The world's spy satellites are going commercial and the national security control freaks are freaking out. Watch for the next big First Amendment battle over who can see what. And if you look up, smile.
There was a time, not so long ago, when you could keep secrets the size of cities. On September 29, 1957, the world's worst nuclear accident to date took place in the Ural Mountains. A waste tank that was part of the Chelyabinsk-65 plutonium-processing facility blew up, releasing 20 million curies of radioactivity into the environment. Thousands of square miles were contaminated and a quarter of a million people were exposed to long-lived radionucleides. Dozens of villages were evacuated; soon afterward they disappeared from the maps, removed from the definitive record of Soviet territory like a purged Politburo member airbrushed out of a May Day photograph. And no one outside the USSR knew a thing about it.
The next time, it was different. Some 30 years later, on Monday, April 28, 1986, the Tass news agency announced that there had been an incident at a place called Chernobyl. This unusual candor came about because foreign governments already had detected the pall of radioactive ash spreading from the site - a cloud of contamination carrying twice the radioactive punch of the 1957 explosion. Hoping to keep control of the story, the Soviets immediately banned foreigners from Kiev, the major city nearest to the accident. The next day, an exclusion order sealed off a 100-mile radius around the stricken reactor. Whatever was happening, it was going to be kept a secret.
But the Politburo could not seal the sky. Aircraft from various countries, among them the US Air Force's 55th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, were tracking the radioactive ash as it spread across Europe. Hanging 23,000 miles above the western Soviet Union, an American Vortex satellite was sucking up all communications traffic within 200 miles of the reactor, listening in to a strange world of panic, confusion, and complacency. And in a lower orbit, what was then the United States' only KH-11 "Keyhole" satellite was maneuvering to get a clear view. By Tuesday afternoon, photos were in Washington, DC. The Keyhole's camera, capable of resolving details a few inches across, showed the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House the full extent of the explosion that had torn the plant's roof off. It gave them their first glimpse into the still raging inferno.
A technical miracle, to be sure, but so far, so very Cold War. The need to scrutinize Russia's territory without losing any more Gary Powers was what drove America into the spy satellite business to begin with. The then still utterly classified KH-11 peering down at the Ukraine was just the latest and most highly evolved manifestation of that desire. But this time, the US government's Keyhole was not the only eye looking down. There were civilian satellites up there, too: America's Landsat, mostly used for mapping resources, and a brand-new, more capable French machine called Spot, launched only a few months before. At the same time orbital imagery of the disaster was flashing on the screens of the White House operations room, a handful of news gatherers were pestering the commercial satellites' handlers for their own version of the same privileged viewpoint. The journalists could see the media possibilities of pictures of a nuclear disaster in the heart of forbidden territory; they dreamed of Kremlin secrets on the front page.
Mark Brender of ABC News was one of them. "I called Spot, and they said, 'We're not going to have any pictures because our satellite is still in the engineering checkout phase,' and I said, 'Screw the checkout phase, get the pictures.'" The engineers eventually got the message. "That really gave Spot a launch pad for their system," Brender says. "That picture was seen around the world."
A former US Naval officer then on the national security desk in ABC's Washington office, Brender had been one of the first in the news media to begin thinking about what commercial satellite imagery might mean. He got Landsat photographs on the air by the evening of Wednesday, April 30, a day after the Keyhole images reached the White House. By the next week, while the fire in the reactor core still burned, he had broadcast the much more detailed Spot pictures. He knew this was more than just dramatic illustration for a story. It was a taste of a spectacularly more open world to come, a world where the media would have independent access to all sorts of national security information. As Brender puts it now, he saw that there was going to be a revolution, and he wanted to take part. He took his current job, as the ABC News producer inside the Pentagon, so that he could help shape the changes he saw coming.
Still, the revolution took its time. For years, Spot and the Landsat program, built by NASA and run by a firm called Eosat, were the only sources of imagery commercially available. They couldn't guarantee pictures of a particular place at a particular time, or even on a particular day. Their data needed a lot of expert interpreting because the images were blurry. Spot's resolution was 10 meters - meaning that details smaller than 10 meters could not be seen except under exceptional circumstances. Service slowly got more reliable - and with the advent of 6-meter imagery from India's IRS-1 in 1995, so did the resolution - but the improvements were hardly dramatic.
