US intelligence wants ability to censor satellite images

The head of a US intelligence agency told the Associated Press that commercial satellite services like Google Earth may need to be censored in the future in order to protect American interests.

Vice Admiral Robert Murrett, who heads the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends his days helping the government map the planet and studying imagery. Once the exclusive domain of the government, commercial satellite imagery has attained high-enough resolutions that the government is thinking about ways to restrict its use in times of war or other emergency situations.

"If there was a situation where any imagery products were being used by adversaries to kill Americans, I think we should act," he said in the interview. "I think we may need to have some control over things that are disseminated. I don't know if that means buying up all the imagery or not. I think there are probably some other ways you can do it."

src: arstechnica.com...

Not that this is unexpected but I always figured anything of real value would either not be shown or blurred out as the article point out in the case of dick cheney. I believe there are commercial services also that can offer a bit more detail than say Google maps. I remember they used this in some areas51 investigations. All we need now are more private satellites.

Additional background on NGA:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security. NGA, formerlly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, was established October 1, 1996 to address the expanding requirements in the areas of imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial intelligence. The Agency changed its name on 24 November 2003. It is a Department of Defense (DoD) combat support agency that has been assigned an important, additional statutory mission of supporting national-level policymakers and Government Agencies. NGA is a member of the Intelligence Community and the single entity upon which the U.S. Government now relies to coherently manage the previously separate disciplines of imagery and mapping. By providing customers with ready access to the world's best imagery and geospatial intelligence, NGA provides critical support for the national decision making process and contributes to the high state of operational readiness of America's military forces.

src:www.nga.mil...
brill


[edit on 10-5-2007 by brill]

I posted the following on sci.space.policy. It concerns the fact that we now have the technical capability to orbit satellites with sufficient resolution to identify individuals from space. I wondered if this would be acceptable if it could end crime and terrorism.There was surprisingly little discussion on the question of whether such world-wide imaging satellites
should be deployed.


Bob

================================================
Newsgroups: sci.astro, sci.physics, sci.space.policy,
sci.astro.amateur, us.military.army
From: Robert Clark
Date: 7 May 2007 07:40:19 -0700
Local: Mon, May 7 2007 10:40 am
Subject: Re: Orbital surveillance satellites now
exceed 1 inch resolution.

...
It is already pretty certain anyway that we have the technical capability for doing this in visible wavelengths. The question is of the cost. I was arguing that commercial satellite interests investing in this would lower the cost for the production of satellites for planetary imaging. There are privacy concerns, but there would be some beneficial societal effects as well.
We can imagine that such satellites are orbited in sufficient number to provide world-wide round-the-clock coverage to be able to distinguish faces and license plates. You could use "light intensification" or infrared viewing devices for imaging at night. This though raises the spectre of "Big Brother" in outer space.
However, an advantage which be the great reduction in crime this would produce. For any crime committed you could trace back in the images the houses that the perpetrators orginated from.
This would be preventive in the sense the perpetrators would know they would soon be tracked and identified. However, in the case of terrorists in many cases they wouldn't care that they would be caught or identified. But this could be preventive if certain suspected terrorists could be put under round-the-clock surveillance. Then certain illegal activities or purchases could be identified beforehand to stop the terrorist acts before they take place. You could also do spectroscopy from space so that production and/or transport of explosives would automatically set up a red flag to alert to the possibility of terrorism.
The privacy concerns would be magnified even further by ongoing research on imaging methods that can see through clothing and even
walls, if these methods were placed on satellites:

First Image from Revolutionary T-ray Camera; Sees through Fog,
Clothing and into Deep Space.
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 01:30 pm ET
11 February 2003
www.space.com...

Tuesday, February 20, 2007
T-Rays Advance Toward Airport Screening.
A new laser design helps create usable terahertz
radiation, which penetrates common materials but doesn't harm tissue.
By Neil Savage
"Zhang founded a company, Zomega Terahertz that makes
a laptop-size T- ray detector that can be attached to a flying drone for remote detection of chemical and biological substances. While the trillionths of a watt produced by the infrared laser in the device is fine for spectroscopic analysis of air samples, it's not adequate for imaging,
and the laser technology is unlikely to improve enough to be used in
airport security, Zhang says. He believes that quantum cascade lasers
are the future of T-ray detection systems: "They will be the final
winner in the market."
www.technologyreview.com...

The question: would you favor the use of such satellites if it would
virtually eliminate crime and terrorism?
How about if the imaging was only available to government agencies and it required a court order to initiate preventive prior surveillance or the tracing back in video of an individuals movements in time?

Bob Clark