TrendU.S. domestic agencies to have greater access to spy satellites

Published 16 August 2007

To bolster the security of borders and critical infrastructure, and to facilitate more effective law enforcement and disater recovery, U.S. will share more imagery and data from spy satellites with domestic agencies

Satellites circle the globe (unless they are stationed in geosynchronous orbit), and as they loiter the skies they travel not only over enemy countries, but also over U.S. territory. The U.S. government will allow border control, law enforcement, and emergency response agencies to have greater access to the information gathered by U.S. spy satellites and other sensors as these monitor U.S. territory. Sharing of imagery and data will be useful in policing land and sea borders and in disaster planning, Charles Allen, DHS’s chief intelligence officer, said. The effort eventually may support domestic law enforcement activities as well, he said, but legal guidelines for that still are being worked out. What is new here is not the initiative itself, but its scope. As AP reports, at least eleven domestic agencies have had access to limited amounts of spy satellite imagery during the last thirty years, mostly on a case-by-case basis. The images have been used to monitor national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It also could be used to map evacuation routes before anticipated disasters or to identify patterns of illegal movement across borders.

The CIA and Defense Department generally are prohibited from spying on American citizens, and Allen stressed the new data-sharing effort does not violate that ban. “This is not a system for tracking Americans,” Allen said. A new office within DHS, called the National Applications Office, will be the conduit for all domestic requests for spy satellite information. It will be left to the intelligence agencies themselves — the Pentagon’s National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, for example — to determine which requests they can honor. Many imagery satellites are in low-Earth orbit and pass over the United States periodically on their way to cover foreign targets. They can easily be directed to photograph U.S. locations as they pass overhead.

Nimble technology companies should note the opportunity here: Collecting data is only a small part of the task. The data or imagery must then be analyzed and turned into a useable product before dissemination. Analysts throughout the intelligence agencies already are swamped with data from foreign surveillance, and they may have little time for lower-priority work. “That will be a challenge,” Allen said. He said they would be able to satisfy the requests in many cases they will be able but would not be in others.

Note that back in 2005, Keith Hall, a former chief of the National Reconnaissance Office and now vice president of the McLean, Virginia-based consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, headed a commission which recommended this move. Spy satellite resolution is better than the resolution offered by commercial suppliers like Google Earth, but it is not precise enough to track individuals and can photograph a given target only at intervals. “There are much better ways of surveilling an individual than using a satellite,” Hall says. “Satellite capability, while quite impressive, (is) not of a kind that allows you to spy on an individual. You can monitor activity periodically, but you can’t tell who you are looking at.” John Pike, a defense technology expert and director of GlobalSecurity.org, agrees. “It’s not immediately apparent to me the satellites would tell me something I couldn’t otherwise learn from an airplane,” Pike said.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists is worried about other aspects of the plan. “What could go wrong? There’s the possibility of a recurrence of past abuses: surveillance used against political opponents as in the Civil Rights era, the McCarthy era,” he said. “There’s also an incidental erosion of personal privacy in which one now has to assume that anywhere you are, you are subject to overhead surveillance by the government. And that is a change in what it means to be an American,” Aftergood said.