To gather other kinds of data, meanwhile, some technologies focus on alternate regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, for instance, radar. Radar satellites come equipped with an antenna that sends radio waves to Earth; after hitting the planet’s surface, the signal is reflected and scattered back toward a detector that generates an image without the need for visible light. “You can see day and night and through most weather,” says David Glackin, a remote sensing scientist with the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded nonprofit research center.
Several nations, including the United States, have already launched radar-imaging satellites, but efforts abound to push the envelope further. One ambitious Air Force project involves a constellation of space-based radar satellites that would surround the planet, providing full coverage with the kind of granular detail thus far available only through aircraft or vehicles on the ground. The idea is to build a reconnaissance net that would target troops and even individuals from second to second, across every square foot of the globe. Gathering so much information has unique requirements, including cameras with huge apertures. The project “got a lot of criticism from academics who showed that the approach wasn’t going to work unless the face of the detector in space was as long as a football field,” says Philip Coyle, the Pentagon’s former top technology tester and a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information. “Something that huge makes a very big target for an enemy.”
In the meantime, the image resolution of commercial satellites continues to improve. GeoEye’s IKONOS, currently its premier satellite, provides resolution at better than one meter, but the company plans this August to launch GeoEye-1, a polar orbiting satellite equipped with a camera that can capture up to 700,000 square kilometers of black-and-white and 350,000 square kilometers of color imagery a day. The satellite, equipped with GPS, will be able to swivel and point its camera with a ground resolution of 41 centimeters?.
“From 423 miles in space, we’ll be able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond,” says Brender. “GeoEye-1 will have the best accuracy and resolution of any commercial imaging satellite in the world when it goes up,” says Bill Schuster, GeoEye’s CEO.
For nongovernment customers, however, GeoEye-1 will still have to degrade that high-quality imagery to half a meter. The main barrier for commercial companies like GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which supplies satellite imagery to Google, is not technology but economics and policy; there’s no point taking sharper pictures if they aren’t allowed to sell them widely. Some of the best future images, meanwhile, may come from foreign competitors focused on increasing satellite resolution themselves. As Glackin points out, in 1980 only five countries were operating imaging satellites. “Today there are 31,” he says.
The advent of Google Earth and related services raises a basic question: Have the images created a security risk? The answer, according to a number of experts, is yes, but there’s not much that can be done about it. It’s not clear that the U.S. government has the authority to remove imagery already in the public domain, according to Aftergood. And the availability of imagery from foreign sources may make some cases moot. “I think the answer probably is case specific, and only exceptional cases could qualify for legal or official intervention,” he suggests.
Attempts to control satellite imagery are “a losing proposition,” agrees Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive and a longtime expert on satellite reconnaissance. “These capabilities keep improving, and the sources of imagery keep expanding; look at countries that have launched high-resolution commercial imagery satellites over the last years. As that number goes up, it’s difficult to prevent people who want to get images of particular locations from getting them.”
And it is no longer just overhead imagery that is increasingly available. What makes the case of Google Street View and the mapping of Fort Sam Houston unique is precisely that it involved not overhead satellite imagery but rather cameras on the ground, raising more questions about Pentagon control as technology develops faster than the government’s ability—or authority—to regulate it. Colonel Brown, for his part, acknowledges that tension. “What we’re wrestling with is the fact that our technology is developing at such a rapid rate, it is crossing over boundaries we took for granted,” he says.
Some countries may still be battling the onslaught of available imagery, but here in the United States, the Pentagon has realized the futility of de-Googling Earth: Both U.S. Northern Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency say they don’t actively trawl the Internet looking for images of sensitive U.S. sites, although commercial satellite service could be interrupted if profound risk were perceived. When asked whether GeoEye is prohibited from selling imagery of any sensitive areas, Brender said no. As proof, he e-mailed, in midconversation, a detailed picture of Area 51, showing new construction at the Air Force’s top secret testing facility in Nevada, including new hangars and a lengthened runway.
In the GeoEye conference room in Virginia, Brender flips through slides of imagery depicting the world’s most mapped areas, including conflict hot spots, borders, and cities that are home to millions. These are the places people want to see. Could someone obtain such imagery as part of a terrorist plot? “We are not aware of one instance where our imagery was used for the greater evil,” Brender says.
But even if images were misused, it would not change the trend. We’ve already entered the era of extreme transparency, and given the widespread technology, our clarity of vision can only expand. With the once-shrouded world bathed in so much light, Brender says, it would in the long run be “fruitless to try to hamper how we look at Earth from nonsovereign space.”