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Artist/Astronomer Exhibits Photos Of Spy Satellites
daemonburrito writes "Trevor Paglen, the photographer and co-author of 'Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights' and 'I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me,' has an exhibit showing in Berkeley of 189 photos of secret US satellites (exhibit page here). Wired says, 'In taking these photos, Paglen is trying to draw a metaphorical connection between modern government secrecy and the doctrine of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time.'"
Everyone knows that the celestial spy satellites are perfect spheres! This "telescope" is a tool of the devil.
That's a pretty neat exhibi$ #_(%#^3 NO CARRIER
Blame the CIA and the Catholic Church in one fell swoop? Now if that isn't a match made for UCB, then I don't know what is.
Did TFA get slashdotted, or did the DoD bomb Berkley?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Why did this article get tagged "censorship?" I don't see anyone in the government trying to censor this exhibit.
I don't understand. What's newsworthy about this? Guy takes photos and displays them. He is not censored. No censorship was alleged.
He wants to make a statement about the parallel between himself being censored and something from 500 years ago. But he wasn't censored and there's really no parallel.
And this would be news if something had actually happened. Are we supposed to be pretend outraged at the imagined censorship that didn't happen? How is that different than the usual pretense to outrage that some folks engage in all the time?
Camping on quad since 1996.
just another young'n who probably didn't know crap about politics prior to the patriot act is now trying to make it seem like we've gone from and open and free society to a modernized nazi germany in 7 years.
i just love the people who were never interested in politics now ranting on like they're experts and telling us how much worse things have gotten. if anything, the government is finally coming clean about what they were already doing for decades.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Oh, I guess I shouldn't have just typed "Berkley" into the URL bar and should have clicked the link in the summary instead? Wow, your computer skills are 133t!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
After trying for the last... oh, a while, I finally gave in and clicked the link to the Wired Story in the hope that I'd see some of these pictures.
And they are censored - by the guy's stupid cheapassed telescope, long exposure times, etc! They sure are some impressive... um, streaks?
I think the Berkeley (hey I spelt it rite) server stopped working out of embarrassment. Now instead of wondering how Berkely got slashdotted, I'm wondering how the story got on slashdot at all (which I guess is still asking why it got slashdotted)
For once when I saw someone's subject line "nothing to see here" he wasn't kidding!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
How does he know it is the US controlling a given satellite? I wonder if any DoD guys looked at the exhibit and said "Hey! That's not one of ours."
The USAF has its own launch capability; they buy the same rockets from the same contractors NASA does. Sometimes NASA launches these things themselves; the Shuttle has carried secret satellites from time to time. It's hard to hide a launch, but you can keep the nature of its payload a secret. So, you can identify Mystery Satellite #121 by radar and by telescope, but determining whose it is (the Russians certainly have their own and I'd be surprised if the French don't) and what it is capable of is another matter. And if you're not watching it 24 hours a day, it can manoeuvre onto a different orbit when you're not looking.
So revealing that he's found 189 satellites and publishing his photographs doesn't reveal much the government wants kept secret. Every serious rival nation already knows where these things are. If however someone published that 'Satellite #117 is a Model X SuperScryer made by Lockheed in 2002, operating in infrared frequency x with maximum angular resolution y, resolving objects on the ground to z centimetres, using the following highly classified technologies...' - now that would upset people.
And 189 isn't so large a number. It's not like Star Wars out there, with crowds of vehicles zipping past each other. Space is big, and empty, and spysats are not such big things. They orbit very low, the better to get a close look at the Earth's surface, while communications and GPS satellites are far above, to have line of sight to much wider areas. Collisions are very unlikely, and all concerned maintain an extremely careful radar watch on all orbits intersecting any manned vehicle.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Here is the exhibit page cached by Google. No images, though, since images are not stored by the Google cache.
If you think that the Chinese need to be told where satellites are, then you must think they are also too dumb to launch something into space in the first place.
They know WHERE every satellite is, anyone with access to the tracking systems that are necessary in order to be able to get a satellite into space can see them. The trick is knowing which one is which. Pictures of the satellites would help them in that, so they won't show the pics, true. So that's no big deal as far as I'm concerned.
Of course, should anything ever get to such a violent point between the countries, China could just simply shoot down every US satellite... Except the ones they actually own, anyway.
