Sunday, September 22, 2002

A Place to Find Out for Yourself About the War
WITH all the speculation about American intentions for Iraq, there has been one place where, to the chagrin of the administration, people can find a few hard facts. Since August, any Web surfer has been able to view detailed satellite photographs of construction and expansion at an American air base in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar.

Published by Globalsecurity.org, a military watchdog group, and taken over the last six months, the photographs show that the base, al-Udeid, has new aircraft shelters, storage tanks and parking ramps.

The close-ups have clearly irked the Pentagon.

Commenting on the ability of outsiders to get them, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld grumbled, "I wish we didn't have to live with it." But that wish is unlikely to be granted, because the commercial satellite industry is blossoming. The existence of such photographs highlights what many consider to be the next information revolution and the government's sputtering efforts to control it.

It used to be that only the spy agencies of the two superpowers had the ability to take snapshots from space. That changed 16 years ago when a French commercial-government joint venture launched the world's first satellite offering photographs for sale. The quality of those early pictures wasn't particularly good, but in late 1999, an American company, Space Imaging, launched the first high-resolution satellite, Ikonos. It can take pictures with a clarity 10 times that of the French satellite — enough to spot a car on the ground or an American airfield. Ikonos, as well as another American commercial satellite launched this year, took the photographs of al-Udeid. As with the Internet and Global Positioning Satellites, the Defense Department invented the satellite imaging technology, and it has tried since to keep some control over it. A 1992 law allows the government to declare any part of the earth off-limits to American commercial satellites to "meet significant national security or significant foreign policy concerns."

But news media organizations and freedom-of-information advocates contend that the provision, known as "shutter control," is so vague that it is unconstitutional. "There has long been a standard in which national security concerns can be invoked to limit the free flow of information," said Ann Florini, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It's that there must be a clear and present danger. This law forgets that."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/weekinreview/22UMAN.html

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