The drama starts now. This year, commercial cameras capable of resolving details down to 3 meters will go into orbit. Next year the limit will drop to 1 meter, as rival high-resolution systems start competing in the marketplace for a prize that may be worth billions of dollars. Information long reserved for the highest levels of a few governments is becoming widely available around the world. And there's a new information society ready to lap it up that neither Brender nor the national security types had dreamed about at the time of Chernobyl. It's not just old-media players like ABC who will benefit. It's more or less everyone.
In a matter of weeks, anyone with a Net connection and a bank balance should have access to a commercial high-resolution, earth-imaging system: a time-share spy satellite. EarthWatch, the Colorado-based company that will offer the service, called EarlyBird, thinks this is the next big step in the information revolution. And like all such steps, it's scary to the people who used to keep information under tight control. That's why the US government wants to have broad authority over what the commercial satellites can see and has written that authority into satellite licenses. US law says that the government can turn off satellites whenever it thinks they might compromise national security - space imagery, in other words, needs a censor.
Mark Brender, however, isn't having any of it. He wants to see news as it happens, just as he was able to look down into the fires of Chernobyl. He wants the right to see what he likes and to broadcast what he sees. He wants to help usher in a new age of transparency in which conventional warfare becomes close to impossible. So he's taking the First Amendment into orbit. At the first sign of prior restraint on the satellites, Brender will take the government to court in what might well be the biggest case of its kind since the Pentagon Papers. He's determined to make the world more open despite the protests of governments. "It's like taking the world to the proctologist," he explains. "A bit uncomfortable, but it's going to do you good in the long run."
Sky of dreams
The first new probe to explore the earth's dark secrets, for Brender or anyone else with a checkbook, will be EarthWatch's EarlyBird, due to launch this summer from the Svobodny cosmodrome in Russia. EarlyBird's story began in 1992, when Walter Scott, an SDI program manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Doug Gerull, executive vice president for geographical information systems at Intergraph, had the idea of selling high-resolution imagery to the GIS community over the Internet. They traipsed up and down Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road until they raised enough capital to apply for a license to operate a remote sensing satellite. Incorporated as WorldView, they proposed 3-meter resolution - three times sharper than Spot, but nowhere near as sharp as systems like the KH-11.
A decade before, the idea would have gotten nowhere - even the laughter it provoked inside the national security apparatus would have been classified. But a decade before there had still been a Soviet Union and a Cold War. By 1992, there was just a collapsed Russia, which wanted to sell the fruits of its space program to anyone with hard currency to spare. The country's intentions with respect to spy satellites were announced in September 1992, when ABC broadcast a Russian high-resolution image of the Pentagon - a gesture that got Washington's attention.
That picture showed more than a big ugly building; it showed that Cold War national security had become post-Cold War commerce. And that suited some people in Washington fine. Making space more open for business was one of those slightly eccentric bits of wonkery that pushed the White House buttons back in the Bush days.If there was going to be a market in high-resolution pictures, the Bush space cadets reasoned, then it should be American-dominated. After all, the United States had spent well over US$100 billion on space-based intelligence and had a truly impressive satellite spying industry to show for it. And then there was the $30 billion investment in the Strategic Defense Initiative - surely that produced something that would sell.
Industry, decreed the bright-eyed Bushies, should be encouraged to do something with all the neat toys SDI had amassed for the generals and spooks. So the administration revamped the legislation covering remote sensing to make the licenses more commercially attractive. Walter Scott applied for a license to build the WorldView system using lessons from the fleet of tiny warhead-mashing "Brilliant Pebbles" satellites that Livermore Labs was trying to sell to the Star Wars program. An eager Commerce Department official named Scott Pace, who now works at Rand, then ran around getting the various government agencies involved - the departments of Defense, State, and Transportation, the CIA and NASA - to approve the license before Clinton got into office.