Pointless. Some genius w/a camera takes pics of satellite tracks. Living in a semi-rural area, I can track eye visible satellites w/a bit of patience. I was hoping for something along the lines of a 16" (or larger) telescope getting pics like are seen often on http://www.spaceweather.com/ they even have a "simple" tracking program. http://www.heavens-above.com/ is a neat tool/toy as well. And if you REALLY wanted to know wtf that codename for that blob of light stood for , hit http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/index.html there's a search function. At one point, there was even one of the UFO "tracking sites" that had some interesting blurry shots of what were prob someone's elint arrays.
Two more words: Hate Crimes
Sorry but the government has already acted. Instead of just being tried for a crime of aggression someone can be tried for what others think the perpetrator was thinking before and during the crime. There have been numerous cases in the press where a criminal case fell apart only to be followed with a "Hate Crime" trial that succeeded because the accusation is all so nebulous. Political Correctness run amok.
The courts already have been twisted into thought control. Yet it is nearly always biased in its application. There is no black and white in the definition of hate speech or hate crimes. Words used by one group become criminal while another group can use them with impunity. That is the very real world we live in today. Unfortunately too many people willingly accept this because they don't have the courage to stand up those who truly profess hate and instead want to wield the club of government to do it for them. Worse, they want to use that threat of government to manipulate and control the system.
The press is in it deep, consistently engaging in the same practice selectively changing context of stories to make the portrayal more offensive than it ever was. We are constantly bombarded by guilt, twisted phrases used to imply any opposing thought is not only wrong but criminal so.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Giordano Bruno was condemned because of his Theological beliefs. Galileo was just making scientifically unsound (and later proven false) claims.
Galileo was right that the Earth goes around the Sun, but he also wrongly insisted that it's orbit was circular (thus either introducing errors or necessitating the same epicycles that the geocentric model needed) and that tides were caused by the Earth's orbit and not the Moon. Further while his observations about the moons of Jupiter were insightful, he also mistook Saturn's rings for moons thus impugning the reliability of his Jupiter observations.
Galileo got a lot of things right, but he went about it in a very unscientific way (e.g. he wasn't critical enough of his own findings) that led to him also getting a lot of things wrong. Making mistakes is okay, but Galileo's wouldn't revise them when other academics pointed out their flaws. This eventually made enemies for him in the academic world which is eventually is what did him in.
Galileo did a number of great things. Just keep in mind that the version taught today is a censored one sided version of the story.
I've argued pretty much what you have about Galileo, that he was brilliant as a scientist in an era when the rules of science were less formal, but was lousy on people skills and pissed off a lot of people who didn't just go around 'inquisiting' everyone, then the Roman Catholic church swung into a more fearful than average phase, he lost the protection of a pope that was willing to cut him extra slack, and he had no other moderates and reasonable men left in the church who wanted to stick their necks out for his particular case. His enemies towards the end included plenty of people who either weren't worried about his effect on church doctrine or would have been willing to let him publish despite their concerns, but they were sticking up for more reasonable people, for example, during that same era, there were people in the church making sure Tycho and Copernicus and half a dozen others weren't charged with anything and that C.'s mom wasn't tried for the allegations of witchcraft brought against her by locals.
There was also a lot of dealing with anatomists at the time, and again, some people in the church hierarchy were trying to distinguish between people who were 'just' autopsying naturally obtained corpses, and ones who didn't care how the subject crossed the line into death, and were subsidizing possible murder for hire. Respect for natural science was low, but did that follow from church doctrine or because some natural scientists were behaving like something out of Shelly?
With Bruno, what I'd like to know is, the R.C. church has repeatedly claimed that Bruno got such harsh punishment because there was more to it than just Theological differences. Now this could be a claim that Bruno wasn't just talking about life on other worlds and raising questions about whether such life had a need for a savior and such, but was doing something Occult, or supporting a specific 'cult' such as the Cathars. Bruno certainly could have gotten the pyre for what the rest of us would call a Theological difference and the church could be splitting hairs over what's variant theology and what's occult practice. I'm not saying the Roman Catholic church has never trivialized competing religions or called them just cults. But it would be nice to have someone translate the original texts here into a language I'm more comfortable with, and do a big book on it for modern readers, maybe as part of a Bruno bio.
Who is John Cabal?
This is typical pointless artistic masturbation. This artiste is pulling a silly stunt to try to make a name for himeslf and wow the clueless intelligencia of the art world. These pictures are less impressive than Iridium flares which are themselves pretty ho hum on the scale of celesial wonder. It would be much more spectacular if he had more detailed pictures taken with a telescope. Granted, these pictures aren't bad if you ignore the topic of prying into the super secret realm of the spooks.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.