GeoEye captures the notorious Area 51.
Image Courtesy of GeoEye
In a generic-looking glass and concrete office building just a few miles from Washington Dulles International Airport, an independent company is—with the full blessing of the government—helping to peel away the last earthly vestiges of cold war secrecy. Unlike Beltway defense companies, where security often starts at the ground floor with guards and gates, GeoEye, one of two U.S. companies selling commercial satellite imagery (the other is DigitalGlobe), is notably open-door until you reach the fourth-floor offices, where a friendly secretary asks, apologetically, whether the visitor is a U.S. citizen.
Inside the company’s headquarters, GeoEye vice president Mark Brender provides a tour of operations. Young engineers in a NASA-style mission control room follow a GeoEye satellite, which is at that moment hurtling around Earth some 423 miles above the ground. Across the hall, GeoEye employees field calls from customers ranging from government agencies to insurance companies. CNN plays continuously on the TV so employees can be alerted to a crisis—a flood, a North Korean nuclear test, a border skirmish—and quickly send orders to the satellite to capture pictures of a specific site.
For a few thousand dollars, pretty much any American can buy up-to-the-moment satellite images of Iran’s nuclear sites, CIA headquarters, even the top secret Air Force testing site, Area 51, in Nevada. Short on cash? If you don’t mind older images, you can view these same sites for free on platforms like Google Earth, the ever-expanding Google service that uses 3-D visualization software to zoom in on different parts of the globe and deliver images to any PC hooked up to the World Wide Web.
This kind of imagery was, for much of the 20th century, part of the eyes-only world of intelligence; from the design of a nuclear submarine to the movement of Israeli troops, one needed high-level clearance for a glimpse. Not anymore. Today, with the advent of civilian satellites here and abroad, we have opened wide the window on places and events that, not so long ago, only spies could see.
Governments around the world have often reacted with outrage to the new age of transparency. And the Pentagon, while hardly thrilled, has had to adjust.
Without a doubt, “the technologies make clandestine operations more difficult to hide and raise the specter of enemies’ having more capability to target critical nodes,” says Theresa Hitchens, a space policy analyst and director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.
Yet the expanding field of vision also augurs a unique counterbalance to government excesses of the past. “It improves international security by allowing nongovernmental actors to monitor the actions of nations,” says Hitchens, who points to Amnesty International; that group has launched eyesondarfur.org, a Web site that broadcasts satellite imagery of 12 vulnerable villages in war-torn western Sudan, empowering the public to document atrocities and track the movement of refugees and troops.
For the good and the bad, the lightless world has been illuminated, and the age of transparency is upon us. “The technologies are out of the bag, and governments will not be able to control access everywhere,” Hitchens says. Keith Clarke, a University of California at Santa Barbara geography professor deeply involved in analyzing declassified satellite imagery, agrees. “It’s a lost cause,” he says of government efforts to stanch the flow of sensitive images. “There’s very little that can be done to prevent it now.”
DAWN OF AN ERA
The imagery we take for granted across our computer screens traces its origins to 1959 and the cold war, when the United States launched a top secret satellite called Corona. Corona’s pair of constantly rotating cameras captured images on film cassettes that were parachuted back to Earth. Since being declassified in 1995, many of Corona’s details have come to light. The earliest Corona images captured objects at a ground resolution of up to 8 meters (about 25 feet), meaning objects on the ground had to be at least that length to be discernible. Although grainy by current standards, the images were still a boon to U.S. intelligence, allowing the United States to look deep into Soviet territory, one time capturing images of a military base that helped dispel the notion of a “missile gap” between the United States and the then U.S.S.R.