The military-industrial complex took heed. The following year the big boys weighed in with their own proposal: a 1-meter system built by Lockheed, makers of the new advanced version of the KH-11. Other applications for licenses turned up, and it turned out that the Clinton administration wasn't so antibusiness after all. There are now 11 American licenses, some for systems with resolutions as sharp as 85 centimeters, though not all of them look as if they'll be built in the next few years. It's unlikely that licenses will be granted for resolutions much higher, not so much for national security concerns but because higher resolutions start to invade personal privacy. In addition to the American projects, there are still the current versions of Spot and India's program. And Canada is selling images from its Radarsat, which doesn't have the same resolution but has the advantage of seeing through clouds.
Two firms are in the lead. The first is EarthWatch, what the WorldView start-up turned into when Ball Aerospace, a small but experienced spacecraft builder, came on board along with Hitachi and some other investors. The second is Space Imaging, made up of the mighty Lockheed, Raytheon/E-systems, and Mitsubishi. Faced with Space Imaging's plans for 1-meter resolution, EarthWatch has supplemented its original 3-meter Early-Bird program with a 1-meter QuickBird program, with the first satellite launching in 1998. EarthWatch has raised another $120 million for the project through Morgan Stanley.
Looking at the size of the current market for satellite imagery, that might seem an absurd amount of money. For example, selling Spot's pictures makes about $41 million a year. The total cost of the program to the French government is estimated to be some $1.5 billion, but is thought to purchase some of la gloire as well.
But the existing satellite market, the companies say, isn't the place to be looking. Look instead at the existing remote sensing data market, which includes satellites but is dominated by traditional aerial photography businesses - and then extrapolate massive growth. That's a market worth investing in - one that was valued by PlanGraphics, a market research firm that specializes in graphics applications, at some $550 million in 1995, growing to $2.65 billion by 2000. And those figures, say the companies, are well on the conservative side. With improvements in supply and potential demand, they think the growth could be much bigger.
The improvements on the supply side are in quality and reliability. The 1 meter data really will be much better than 10-meter data. It's going to be clearer and easier to interpret. It should be accurate enough to fit seamlessly into or over existing detailed maps and eventually to supersede them. The new systems also will provide more frequent opportunities to revisit the same site. Spy satellites normally circle the poles in orbits that take about an hour and a half. So if a satellite passes over New York on one orbit, the next orbit will pass over somewhere like Omaha, because that's how far the world has turned in the intevening time. The places in between won't get seen until another day - on which New York and Omaha will be invisible.
There are a number of other ways around the problem. You can have more than one satellite in more than one orbit, or give the satellite a greater ability to take sidelong glances so it can see places that aren't directly beneath it. EarthWatch intends to do both. With two EarlyBirds in the traditional polar orbits and two QuickBirds in orbits that ignore the poles in order to cover the rest of the world more thoroughly, the company hopes to offer revisits every day or even more often.
On the demand side, some existing markets look likely to expand: environmental monitoring, resource management, straightforward mapmaking. Only 7 percent of the world is covered by up-to-date maps at a 1:25,000 scale. But the big hopes are for the market in spatially arranged databases for GIS products, already a $2 billion industry and growing fast. Satellite imagery is a natural here, both as a source of data and as the key to organizing info that comes from other places. What could be easier than looking down on a particular location and then zooming in, both for detail and for other data?
To some extent this reliance on unspecified GIS applications is like the film Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come. The companies admit as much and are as vague about the market's details as they are sure about its size. EarthWatch's Gerull, with his 20-year background in GIS, says he never bothered to get a figure for the market - he just knew it was enormous. Space Imaging's brochures enthuse over the purported fact that "80 percent of business information has a geographical component."
The GIS market they talk about most is in infrastructure. Utility companies, for example, could be big customers for data that shows them how the world actually is, rather than how they think it is. With 1-meter imagery you can see how fast-growing suburbs are actually spreading, and what services they need. You can plan roads, power lines, water mains, ATMs, fast-food outlets. You can get a high level of detail and precision in your planning without having to do on-site surveying. In effect, you get to see the world exactly as it is, more or less whenever you want. Put that way, GIS sounds like a resource you can't do without. Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, once described objectivity as "the view from nowhere" - a point of view unencumbered by any accidents of geography or history. From the emptiness of orbit, satellites can provide just that sort of objective knowledge, delivered in neat, commoditized packages.
