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Satellite Images as Courtroom Evidence
Anonymous Coward writes "Mark Johnson, director of motion graphics for Visual Forensics, has been using data from Earth-imaging satellites for a special purpose: sticking it to the bad guys and keep the good guys out of trouble. Now Johnson's looking forward to the launch of the Ikonos imaging satellite later this week, which is capable of taking pictures that show clearly the name of a football team in the end zone." Johnson's fees for testifying on your behalf in court are apparently $25,000 and up. Not a cheap alibi!
Temporal Filters have been around for a while even going back 10 years. A simple time average computation isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical, as you would expect to have the 'correct' image on average while the fuzzyness caused by atmospheric affects would be random.
No, he is not in the business of selling cheap alibis, these hypocrites are! (Click on the UK link to see what they do.)
There is a difference...
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
US citizens have been killed by European pilots too, flying training missions in the US and not a damn thing was done to those pilots either. A few years ago, in Wichita Falls, Texas, a European student pilot & his instructor (both either Dutch or German I can't remember which) were flying a T-38 from Sheppard AFB and had an engine failure while over the northwest portion of the city. While they still would have had more than enough airspeed and altitude to aim the nose of the plane a few more degrees northward where the plane would have come down harmlessly into an unpopulated area before punchine out, they did not do this. Instead, both student and instructor panicked and ejected out of the plane immediately with disregard for where the aircraft would crash into. The aircraft, almost full of fuel just a couple of minutes after takeoff, crashed into an apartment complex right next door to an elementary school. Two Jehovahs' Witnesses who were walking on the premises were squashed and killed instantly. The jet landed squarely on top of them while they tried to run away from it. One apartment building burst into flames next to the exploding wreckage, but luckily everyone who lived in it got out alive. If the plane would have come down less than one tenth of a mile more westward, it would have punched down through the roof of elementary school classrooms instead. Of course there was an "official review" of the incident but the pilot and his instructor were simply sent home with no real punishment for their negligence.
Fuck em.. let everyone take pictures of the bases. Hey the Ruissian's need money and they probable have spy sat.s Maybe they could set up a web site which gave real resolution pics for like $500 or something. That would be great..
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Most satellites used for remote sensing (ie, looking at the earth) are either in geosynchronous orbits or polar orbits. The ones in polar orbits have a regular repeat cycle. For example, the NOAA AVHRR satellites have a daily repeat while the Landsat TM sensors have about a 14 day cycle (more often at the poles). The general rule of thumb is the higher the resolution, the longer the overpass cycle.
This satellites has a polar orbit. They are really intended to be an alternative to aerial photography for planners, foresters, and farmers. They provide regularly updated imagery but not continuous coverage.
The specific of the ikonos satellite, including orbit info, can be found here on the Space Imagine Inc. Home page .
This applet shows the orbit and ground track for ~100 different satellites. It's really useful for visualizing the orbits.
There is a mock-up of the HST is the Smithsonian. Look at the date on it (in the 70's as I recall). I think the HST might be a re-purposed recon sat, and not current-generation technology, either. So 2.4m optics is brobably not a limiting factor for the people who are take the best images of the Earth.
I wrote parts of this stuff
>Not to mention the fact that the satelites are moving in relation to earth, so that even if they wanted to spy on you they could
only catch you for a few minutes at a time.
NOT, ever heard of geo-synchronous orbit? They stay stationary in relation to the earth. Weather satellites, man. They can spy on you 24/7/365 1/4
This is OT but how is the new Landsat7 pricing policy going to affect you business?
Um Terraserver has sattelite images down to a 1 meter resolution that were taken in 92 by the USGS this must be ancient tech by now
something wicked this way comes...
You might try www.Vitec.com for commercially available image roaming stuff.
>Not to mention the fact that the satelites are moving in relation to earth, so that even if they wanted to spy on you they could
only catch you for a few minutes at a time.
NOT, ever heard of geo-synchronous orbit? They stay stationary in relation to the earth. Weather satellites, man. They can spy on you 24/7/365 1/4
Maybe I don't understand the laws properly, but if they've got a picture of a crime occuring, that picture doesn't contain me, and I'm accused of a crime, I'm nailing their buttocks with a subpoena.
