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Satellite Spotters Make Government Uneasy
An anonymous reader found an interesting little story about satellite spotters and how, not surprisingly, their painstakingly methodical hobby doesn't exactly make gazillion dollar government agencies all that excited. Of course the article raises the very obvious point that if a guy with a pair of binoculars in his back yard can spot a satellite, so can the Chinese government.
If they are spotted, they failed. I think they should thank the spotters for the free bugtesting.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
...but the sky is pretty much Public Domain. Or are you going to outlaw looking up?
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Seriously, two articles in the same day scaremongering about China. Slashdot is turning into The New York Times in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
If the Chinese can develop tiny robots good for them. If the Chinese can spot satellites, good for them. Why the summary decided to single out China, I don't know. I'm sure if a guy with binoculars can do it, so can just about every government in the world, including the United States government. Remember, you guys aren't the only with satellites up these days.
First of all we aren't all American here so we don't all quite understand this paranoia about the Chinese. Secondly, I highly doubt the average Slashdotter, who is generally well educated, has the kind of irrational paranoia that Slashdot seems to be provoking in these articles.
The people charged with our defense and national security are *supposed* to be uneasy, ...lay awake nights, ... constantly wonder if all they've done is enough. That way, the rest of us don't have to.
Many LEO satellites are visible to the naked eye, and certainly with only a little optical assistance. Spotting one and speculating what it's doing are two different things. But maybe it's time to employ a little stealth for satellites too.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
The US government isn't worried about China or vice versa. We both know where each other's satellites are; both public and "secret". You don't put two billion dollar objects in orbit on a potential crash course. It just doesn't happen. That's why they know, we know they know, they know we know they know, and we're all comfortable with that.
Next question?
All the government folks are saying is that they would rather not have folks doing the work for the Chinese government.
That's not what the article said. The article said that if hobbyists could do it, so could the Chinese government. I doubt very much that the Chinese government is relying upon hobbyists to spot our satellites, given how easy it can be done.
Talk about a Straw Man argument. Sheesh.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
... a revolutionary, new method of self-destructing secret, space-based satellites. The new method is called overheating, due to a black, dull color.
Good news about our increased chocolate rations, though!
You can't take the sky from me...
Actually, no: anyone making notes about who is going in and out of a government building is likely to be arrested as a terrorist (see, for example, here).
The government would stop you looking at satellites too, if they could. At the moment, they can't. But if I lived in the US, I would think twice about publishing that sort of stuff on a web site.
Is the whole rest of the world enemy to the US now?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
It's also there because high-tech secrecy is something that only matters if you've got a high-tech enemy, and Russia's really not that relevant a threat these days. So if you're in the business of high-tech paranoia, the Chinese are the only other superpower around.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What will $CURRENT_SCARY_SMALL_TERRORIST_GROUP possibly do with this information, prey tell?
Do NOT look through binoculars^W telescope at secret government laser satellite with remaining eye.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
LOL, where the hell did you get that "fact"? You do realise China's been nuclear-capable since the late '60s, right?
How many nukes China does or does not have is one of the world's most closely guarded secrets and frankly, unless you're some top level NSA operative, you have no fucking idea.
The *only* credible information about the Chinese nuclear arsenal was the HK leak which emerged in 1996, which indicated China had in excess of 2,300 warheads. Look it up. That was close to an order of magnitude above any prior western media report - I somehow doubt they have given up making them since then.
They have ICBMs easily capable of reaching anywhere in the US. Accuracy doesn't really matter with nukes. If you think 2,300 nuclear warheads - and that was over *10 years ago* - isn't a significant deterrent to the US, you're out of your god damn mind.
I do not claim to have any special knowledge but I do take an interest in geopolitics and have a few friends in (Australian) intelligence circles who would laugh in your face if you tried to claim the USA would automatically win in an all out war with China. They would say, and I'm inclined to agree, that the USA is more likely to automatically *lose* anything other than for-real "all out war" with China - by default - because the US government cannot take any action which leads to nuclear retaliation by China, but the Chinese Govt couldn't give a shit. You think the US is going to risk getting nuked to save Taiwan? LOL!
Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
And then what? "Look up web pages" on how to shoot them down?