And it's not just a matter of maplike pictures. Cheap high-performance computing combined with stereoscopic satellite photographs (matched images from different points of view that highlight an area's relief) are bringing 3-D landscape generation into its own. For example, NBC built a "virtual Bosnia" for its news broadcasts to fly the viewer through the embattled terrain, explaining things in ways no simple two-dimensional photograph ever could.
This could all add up to a great business. But it looks like one based on lots of different little things rather than a single absolutely compelling one. That should ring some alarm bells. Satellite systems don't come cheap. And while a multitude of minor applications is fine for a mature business, it's not so good for a nascent one that needs a lot of early revenue to keep investors happy. Of course, there's a mantra for dealing with situations like this: Look for the killer app. But, in the words of a recent briefing from Rand, which stressed the commercial risks in all this satellite investment, "This elusive item is yet to be identified, at least publicly."
The killing app
John Pike, an analyst with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, DC, knows more about more aspects of space and national security than almost anyone outside the world of classified programs. His mixture of diligent research and pungent sound bites made him one of the most effective critics of the Star Wars program in the 1980s. Now he is a born-again webmaster, presiding with evangelical zeal over the bountiful resource that is the FAS Web site. Pike has a slightly fevered air, with a laugh that sounds like automatic gunfire on a battlefield. The killer app question brings on a burst of it.
"Every defense ministry, every intelligence staff on the planet is going to want to have this stuff," Pike says. "Think of it in concrete terms. There are colonels responsible for briefing ministries. To be able to come in and show them an overhead image of the other guy's airfield for a few hundred bucks - that's a no-brainer. Totally apart from the question of whether it would actually do anything, simply think of the sex appeal of being able to brief your higher-ups with satellite imagery, to be the first kid on the block with it.
"Have you seen the EarthWatch CD-ROM?" Pike cackles. "They know who their customers are going to be." He fires up the program, which greets us with some vaguely martial music that might come from an arcade game and icons for five areas of interest we might like to explore. We click on Defense. Images of airports, roads, and railways light up the screen. A somewhat unctuous voiceover begins, its pitch punctuated by Pike's laughter.
"High-spatial-resolution satellite imagery will provide timely and comprehensive detection, identification, and verification capabilities worldwide. Using 1-meter and 3-meter imagery, weapons inventory, type, and operational status will be routinely available up to several times a day."
Soon we get to the hard stuff: "High-spatial-resolution satellite imagery is not only a useful visual tool for target selection, the high metric precision of the imaging can be used to pinpoint weapons delivery," the voice intones. "One-meter imagery can provide a detailed visual record of strike effectiveness and target operational status, as well as help prioritize targets for any follow-up missions." From Pike, shrieks of laughter.
If I were in a military organization that didn't have spy satellites - and almost all of them don't - I'd be contacting EarthWatch in double time. That the killer app is the killing app should not be surprising. Spy satellites became a multibillion-dollar industry in the US precisely because they provided the military with information that was unavailable from any other source. Jeffrey Harris, who used to run the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), made the point forcefully last April when he spoke to a conference on satellite imagery and the media hosted by American University in Washington, DC. Back at the tail end of the 1950s, the early days of the pioneering Corona spy satellite program were marred by failure after failure. Then there was one success. And that one success brought back more overhead imagery of the Soviet Union than all the U2 flights ever. On its own, the satellite located two dozen previously unknown bomber airfields.
Those Corona satellites and their "product" were then the darkest secret around, and things stayed that way until the Cold War was over. Until a few years ago, the very existence of Harris's NRO, the intelligence outfit that runs the overhead imagery program, was all but unknown to civilians less clued in than Pike. Now there has been some real glasnost. More than 800,000 Corona images have been declassified; the FAS Web site has a fine portfolio of them. And Harris is now in civilian life, the president of an exciting new technology venture. It's called Space Imaging.