Maybe *I* ought to set up a service that uses that subpoena'd data to do all the simulation work. Hey, I'll only charge $10K per trial. (:
I wonder how the local police will react to photos of a crime scene they didn't take...
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Remember them, these were workers at the still-denied-to-exist US air force base near Groom Lake Nevada (aka "Area 51") where loads of toxic chemicals were burned in open waste pits. Many years later, the workers started showing signs of injury and sued the gov't for medical compensation, however since the gov'ts position continues to be that there is no base there (we all saw the low-res, high-altitude russian sat photos), they refuse to pay for any medical problems these people have. Private, highly detailed sat photos that show the burning waste pits would be harder for courts to dismiss.
Why it still might have been cheap to pay someone, there wouldn't have to be any retasking. You'd just buy an image from the next overpass
The guy must have not noticed that he was flying at like 50 feet. How high off the ground could a ski lift be anyhow?
I remember when I was studying my Prof. used Landsat MSS to demonstrate that a cotton grower was drawing water from a river illegally. He was also scanning the hills for Ganga plants at one stage. MSS was pretty good for irrigation water since you have coverage every 16 days filed away that you can drdge up years after the event. Higher resolution stuff (sub metre) is a bit more difficult since you either have to deliberately scan an area, or have lots of satellites or a lousy revisit time. Never mind the insane volume of data you'd need to store.
X.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I'll get worried when the NSA starts supporting pollution prevention...
Well, if you've got $25,000 for the picture, wouldn't it be easier just to *bribe* the judge? Or *gasp* pay the fine? Maybe you should have paid the parking meters instead. Exactly what sorts of crimes do people with that kind of disposable money need defending from anyway?
Somehow this doesn't strike me as the "justice for all" device the article implies.
It could also be used to bust false alibis: i.e. your friend claims to have met you at this that place at that time, and the video shows that there was nobody there at all at that time.
Or it could show that a car left your driveway, went to the murder victims house, and came back to your driveway.
You don't need to identify a person for every evidence. However, the real difficulty seems to be complete coverage. The satelitte would be useless if it happened to point in the wrong direction at the time of the crime. And given the high zoom factor, the probability that it pointed to the correct location (chosen after the fact) seems to be quite low.
Ok, I accept this. What do I have to pay some corporation to *NOT* be spied on. Unfortunately, I'm not a PAC so I can't buy off the Govt. too. Ahhh, the mafia to the left of me, the mafia to the right...
This kind of justification triviallizes the whole technology, (cynic mode on) but I guess that's just the sort of justification we need to get the people with the money to buy into hi-res satellites (cynic mode off).
I'll spare the mathematical details,
;-p
...when a human being sees a blurry or distorted image (particularly of the sort produced by satellite), he can usually pick out most of the deviations from an "ideal" clear image. instantly.
;-p. Heck, we dont even need bigger telescopes, since the only difference image-resolution-wise compared to small telescopes is convolving it with a smaller point spread function, which we recognize away anyway.
please don't
How does een human even know the deviation from a 'ideal' image if it can't be seen. (unless you assume what you are looking at)
Damn, we sure could use this in astronomy research. We just need to recognize to protogalaxy in the fuzz
I agree that temporal filtering of 100-1000 images would do nicely, but even that is bound to diffraction limiting. (at 200km height you need an equivalent of HST's 2.4 mirror.)
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
courtroom evidence is irrelevent. Prepare to be assimilated.
You know the hubble satellite? The military has one just like it. And I bet its pointed in the other direction. Earthwise. Dont bet that they can't read newspaper headlines.
Big Brother is watching...
be scared. be REALLY scared
The biggest difference with this sensor isn't so much the 1m panchromatic resolution but the availibility of 4m multispectral data. This is considerably higher than the other current options.
Keep in mind too that the target market for the panchromatic data are the people who are used to buying 1 foot planimetric aerial photos and are used to that level of accuracy. The closer you can get to that, the more interested they'll become.
isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical
That might be a problem, if you require sub-meter pointing accuraty and stability, just by gyro-control, on a spacecraft at 200km height, traveling at say 7000km/hour, minimal exposure time some fraction of second. It might be quite undoable.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
The stuff he does in infotainment. I'm sure everybody here knows about how when you present a table of data to a PHB, he doesn't understand it. But if you dress it up in a Power Point demo and make some pretty graphs he'll say, "Wow, look at that!". That's what this guy is doing.