I'm guessing you mean the "terrorists" can hide from them, but there are too many satellites to do that, and the amateur satellite trackers don't know accurately which ones are spy sats (the ones you have to hide from) versus other types of sats like military communications. Plus the US military mostly uses UAVs to track terrorists, and those aren't being tracked, nor fly in predictable orbits.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Any sort of free intellectual activity, following what interests you to see where it leads, makes authoritarians uneasy. Bad governments seek to exercise power by restricting information. Anyone who's just naturally curious and follows their bliss for the sheer joy of finding things out represents a danger to authoritarians.
It's not just political speech that's dangerous, it's anything that seeks truth that might not always align with propaganda.
That's why the freedoms provided in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution are so precious.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How high an orbit do you propose to send these (low orbit) satellites into? ;-)
Seriously, the distance between the earth and the satellite is *tiny* compared to the distance of the earth from the sun. Thus, the satellite is practically always going to be in the earth shadow when on the "night side".
Only when it's in the sunrise or sunset part of its orbit will it be exposed to the sun - and only from an oblique angle, so unless you're planning to place the satellite in a geosynchronous orbit above the Lalamatine district of Ursa Minor Beta, you shouldn't have a problem.
I'd rather have the Chinese or whoever have to pay for it themselves.
Yeah, binoculars being so expensive and all. Oh, and manpower! I hear that comes at a premium in China!
You're being ridiculous. The fact is that China would have already found all of these satellites some time ago; they're a big country with a big intelligence agency just like ours, they can launch satellites so if they have any interest in finding satellites -- and they certainly do -- then they would have funded their own discovery effort. No hobbiest is discovering anything that China didn't already know.
The enemies of Democracy are
And then do what? What's the security issue?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Maybe "whether this has ever been discussed before on Slashdot" isn't what most of us want to see the conversation devolve into?
Furthermore, I don't see how you can accuse China of being militarily aggressive against the United States. The spy plane issue to which you refer does not prove your case. America was flying a spy plane in sovereign Chinese territory tens of thousands of miles away from the United States. One of their fighter planes accidentally hits the plane (the pilot was a hot dog who died in the accident).
The surveillance aircraft was in international airspace, not sovereign Chinese territory, when it was intercepted by Chinese aircraft. It only entered Chinese airspace after the Chinese pilot collided with it and it had to make an emergency landing at the closest airfield.
Accidentally hit is a misnomer on your part, so is hot dog. When a high maneuverability fighter gets that close to a slow lumbering aircraft it is a threat, and when the pilots is so aggressive that he bungles the maneuver hot head would be a better description.
You other attempts at changing the topic are intentionally ignored.
Smaller groups such as certain terrorist organisations possibly do not have the organisation or patience to find out this information themselves, but they do have the ability to look up web pages.
It always comes back to the terrorist bogeyman, doesn't it...
1) In the same way that there *weren't* communists under every bed during the cold war, there *aren't* terrorists lurking in every shadow today.
2) If those terrorists had the technology to affect a satellite in orbit, they probably wouldn't use it for that. They want to hit people "where they live" and freak out large parts of the population. What's going to have a "better" impact in their eyes - taking out some visible infrastructure onthe ground, or taking out a satellite that most people didn't even know existed?
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Satellites are classified by orbits, and orbital maneuvering, more than by anything else (assuming you don't have direct knowledge of their mission). Different satellites have different orbits for a reason, to support their mission, and their orbits thus provide information about their missions. GPS satellites are in high 12 hour orbits, comm sats are in even higher, 24 hour, orbits, weather satellites are in sun-synchronous polar orbits, etc.
An example : if you have an orbit that passes over Baghdad, big deal, they all will do that sooner or later. If you have one that passes over Baghdad early to mid-morning, when the shadows are nice and long (generally regarded as the best time for surface photography), you may have something. If you have an object whose orbit is continually tweaked to keep passing over Baghdad during mid-morning every few days, and that also happens to be at the perigee of the orbit, then you almost certainly have something. If you look at where it passes over during later-afternoon on other orbits, you may start to gain insight into what other targets are of interest.
You can bet that every serious intelligence service on the planet does this. Amateurs have been doing it since the 1950's, so this is old, old news.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.