Space Imaging is basically a diluted version of the longstanding US spy satellite program. Its owners are the makers of the Keyhole satellites and electronics; its president is a former alpha spook. Its products are the thoroughbreds of low-Earth orbit - or, as one EarthWatch employee puts it in a backhanded compliment, "mainframes to our Macs." And its markets are likely to be a good match for its history, partly because those big, expensive satellites need to start earning back their investment as fast as possible. Space Imaging, through as yet unnamed regional affiliates, seems likely to be looking for price-insensitive customers in intelligence agencies around the world.
Of course, buying into Space Imaging doesn't quite carry the same cachet as having your own spy satellite program. But then it doesn't carry the same costs, either. And that the company's license gives the American government a legal right to know who the bulk buyers are, and what they are looking at, is just the price the world's colonels will have to pay for using it. Most of them will pony up happily.
Space Imaging gives most countries what they need. It gives the colonels pictures of their neighbors' airfields, of threats to their troops, or of whatever they want. Strategists tend to believe that this sort of transparency is inherently stabilizing. The first Corona missions reassured America's leaders that the much-feared "bomber gap" and "missile gap" were fictions and introduced a note of calming reality to a Strangelovian world - though the note was played too softly for anyone outside the corridors of power to hear. And transparency made the disarmament treaties in the 1970s and 1980s possible by allowing verification from above.
Spy satellites, however, were not an unalloyed force for good in the Cold War. Pike claims that after the Corona flights, the Soviets, "having failed in their pretense of having strategic superiority, then went absolutely berserk and spent the next quarter of a century attempting to achieve the reality of strategic parity." Accurate targeting information may also have made a "winnable" nuclear war strategy aimed at the enemy's deterrent forces more conceivable. But in general, the information that satellites provided to both sides seemed to add up to stability. And if satellite information did that for the two superpowers in the Cold War, maybe it can do the same for everyone when it's freely available to all. When every government knows where its neighbor's troops are and where they are going; when every government is aware that the same is known about its own troops; when the citizens know it all, too - is that a recipe for peace? We'll soon find out.
Free speech in space
Not everyone shares the dream of a world where peace comes through everyone spying on their neighbors by the good graces of American industry. Some countries and organizations will just take it as further confirmation that the way to fight wars is no longer in the open, but through the sneakier methods of the terrorist. Others just aren't keen on the United States setting up a global information hegemony. When Lockheed offered Germany its very own off-the-shelf spy satellite for about $500 million a few years ago - a system very similar, by most accounts, to Space Imaging's satellites - the French were incensed. France had developed a successor to Spot, a higher-resolution military spy satellite called Helios, with some investment from Italy and Spain. It wanted to do more, planning an even better Helios 2 and a radar satellite called Osirisas the foundation of a multibillion-dollar spy satellite system that could be afforded only if European countries pooled resources.
If the Germans bought American then the European projects would likely collapse, went the cry from the Élysée, and with them the continent's aspirations to true strategic independence. The Germans didn't buy the system. But they haven't signed up for Helios 2 or Osiris, either, and the prospect of their simply putting in standing orders with Space Imaging hasn't made Paris any more sanguine.
You don't have to be French or paranoid to see some truth in the worries. You just have to read Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the strategy-making classes. In 1996 Foreign Affairs ran an article called "America's Information Edge," by Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School, and William Owens, then just retired as deputy chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The article started from the basis that the United States has overwhelming leads in information technology, both commercially and militarily. By sharing the fruits of this technology widely but deliberately - that is, sharing by a sort of generous rationing rather than by selling freely in the open market - it would be possible to maintain a soft but sure hegemony. Current policy, which prevents remote sensing satellites from being sold to foreign buyers outright but lets the data be sold to foreigners subject to the restrictions of a US license, fits into that view of the world. It gives the executive branch ill-defined but wide powers to control who gets the goods.
Which brings us back to Mark Brender. Brender is a fine patriotic American utterly at home in "Correspondent's Corridor," the part of the Pentagon where journalists are given offices. But he's also a journalist who wants to get the most out of this new technology. By the time Chernobyl happened, Brender had set up the remote sensing task force of the Radio Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), a modest pulpit from which he's campaigned to make sure the media get unfettered satellite imagery.