The cops already got helicopters flying around on an unknown schedule, they tap phones, they got plainclothes, they have "traffic" cameras everywhere. etc. etc. The deal already came down. 1984 was *last* decade. The 1-meter resolution of the new Ikonos won't do a damn thing for 'em.
There's a big difference between an airplane having an engine failure ...
... and an airplane driven by some foolish pilots seeking the challenge of underflying the lifts cable. Yes: they didn't do it for the first time, and yes, they knew very well the cable was there. US Prowlers were often seen flying low and trying to underpass cable cars!
...when they landed and heared 20 people were killed, they destroyed the tape.
:-(
The pilots unfortunately flew too high and touched the cable with the wing. They flew so fast, they didn't realize they touched. While 20 people where crushing to dead, the pilots loughed in their video. The video they wanted to show later to their friends to demonstrte how much courage they had, and how fun it was...
See the difference?
Markus Senoner
--
This sounds a little too much like big brother for me... I don't like to be watched.
So don't besurprised that in the future the sun will be eclipsed every other minute given our society is paranoid enought to cover the skies with them.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Let's see, Iridium has lofted approximately 200 communications satellites (presumably they don't have cameras on them, but I haven't gone up and checked...), and they're just one company. There are thousands of satellites in orbit, and many are in *geosynchronous* orbit (that means they orbit over one place, NY City, for example) because they're expected to be there 24-7 for a specific purpose (usualy comm relays). If private telcom industry can loft hundreds of satellites, the US government or a private security firm can also loft enough satellites to cover the US with 1m resolution imaging cameras.
;-> ) then all you need to do is have the images properly tagged for time and place, and you have a database of continuous, or near-continuous (1-10 second frame delays wouldn't make much difference) video footage of the US (or Europe, or wherever) which is keyed on GPS coordinates and time. All you need to do to find the footage you want is to look it up in the database by its (GPS, time) coordinates...
Now, if you use the "excess" bandwidth of the whole slew of communications satellites in orbit to send the images constantly down to a sufficiently powerful server farm (hey, you could run it on Linux!
So if good guy claims he was at the Yankees game while bad guy was shooting someone on the Great Lawn in Central Park, just punch up those two locations and look for your guys (you'll have many thousands of frames to check through, but so what?). Hopefully they're looking up, or you can identify them by the tops of their heads (unless, of course, you're taking your images at the "right" angle for each meter), but other than that... you can find the meter you're looking for rather easily...
This is all bad. This is definate Big Brother stuff, and additionally, even if the imaging is of rather poor quality and your face is difficult to see (and there is certainly feature enhancement software to clear things up if the image is shot at an angle preserves enough information to do so), the Gov't have a way of convincing juries that what they say is a picture of you IS a picture of you, because "pictures don't lie"...
For all their good, powerful computers definately are presenting the possibility of a Panoptical surveliance society. Don't worry if you're a good guy, right? Well, that depends on what "good" is... What if you're a Communist or Pacifist or other "political undesirable" at an anti-government rally? What if you just feel like taking a stroll without it being recorded for posterity? Oughtn't that be your right?
Do the security benefits outweigh the privacy infringement in this case? They do not seem to, frankly...
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
the pilots loughed in their video And how do you know they laughed on their video? Have you seen it. The Bombadier was the one who allegedly destroyed the tape, and he was punished severely for it.
You start off making sense.. you were glad the pilot got off for something that was obviously NOT his fault. Then you go on to say he should have been found guilty? Make up your mind. This would be more like having a kiddie crosswalk through the middle of a highway and neglecting to mention it to the drivers doing 60mph not expecting that children were going to be jumping out from the sides of the road onto a freeway!
Well, be safe and secure in the fact that there are 5 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, 999 other nekkid butts in the world, nobody gives a rat's ass about yours in particular. How different does yours look from anybody else's?
And if you wore shorts anyway, what's to stop somebody from photochopping in someone else's nekkid butt onto your picture, if they wanted a picture of your nekkid butt that badly?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Same thing.
Fantastic I Really See This. Perhaps On Satellite Too!
