THE BREACHES
With the proliferation of online tools, it is hardly surprising that state secrets have been exposed. In a highly public—and embarrassing—incident, a blogger in July 2007 noticed a photo showing a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine in Bangor, Washington, posted on Microsoft-owned Virtual Earth, a Google Earth rival. The problem was not the sub per se, but the sub’s propeller, which was supposed to be covered with a shroud when out of water to protect its top secret design. The propeller was left exposed, and the image was posted online. “They protect those propellers like it’s the body and blood of Christ, the host,” says John Pike, who runs Globalsecurity.org and was one of the first private analysts to buy commercial satellite imagery. “It had been 30 years since anyone had seen an American nuclear submarine propeller.”
Nor is the U.S. government the only one to get caught up in the expanding reach of freely available imagery. Israel, in particular, has fought to control high-resolution imagery of its territory. More than a decade ago, the U.S. Congress passed the Kyl-Bingaman amendment, which prohibits U.S. companies from selling commercial satellite imagery of Israel that is better than similar imagery from other commercial sources; in practice this has meant that imagery of Israel is degraded to two meters, a restriction not imposed on any images of the United States.
In another notable case, a U.S. nuclear expert last year pointed to satellite images that appeared online showing China’s new nuclear ballistic missile submarine. “Both China and India have raised their hackles about imaging satellites and tried to push back,” Hitchens says. Calls by these countries to restrict satellite imagery, if heeded, would be a “scary” precedent, she says.
Some incidents are less about national security than about embarrassment: Bahrain’s royal family briefly fought to block its citizens from viewing Google Earth images of its luxury housing, for fear of personal exposure.
But perhaps the most telling example of how the rapid expansion of mapping technology has caught the Pentagon off guard is the case of Google Street View, a feature Google introduced in 2007 that includes street-level photos providing 360-degree views, allowing users to weave their way through a city. Google collects the pictures for Street View by sending out cars and vans equipped with a special camera that captures the distinctive panoramic images. While Google Street View raised privacy concerns for individuals captured in the images, the novel addition to Google was not something that immediately raised red flags for national security.
Then, in late February, just weeks after returning from his second deployment to Iraq, Colonel James Brown, who heads force protection and mission assurance at U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, received an unexpected message: Was he aware that something called Google Street View had mapped out all the roads at Fort Sam Houston, an Army base in Texas?
Brown wasn’t familiar with Google Street View, so he went online to take a look for himself. There it was: panoramic views of the entire base; you could even zoom in and out on security fences and guards. He recalled thinking to himself, “Oh, my God, this is the best preoperational surveillance tool I’ve ever seen in my life.”
One Web site broadcasts satellite imagery of 12 vulnerable villages in Darfur, empowering the public to document atrocities and track the movement of troops.
In other words, it was ideal for terrorists planning an attack on the base. “I was aghast,” Brown recalls. “We didn’t have any idea that this existed.” Brown decided he needed to figure out what sort of online images might prove a threat to national security.
At U.S. Northern Command, which was established after 9/11 to defend the homeland, Brown put the critical infrastructure protection team to work, setting them loose on the Internet. “What was funny,” he says, “is that the first night, the answer came back: This is the list of DOD [Department of Defense] facilities that are mapped, and we thought, ‘Oh, boy, this is bad.’” It turned out to be a false alarm; a number of the flagged facilities were military bases that had been decommissioned, so their mapping was not a threat. Brown’s group also looked at photographs of entrances to bases from the outside but decided to let those cases go. “We didn’t want to get involved in trying to pull the wings off photography flies off base,” he says.
In the case of Fort Sam Houston, the panoramic street views ended up being something of a fluke; Google mappers had mistakenly been allowed on base. (Brown says that at the time, base security had seen the street mapping program as innocuous.) Within days of a review, however, U.S. Northern Command issued an order to U.S. bases and facilities instructing them not to allow this in the future. The command also contacted Google, which quickly removed the Street View images of Fort Sam Houston.
THE FUTURE OF I SPY
The goal of national security entities has long been to know everything, everywhere, at all times—a concept dubbed “universal situation awareness” by one former Air Force official. Toward that end, technology is advancing at a rapid pace.
State-of-the-art technology still belongs to the secret world of the intelligence community, and satellite experts familiar with classified technology are hesitant to speculate about precise capabilities. “I don’t believe that the optimal performance of systems we have up there right now is public information,” says Sidney Drell, professor emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who is credited as one of the fathers of satellite reconnaissance. Outside analysts like Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists say that a resolution of 10 centimeters—allowing us to see a softball or the fine details of a car from space—is likely the best available resolution using visible light. This limit is imposed by the atmosphere, which diffracts visible light beyond that point.