Those fetters go by the name of "shutter control," the government's ability to tell companies to stop imaging a particular place for a period of time - or at least to stop selling the imagery to anyone other than the government. At the moment, the Secretary of Commerce can exercise shutter control over a US-licensed imaging satellite if cabinet colleagues at Defense and State convincingly argue that "national security or international obligations may be compromised." To some extent, Brender sees nominally civilian control as a victory. "Originally there was going to be a bunch of colonels," he explains. "Every day in the Pentagon and the CIA, they would issue an order to the commercial satellites of areas of the world they could not take pictures of. Initially the government thought it could have that much control. My little organization helped change that. We at least got the decision put to the Secretary of Commerce and out of the hands of the national security apparatus.
"What we did not get embedded into the policy is what standards the Secretary of Commerce would use in making his or her decision to shutter a satellite. We wanted 'clear and present danger.' The government has the right to prevent publication through prior restraint if it can prove in court that there's a clear and present danger. That's already been through the Supreme Court. It's the Pentagon Papers standard."
But that's not the standard in force today. The license allows shutter control if "national security or international obligations may be compromised." And the call is left to a cabinet member, not a judge. So if this sort of shutter control is ever used, Brender and the RTNDA will be the first to challenge it. They'll take it straight to a federal judge.
Brender offers this scenario: Imagery of North Korean nuclear installations appears during multilateral talks between the Koreas, Japan, and the US. The North Koreans threaten to walk. The US government puts up the shutters. "North Korea's a hermit kingdom, doesn't like being imaged from space," Brender says. "It comes in and says, 'Knock that shit off.' Should we be allowed to image North Korea in spite of what North Korea wants? Yes. Is that a direct and immediate threat to the national security of the United States? No. Is it sensitive to foreign policy? Yes. But everything we do is sensitive to foreign policy. If you don't fight the first one, you've lost. Precedents are set and foreign policy concerns become the guidepost. So in the media we have to get organized for when the first test case comes down the pike - and it will."
What about pictures that show American troops on the ground? There are Spot images from the Gulf War, not released at the time, that clearly show the logistic development of the "left hook" strategy, the encircling move through the desert that struck at the Iraqi flank, weeks before it happened. During the war, Spot voluntarily restricted its remote sensors. Would Brender have tried to image the left hook if the new systems had been up and running?
Yes, he says - up to a point. "We would have tried to have the left hook imaged. We would have looked at the imagery and then we would, in consultation with the government, have decided whether to put it on air. We'd say here's what we have, do you want to refute it, do you want to discuss it, do you want to help us out with the interpretation? Then we'd listen very hard to what the government would tell us and if it could be proved that the publishing of this imagery could be a direct threat to the national security, with the lives of Americans at stake, then clearly we would not publish it.
"We're the American Broadcasting Company, owned by the Walt Disney corporation," Brender says. "The last thing we want is to have the blood of American troops on Mickey Mouse's hands."
This won't convince everyone. Old generals will recall journalists adamant that the story takes precedence over everything, whether it helps or harms US troops. On the other hand, old hacks will recall being misled by briefing officers in theaters of war around the world. In practice, though, wartimes are not likely to test the boundaries of shutter control, according to Rand's Scott Pace. He and many others think that in a war, the US aerospace industry and its government won't be on different sides. Their position in the military-industrial complex makes it a pretty sure thing that when GIs are shooting and being shot at, the satellite companies will do pretty much what the US government tells them to. This may not satisfy the most deeply committed believers in a free press, Pace says, but it's likely to be the way things go, at least at first.
Still, you don't need a war that puts American lives at risk to have a shutter control crisis. Journalists might provoke such a clampdown by publicizing highly secret, unsavory, or otherwise destabilizing facts from any number of countries, including the US. Later this year John Pike plans to image the facilities at the sealed-off Groom Lake air base, the fabled Area 51 beloved of X-philes and other conspiracy theorists. It's an area that commercial aircraft cannot fly over and that no one can look down into, since the surrounding hills have been taken over by the government.
