, clouds permitting (and assuming we're only talking vis/ir), is far greater now.
Speaking of which anyone know the whereabouts of the Saint formerly known as Paris?
Hope is the currency of fools
Who is damn sick and tired of being spied on by their own government?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Some of the ideas of what this technology would be doing are pretty off-the-wall. This isn't "24"... think more of "Patriot Games." These are satellites that have to be pointed at a single target, and have the ability to track that piece of land, and can then give real-time images in either visible light or different infra-red spectra for night time and for heat detection, along with laser and radar technology for penetrating structures. Depending on where the target is, they sometimes even have to adjust the orbit to get a decent shot. I don't know how many sats there are, but this is obviously not something for community use. There's got to be a queue of agencies with various priorities to decide what they get to point the suckers at. If you think they're going to be looking for you smoking pot in your back yard, just extend the tin foil down into a wide bell shape, and you'll be covered.
read that as Dead Hooker Storage? I thought damn, someone has an array!!! An array of Dead Hooker Storage, would that be a plethora?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Wait for a cloudy day before you do your Bad Stuff.
Of course, once you've run the tape back to find where the perp's live, you know which telephone recordings to scan.... But there's no domestic telephone recording going on, right?
Another type of satellite has super magnification, but a narrow field of view. These need to be targeted (which is expensive), but yes, they can tell if you need a haircut or not. These are the ones that cannot hover over an area. But if the goal is to snap a photo of you holding evidence (or being in the presence of the wrong people), and DHS has an idea of when to monitor you, it is possible. Not likely, but absolutely possible.
This shouldn't be all that worrisome, until DOD+DHS announces a plan to put up one satellite a week, forever. Go for that price-break on the large quantity discounts, you see.
Frankly, even if you don't like it, too bad for you. Consider the Hans Reiser case: take the wide field view tape, and follow his car. If it doesn't show him driving off to any remote areas the day of the murder, maybe the tape should be played back from his wife's house to see if someone else showed up there that day, then follow them.
In either case, having evidence of who dumped the body will convict murderers. Even if you don't like spying by DHS, DHS isn't going to give it up without a fight.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
The Democrats did this the last time they held power (and she-who-must-not-be-named is running for a third term) without the 'structure' in place to authorize such things as taking the FBI files on all leading Republicans and using them for blackmail, etc., spying on all pro-life Christians, including the Cardinal of New York, not to mention the Waco pogrom, etc., Imagine what they'll do with -this-.
shouldn't they be sharing with other government agencies? concerning...
Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous.
It's also a useful tool, especially in regard to securing the border. I like having a system in place to keep track of who goes in and out of the country -- it's only a problem when the system itself is misused; inherently it's a good idea, and serves it's function (I actually know of a guy who deserted the army overseas, after stealing sensitive info, and months later was then stupid enough to take a flight that had a brief layover in the U.S. -- his passport was flagged, and they arrested him right there).
In any case, if the border patrol isn't using this technology already, using it would make it next to impossible to sneak across.
Just remember, kids, all you need to avoid incriminating yourself to a spy satellite is a roof over your head!
So don't grow pot in your backyard or anything, they might check for that now.
Has nothing do to with doing something wrong, at all, in any way. Stop saying it.
Where was a white Ford Bronco parked the same night OJ cut himself? Do the Chinese have overflights of Los Angles on the night in question? Even if you have a photo double jepordy still applies, except in England. The queen can put anybody to death on a whim. Makes you appreciate our system even when there are some things wrong with it. Maybe he really can help find the REAL killer.
I take it that there are no security cameras in private establishments in the US then? Actually, I know that to be false because I counted as many, if not more, than I would expect in the UK on my last visits to Baltimore, Columbia, and DC. Pretty much every business in the UK that deals with cash has at least one CCTV camera up, and I imagine it must be similar in the USA.
Also, a huge number of the cameras in the UK are on our highways. These are immensely useful for reporting traffic incidents to local/national radio and the highways agency travel website which then provides data to companies such as TomTom so that SatNav devices can route around problems. I find it immensely useful. Yes, those cameras also get used during police pursuits or other crimes, such as the recent M40 shooting, but as a law abiding citizen, what difference does it make?
Just a quick reality check.
I think you've watched Enemy of the State maybe one too many times.
Surveillance satellites are not geo-synchronous, so they cannot observe in what most of us consider real-time. "Real-time" surveillance is not like watching a color movie of what's going on on the ground. It is more like analyzing black and white snapshots of what is on the ground as the satellite(s) pass over a given area.
Doing effective analysis requires a lot of resources, knowledge and experience that the typical person just doesn't have.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Thermal Energy = infra Red.
There is simply no way Infra Red can be picked up after traveling through air, then through even few inches of concrete/bricks/wood/tiles then through air again, especially as a typical building has several insulating layers (e.g. ceiling, thermal insulation, cavity space, roof tiles). The signal is going to be simply non-existent.
Large static sources of heat like "grow rooms" may show up if on the top floor of a "thin"-roofed building, although they would appear pretty identical to many utility/boiler rooms.