The ability for the general public to take satillight photo's. With limits of course (no nude beaches etc etc..), but a place where you could plunk down $50 or so for a sat. photo of whatever you like, that would be great! Or even better a website :)
my $0.02
- Jimmy
Well, they give the example that the system was used to help the 'good guy' USAF pilot who killed a number of skiers by flying so low he cut the cable wires of the gondola. I'm so glad he got off.
The accident obviously had nothing to do with the fact the maps the USAF had were so old they didn't even show the ski lift.
All pilots suffer from many kinds of illusion and distortion. That's why they learn to trust their instruments and not their instincts. It may well have looked as though his plane was high above the mountain side, but that's not an excuse. "Sorry officer, I didn't know I was doing 50mph in an urban zone when I killed the school kids - with this new car it felt like 25 mph!". Yeah right, good excuse.
For those in the U.S. who may never have heard this story, people in Europe were deeply upset at the high handed way the US military handled this. They basically said "oh, whoops, sorry, accidents happen". Disgraceful, and using this dubious incident to promote the technology is a massive faux pas to anyone in Europe. The pilot should have been found guilty, and the US authorities should have been diciplined for having such outdated maps.
Rather like the maps of Belgrade....
-----
..but I'm a little freaked out by this. Does this mean that there is no place outside, not under cover, that is considered private? What if I like to walk around butt nekkid in my backard, watering the azaleas? Don't I have the right to do so without fear of being on Hard Copy?
dshahin
to mail me, first remove the evil spam.
If declassified civilian stuff does this, you know the intelligence community can read the name off a football jersey... Scary stuff--wait until the FBI gets its hands on high-res satellite access for watching high-profile suspects. The only real obstacle to perfect resolution of anything larger than a matchbook is atmospheric interference, and with greater computational ability comes the ability to write super-accurate compensation algorithms--take a few hundred or even a few thousand frames, each blurry as hell but in a slightly different way, and you can create a very accurate single image. I give it ten years til the FBI uses satellite imaging in a high-profile case against someone it really, really wants to nail.
How can this possibly be useful? It would have to be pointed directly at whatever it wanted to photograph. Therefore, it would have to KNOW when someone is committing a crime in order to take a picture of the innocent person as proof. Also, 1 meter resolution? How are they going to be able to use that as proof? You could be mistaken for a large animal very easily. Also, back to the sattelite pointing at a precise moment, I think that would be more incriminating to have that picture taken (Hmmm...if this guy didn't know about the crime taking place at that exact same time, why did he have this made as proof he didnt at the exact same time?) that to not have it...
Another thing that bothers me, its called orbit. If this thing is in orbit, that means its only going to be over top of certain places at certain times of the day. Which means they'll need a lot of them to actually have coverage. This also bothered me in "Enemy of the State". It appeared they used the exact same sattelite every time....
If I'm wrong about the part above, would someone please politely correct me.
---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
---------------------------
Hmmm,
/. user ventures outside, I think that any paranoia about this is system is, well, rather silly?
;-)
Considering how much the average
Wait for the 1mm resolution radar imager that can see inside houses, then start worrying
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
It's been possible for some years now to obtain 2-meter hi-res imaging data via SPIN-2, imagery taken with the russian sat Cosmos gone commercial. Check out http://www.spin-2.com/
Orbimage is also a global provider of satellite-delivered Earth imagery services with a planned constellation of five digital remote sensing satellites. They will launch 2 1-meter res. sats next year.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
There's no need to worry about. Currently, the resolution of this satelitte is 1 metre, so you'd only show up as a very diffuse shadow on the image, without any details
I just want to know how long before I can use the thing to find out if my girlfriend is cheating on me.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I realise this is OT, but it galls me to see this event used as if everyone recognised that the verdict was just, and to see this event used as promotion of a commercial product.
0 3/
If you care, here's a link to CNN info on it all.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/04/marines.cablecar.
-----
Why not John Carmack if he could use these for Q4 or Q5? I would love to get my hands on one of those!!!
does w/ "caller id" - one person pays the company to collect possible evidence (caller ID), the suspect pays the company to keep it secret (caller ID block) - thus they can collect fee's from both parties and keep the status quo.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Don't worry about the resolution. Ordinary US/RUSSIAN/[INSERT COUNTRY] spy-sats have 1-2 feet resolution, that's about diffraction limited (ie you just need bigger mirrors for improved resolution). Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but even if it did, you cant compute the interference away (because you have to know the exact interference to deconvolve it... basic image processing). Just statistics is certainly not enuff. The solution is active optics, such as used in the new eso VLT telescopes. But bringing active optics into space.... hmmm, think not, for now.