He applies the same reasoning to Camp Perry in Virginia and Harvey Point in North Carolina, the training centers for the CIA's directorate of operations. He'll be looking for evidence of the actual size of these facilities to work out how many people actually work there, what they do, and whether the reality reflects the world reflected in the budgets. Will he be stopped? Probably not - but he might be. A spokesperson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that deals with satellite licenses, says that shutter control for areas inside US borders "is a possibility."
It's more likely, though, that shutter control will come into play in the diplomatic arena - when other countries are putting other people's lives at risk. Imagery of French forces in Chad, say, or Russians in Chechnya. These are the areas in which the hard cases will be found - places where America has some interest still not utterly well defined, where allies or enemies are in danger but Americans are not - areas that, at the moment, are roughly equivalent to the whole surface of the earth.
When that crunch comes, Brender and the Radio Television News Directors Association think they have a pretty good case that shutter regulations would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on free expression. Others aren't so sure. A satellite is not a printing press - it's a means of collecting information, not of disseminating it, and that distinction could be pried open far enough for all sorts of legal fun and games. Shutter control could turn into the next big free-expression fight of the digital era, with appeals all the way to the Supreme Court.
In the long run, US hegemony cannot be complete. France plans a new 2.5 meter-resolution commercial satellite in 2001 or 2002; the Indians plan a 1-meter satellite around the same time. Neither will need US licensing to sell its imagery - though the French and the Indians might feel the urge to put on their own controls. Russia could still be a player in the market, too. The technology is hard to build - but not that hard, and not getting any harder. It could proliferate quite spectacularly if other countries, and quite possibly the media, feel that it's the only way to ensure the access they want. The US government may find itself in a dilemma: The more it uses shutter control, the more people will want non-US satellites that aren't so controlled. So the more the US uses control, the more it risks losing it.
A new model for understanding
In the end, though, this is not a big-media-takes-power-from-big government story. It's a new-way-to-look-at-the-world story. At least that's the view of Christopher Simpson, a journalist who fell among academics and ended up running the program on satellite imagery at American University. Simpson is as interested as anyone in the idea of a transparent world where oil spills on the high seas, fires at nuclear reactors, and mobilizations along borders are all public property. But he also looks further. He sees that this new media tool is going to change the way people see things. Quite literally.
"This satellite imagery," he says, "is one aspect of an emerging new form of journalism, which includes various forms of Internet journalism but is more fundamental than that." To Simpson, it's all part of an elevation of the image over the word. "There are many sorts of information that are far more effectively transferred in iconographic and pictorial form. In a data rich environment, charts and graphs convey a lot of information in a very concentrated space. But any such diagram is an abstraction that cuts out pieces of the real world and distorts it."
A satellite image, he says, is even more than that. "Look at the nightly weather. The pictures of clouds going across where you live illustrate the words, make them more compelling, easier to hear. On another level, they are the raw material for the analysis. There are two different jobs that blend together. Once a qualified meteorologist has made sense of it, an ordinary person can participate in the analysis - and to the extent that they're interested in doing so, they can make counteranalyses.
"For most people, most of the time, it seems easier to make independent analyses with pictorial and iconographic images than with lines of argument or text. And satellites give a broader and more synoptic image of the world than any other tool so far."
In this vision - clearly the right word, all things considered - the satellite image integrated into geographical information systems becomes something more than a useful media product. This is not only a way to look at what would otherwise not be seen, a way to jimmy open old information monopolies. It's a new model for understanding the world. Like the telephone or the wristwatch, it is the sort of product that gets woven into the fabric of life - in this case, as an assumption that all the world is out there to be seen, that it is all available, comprehensible, and held in common.
Since a singular image taken from Apollo 8 first showed humanity its home adrift in space, most of the public pictures of the earth from orbit have been dramatic snapshots of storms and floods. The constant flow of imagery about to start up will be much more: a rich, textured portrait, endlessly evolving. With shared eyes we will watch the world carry its cargo of civilization - its roads, its fields, its cities, its landfills - through time and space. This portrait will be an image that can zoom in to the personal and pull out to the geopolitical, a new way to look at borders, a new way to look at news. It will be an illustration of everything: not, in the end, a view from nowhere, but a view from everywhere, for everyone.