Go on believing that, I've seen it. It does work.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't worry this isn't like hollywood where they can track your every move. First of all these satellites are only a couple of hundred miles up, so they aren't stationary. They can barely make out anything at the person sized level, and the images are in black and white. If you specifically are a target, and they invest the energy in tracking you directly, they still can only get 4 minutes worth of sparse STILL (not video) images of you every 90 - 120 minutes. It's not like they're reading the radio dial or anything, or nosing in the books you're reading. Honestly with today's satellite technology, the only real thing they can do is compare what something looks like this week with what it looked like last week. It also doesn't capture images unless they specifically target the images. They can specifically target general areas and see for example, if a large contingent of troops are moving in a warzone, or if there is a blockage to an escape route after an earthquake. They cannot watch you in realtime and video tape your sexual exploits with that hooker you've been trying to hide in your car. Haha.
Although that is how it is now, but I suppose it's possible that a next generation of satellites could possibly do those things, at least in small bursts, so it's important to make sure the law keeps up with the technology, but right now, there isn't much in the 'offensive' that satellites can give the government, just mostly information that can be used for post-facto defensive strategy or in near-term decision making, like choosing evacuation routes after say.. a terrorist drops a nuke on someone.
Speak for yourself.
My first programming job was with a company that made software to process satellite and aerial photography. This person knows what he's talking about. The kind of satellites that DHS is likely to allow civilian law enforcement to look at do not have that kind of resolution at all.
Now, I never worked with classified data, but I have serious doubts over what military satellites are capable of based on conversations with coworkers. Our parent company also made top of the line aerial sensors, and our best sensor got 5 cm resolution at an altitude of 3 km. I think the lowest satellite orbits are 160 km, and so figuring out what one of the best commercial sensors could do at an altitude over 50X as high is an exercise left to the reader ('cause I'm lazy).
(PS: Our parent company was not American and had no reason to hold back technology for military use only, so put that conspiracy angle aside right now.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
We're talking higher rez, multiple spectrums, and updated extremely often. Just a touch different from Google Maps.
Meh. There's a direct tradeoff between the number of bands of color that you can sense and the resolution you can resolve. Panchromatic satellites have significantly better resolution than multispectral satellites which have better resolution than hyperspectral satellites. This is why nearly every color satellite has different resolutions for black & white and color images that it can take.
And trust me when I say that the best hyperspectral satellites (the kinds that resolve enough different wavelengths of light per pixel to do the kind of spectral analysis needed to detect "traces left by chemical weapons") have absolutely terrible resolution. For example, AVIRIS, a 224 band sensor, gets a resolution of about 20 meters per pixel. The Orbview-4 (aka Warfighter-1) probe that was launched for the Air Force in 2001 was going to be one of the best with a 1m panchromatic resolution and an 8m hyperspectral resolution, but it was destroyed in a launch failure. If you want high-quality hyperspectral data, you take it from a plane.
So anyway, much of what they talk about in this article is fantastic scare-mongering.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"Your son happens to surpass the speed limit & the officer promptly issues a speeding ticket ... and another ... and another."
So, you're trying to claim that enforcing the law your son broke is an abuse?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
When you start using data from spy satellites, it's unlikely that a defendant will be able to see the evidence against them. The capabilities and resolution of spy satellite photos is classified, so all most people will see is down-graded view. Even military commanders in the field get an interpretation -- they ask about particular features of a potential target, and then a photo analyst draws them a picture describing the photo. That way, the picture (and the satellite's capability) can't fall in to enemy hands.
This is good and bad -- good as in that police will need additional evidence to use this in individual prosecutions, and bad in that the secrecy surrounding spy photos could be used to manipulate the legal system ("trust us, Judge").
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Usually I'm a huge privacy & security zealot, but the sharing of remote sensing data doesn't bother me. Here's why: Public photography is legal.
Remote sensing data (i.e. visual imagery, radar, infrared, SIGINT, gravity measurements, spectroscopy, whever else you can think of...) are the types of data that anyone can freely collect on their own however they please. How, you might ask? Walk outside. Snap a picture with the camera in your cell phone. Turn on a radio. Measure the surface temperature of a house with a thermal imaging camera. Now take all that data and share it with people. Or sell it. No problem. It's all legal, because public photography is protected.
Should it be wrong to take the same kind of measurements from a vehicle in low earth orbit? Hell no. You can jump in an airplane and take pictures of your home town, complete with interesting aerial views of your neighbor's backyard. It's legal. You can share, sell or license those pics however you like. Public photography is protected.
"You have been watching too many movies. I worked with this stuff and referencing "Patriot Games" makes anyone in the know laugh (or even better that dubmassed movie that has them tracking WIl Smith in realtime inside a firken building. I was even at a classified brief where they made a joke of it: "Can we do stuff like I saw on Patriot Games? Yes, if you can get my a camera and a crane"."
Let me guess where that brief was - a certain 3 letter agency at Ft Meade MD? Heh.
They used that same anecdote when my wife did her brief a long time ago, and when I did mine going back into classified work after 9/11. I bet my son hears it when he gets his indoctrination brief going in there.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
There is simply no way Infra Red can be picked up after traveling through air, then through even few inches of concrete/bricks/wood/tiles then through air again, especially as a typical building has several insulating layers (e.g. ceiling, thermal insulation, cavity space, roof tiles). The signal is going to be simply non-existent.
Technically, it's a hidden object cheat. I'm sure Valve will be all over their sorry ass for terms of service. Then again, the feds can play pretty rough.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Performing the impossible is ...impossible. Appearing to perform the impossible (particularly when multi-million dollar federal contracts are in the air) is far easier.