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
www.terraserver.com
Of course bigger mirrors=greater resolution, but only up to the point that atmospheric interference means you cannot gain greater clarity. But I think you make a mistake when you say: >Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but >even if it did, you cant compute the >interference away (because you have to know the >exact interference to deconvolve it... basic >image processing). Just statistics is certainly >not enuff. Statistics are not enough, but accurate algorithms which take into account various factors causing differences in hundreds or thousands of images will definitely yield an image of greater resolution and accuracy. I'll spare the mathematical details, but it should be rather intuitive (and common sense would hold true here). To show the intuitiveness of this without delving into graduate level mathematics: when a human being sees a blurry or distorted image (particularly of the sort produced by satellite), he can usually pick out most of the deviations from an "ideal" clear image instantly. A trained FLIR operator, especially. If you can design a complex set of computational algorithms to mimic this "instant recognition" and image correction on the part of human beings, which is really based just on a set of optical "norms" and generic rules we've grown accustomed to, then you can effectively increase resolution particularly if your algorithms can look for "optically correct" data across a large set of images. It's by no means "simple programming," but I'd be shocked if the NSA/CIA/military hasn't already spent several million developing the code and implementing it on supercomputer.
They did it already (the endzone thing). You can clearly read "Packers" in Lambeau field, Green Bay, WI. Gee, wonder where I live...?
But seriously, this has to be one of the coolest things I've seen microsoft come up with. Or at least host...
Dirk
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
I just went in the front yard and mooned the Man. Woo Hoo! Anytime I want! Now thats Democracy!
As someone in one of the threads replied the application as stated in the article is for post-evaluation of an incident so I won't dwell on that.
You are quite right that the satellite will only be covering a certain area at a certain time - all dependant on the orbit... As some of you may be aware, a satellite (or any object orbiting the earth) has an orbit period determined by its altitude. The higher the altitude - the longer it takes to orbit the earth. Some figures: a typical LEO (Low Earth orbit) satellite at an altitude of about 800km will have an orbit period of approximately 100 minutes. Geo-stationary satellites on the other hand has a 24 hour orbit period but has to be at a very high altitude - 35786 km to be precise!
To get back to the point. For high resolution imaging you would like to be as close as possible to earth. Obviously this will bring the complexity and cost of your optics down - and believe me, it is expensive! But you have to consider that a LEO implies a fast orbit with some advantages and disadvantages.
A LEO orbit (600-1200km) has the advantage that the satellite's footprint will cover most of the earth in approximately 12 hours. As you need daylight for good imaging, your coverage (for imaging at least) goes up to 24 hours in practice. Allowing for good weather you can see the problem for a quick turnaround time for images e.g. car pile up example stated in the article.
Even a constellation of imaging satellites may proof to be impractical, you'll need quite a few satellites ($$$) to have an image within a few hours. In a previous /. article about this 1m resolution imager (Ikonos) you'll notice that they claim to have the image ready within 30 minutes. What they don't say is that they'll have it ready in 30 minutes after the image has been captured. Impossible to take the image of a certain target within 30 minutes of requesting it!!
IMHO visual forensics (using satellite imaging) will only be practical if the 'crime scene' stay's the way it is for a prolonged time. I can't imagine rescue services waiting for hours until an imaging satellite comes over the horizon before clearing up the debris!!
If you're interested please visit my company's homepage for some earth observation images taken with our LEO satellites over the years. Please note we're not close to 1m resolution - currently 30m multi-spectral and a 10m b/w experimental imager.
I'll be happy to answer more questions if anyone's is interested.
something wicked this way comes...
Bullsh*t The best possible resolution in the 80's was just getting under one meter. Current typical resolution available to certain agencies from the KH-12 series of satellites is around 10 cm. Even this will not let you identify faces. However, this 10 cm resolution can be accomplished with visible near infrared and thermal imaging all in real time. Additionally multispectral analysis can be performed to pull out signatures of objects revealing more information than simple pictures can provide.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
This is a very common technique. With commonly achievable resolutions down around 10cm in real time with visible, IR near IR, thermal modes available. Additionally, multispectral analysis allows one to pull out significantly more information than is available with "photo's"
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Wait for the 1mm resolution radar imager that can see inside houses, then start worrying ;-)
;-)
Yeah.. and then get one of those polarized screens for your monitor, and lock your bathroom door, and...
;-)
Of course, as we know, that wouldn't work, unless you lived in a glass house, because of annoying things like solid walls, doors, etc, etc...
Just wait til you start getting fibre optic cameras placed in, say, the ambiguous looking microphone "holes" on those computers that have them built in, so forth and so on.
Or, just do something really rambuncious (sp?) anyway, so they'll _really_ have something work looking at...
Insert mind here.
10 cm is typical achievable resolution from the latest KH-12 series.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"How does een human even know the deviation from a 'ideal' image if it can't be seen. (unless you assume what you are looking at)"--Easy. Does it look like a straight line made fuzzy by diffraction? Then it's probably a line made fuzzy by diffraction, so take a statistical mean of its position across a number of images and sharpen the resulting component into a straight line. Very easy for a human to do, roughly, by visual means alone. Does this component look vaguely like a "2" on the license plate? Compare the same point across all available images, and if the assumption based on shape seems to hold true then it's almost surely a "2". Takes quite a lot of coding overhead to get a program to interpret this sort of thing as easily as a human can, but I think it can be done and probably has been done by the intelligence agencies.
I haven't seen a single serious comment here proposing a legitimate and practical new application for this technology, despite its potential to usher in a new era in environmental science, education, local government/urban planning, and other fields.
No, instead it's all just a bunch of whining. "Ohhhhh! The evil nasty government is going to start spying on me!"
First you whine that all software must be free. Then you whine how evil copy protection is and that all data must be free. Now the option comes along...not even through the government, but through private industry, and openly available to anybody...to get a good view of our world and maybe learn something. But no, that can't be free. Everything else but that. Not in my back yard.
Whining about reading newspapers and license plates and looking at nude sunbathers...you've only shown that you have absolutely no clue about how this stuff operates. Go educate yourself. You don't even have to, horror of horrors, leave your chair to do it...there's plenty of this stuff on the web. Give your index finger some exercise.
Amazing how a genuinely novel technology can suddenly turn a bunch of supposedly technologically elite people into the very luddites they so gleefully mock. I can just imagine the Slashdot responses to once-bold, now-common technologies:
Kodak Announces "Camera"
"Ohhhhh! The evil nasty government could spy on me with this!
New "X-Ray" Technology Sees Through Things
"Ohhhh! The evil nasty government will see inside me with this!
Researchers Build Electronic "Computer"
"Ohhhhhh! The evil nasty government can launch projectiles at me with this!
Yes, each whine has an element of truth to it...but each also overlooks the far greater benefits or even the simple joy that each of these technologies has brought to our lives.
Somebody's been watching "Wargames" too much. Turn off your evil nasty government mind control box, er, television, and start putting the same kind of thought that you would for your beloved operating system into suitable and correct applications of satellite imaging. You'll find that not only do the benefits outweigh the risks, but that (once you understand the technology) a lot of those risks turned out to be unfounded. They're not following you. There are no black helicopters.
Technology is neutral. It doesn't know from good or evil. It's all a matter of how you apply it. I intend to apply this one toward good.
A quick net search for Viper satellite law enforcement tools will yield some interesting clues about satellite capabilities. This product roams large graphic images and can identify and track vehicles real time. Very cool app!
If we had a massive parrallel database of images that covered 90% of the earth at a resolution of 10 CM (sorry no nipples), and if the image was refreshed twice a second what would be the storage requirement? Would we be able to use a Linux system to roam the image?
Don't worry, I'm being gentle with her... You can have her back in an hour. Aw heck, make that ten minutes... ;-)
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I'm sure that's the best civillian res we get to use, but...
There was a project called 'keyhole' from memory where it was claimed that a satellite could read a number plate on the ground. Don't recall how substatiated the rumors were though. Still, that's a fair resolution considering all the atmoshpere the light has to go through.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
I like the way a similar sentence is used every time some sort of surveillance system is introduced. I bet they said this for Echelon too.
In my mind, that's Govspeech for, 'Spying on everyone so if you've got nothing to fear, you won't mind. Right?!?'
This system is used to spot crimes happening, not to solve them. As such, it's actually a backward investigation idea backed by modern technology. In the late 1800's, the length of a police investigation was to catch the criminal in the act again. Modern investigation techniques have led to an in-depth investigation with the help of, for instance, DNA analysis.
Compare DNA analysis with satellite surveillance: one is used to identify a potential suspect, the other is used to catch a criminal red-handed. One is performed on you when you are a possible suspect already, the other is used whether you commited a crime or not. There is a hell of a difference, and while the first one speaks of the marvels of modern forensics, the last one makes me cry out 'Big Brother!'
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
...lets all go out to our nearest football field and use fertilizer to burn the message:
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
BIG BROTHER GO AWAY!!!
Seriously...this is too much like Enemy of the State for me. Not that the government can't already spy on me as a sneak a quick nose pick in the backyard but...isn't this a private company?
I don't want some punk kid working at Visual Forensics as a $10/hour contractor getting to surf my life on his lunch hour as easily as I may surf the web...
My $0.02, not necessarily yours...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
What is the maximum resolution for satelites?
The whole privacy/security issue was a big deal when the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor was launched. A number of countries were very concerned. That's part of why the TM sensor has a 30m resolution. The government felt that at this resolution, the military utility was diminished. Hasn't been much disscussion about this with these new satellites.
It is important to realize how much privacy is being invaded both online and off, most the time without the public even realizing it is happening.
There is a possible upside though. There was some discussion a while ago this could dramatically change news reporting in times of war. For example, in the Gulf War, the news agencies wouldn't be dependent on the filtered military briefings. You can have access to almost real time imagery of the action.
This will probably never happen though. There's probably some clause that lets the goverment black out certain areas for national security purposes. Even so, it could make the government more accountable since the data will exist and could be reviewed by the public after the fact.
Note that most of these are NIR red, green false-colour images - i.e. red regions are grass/vegetation and the light blue is the built up areas.
My favourite is the one image of Washington DC and surrounding area captured in July, clearly showing the White House, Jefferson Memorial and National Mall leading to the US Capitol.
These are all JPG's - if you have the bandwidth to burn you can download the bitmaps here.
something wicked this way comes...
Not to mention the fact that the satelites are moving in relation to earth, so that even if they wanted to spy on you they could only catch you for a few minutes at a time. If someone wants to find out all about you, they don't need no stinkin' satelite. All your information is on computers...
Foolish people! In the 80's we were able to verify the identity of POWs in Iran by looking at their faces from space. Satellite technology has advanced to much higher resolutions, and there is no question that we can read a newspaper you are holding in your hands. Anybody can buy satellite images from civilian corporations. You can buy stock images, or pay them to task a satellite to image something specific. Take for example, the French Company Spot Image. Saddam was purchasing data from them for years before they finally cut him off. You just have to have the $$.
Not 600 like ikonos and it probably had a swath width of 50 yards and it was a crystal clear day.
0.8 meters (but don't tell Congress)
Well, to hell with privacy I guess.. Everyone wave at the camera.. ;-P
;-P
I wonder if anyone who can't afford the 24k$ figure will ever try to subpena (sp?) the data, to get around having to pay to see if they have any evidence..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
You think this is amazing news? The DOD and CIA have been able to do this for YEARS now. Heck, I wouldn't be suprised if they have managed to get the resolution down to 3" by now.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The problem with geostationary satellites is that while they stay at the same spot (viewed from earth), they must keep the specific distance you were talking about, which is > 30000 km. At that distance, you can broadcast television signals, but you can't have the same level of detail as from a satellite that is in an orbit only a couple of hundred kilometers. That's why there usually is a 'time frame' of some minutes for satellites that fly low and are designed for spying into people's backyards (the exact time frame should be dependent on the distance from earth I guess, the higher it is positioned, the longer you can observe the same spot).
you know the intelligence community can read the name of a football jersey...
:P)
Sorry, but if you were in my position, could you resist? That line is funny for so many reasons...
(No offence intended
M
From the article:
For $25,000, you could hire Visual Forensics to help defend you from charges that you caused a multi-car pile-up [...]
Erm, so, does this mean that this satellite is going to be gathering an archive of video footage of the entire planet, for ever and ever?
Might there not be some mild privacy concerns here?