17 August 2007

Looking Up



The jury did not take long to convict Mr. Jose Padilla in Miami. One of the jurors delivered her opinion on the matter in Spanish, her preferred language, which ends the long legal limbo of the Brooklyn-born jihadi who the government said wanted to vaporize Chicago.

It seems that the American mortgage melt-down rattling the world markets is having the same effect that Mr. Padilla is alleged to have wanted, though not exactly the way he intended.

The Government did not charge him on that spectacular charge, though, so he will do his time for something less. But time it is, more endless hours just like the ones identical to the ones he has lived since they busted him at O'Hare international.

The deliberations went less than two days, which is a little more than the five hours the engineers took at NASA to say that the crew of the shuttle would be fine on re-entry to the atmosphere. Endeavour's belly was scarred by ice falling from the enormous liquid fuel tank during lift-off, just as Columbia was. I don't know how confident the crew is that the engineers are right; the perspective is dramatically different between the two groups of people. The hours before the crew straps in for the ride down through the atmosphere will have a certain poignancy.

I'm sure it will be fine. The Engineers say so. Still, I will be looking up when they come home, just as the eyes in the sky will be looking down at me.

I don't know about you, but I never set out to go anywhere without doing a search on Google Map to identify the route. The final step is to click on the “hybrid” function that superimposes the map on an overhead picture. It is a neat function, which duplicates something we used to do in the government with other people's houses and power-plants and military installations.

It was a big secret once, and parts of it are still highly classified. The images were of places outside the United States, and not very useful for getting around, but most excellent for knowing what the residents were up to; how many tanks they had, or whether their submarines were at their usual piers.

We were only rarely permitted to access images of the continental United States. There were stringent policies on that, and the images we were permitted to use were mostly of blasted stretches of the desert Southwest containing military training ranges, which we used to help train for the real thing elsewhere.

It was a pain in the butt to get the “proper used” permissions, and more hoops beyond that to jump through to get the pictures. Consequently, it was easier to send a photo-reconnaissance airplane and have pictures that were not classified by their source.

There are all kinds of things up there whizzing around in orbit. Some of them are American, and some of them not. Some of the eyes gaze from stationary positions deep in space, in geosynchronous orbits, watching the weather, and some are much closer and watch for things.

I was startled by the announcement yesterday that the Spooks have proposed using the national security systems to support Homeland Security. I was not surprised that they were doing it; rather, that it had taken so long to get around to it. Our satellites are useful for assessing storm damage, creating detailed maps and charts, and see how fast the earth is warming.

After the Cold War, we used some sensors to listen to the great whales sing to one another since there were no longer hostile submarines with missiles in their bellies to track.

All the gee-whiz technology is migrating to the commercial sector, and it is mostly the people who have retired from government who are helping. There is money in it, and the advantage is that it can be done in a completely legal and much cheaper way than the Government can.

It is fun to see the gang still in action. A former director of the National Reconnaissance Office authored the recommendations to allow the Department of Homeland Security to gain access to the information, where some of the other usual suspects will employ it to look at the borders and identify threats to the nation. Eventually, access will be provided to law enforcement.

There will be a new office established to coordinate requests from the civilian agencies, and strict oversight will be provided the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Civil Liberties community is having a case of the vapors about the whole thing, and wants additional Congressional oversight for the whole process. I support their concerns, of course, but once again the public debate is far behind the technology.

Google is bringing us street-level views of neighborhoods, after all, which is useful for searching for real estate. Or stalking people, I suppose.

The only key difference between the national and commercial systems are resolution and periodicy- the frequency of which new images of the same place are updated. You can get a lot closer if no one is likely to shoot at you. There are also places denied to the commercial folks, just as some places are overseas. There are "denied areas" that have been worked out with the commercial folks that includes places like the White House and the Naval Observatory in Washington where Mr. Cheney lives.

I don't know where this puts us on the First Amendment issues- after all, the frozen nature of Google makes it fine for directions but irrelevant for virtual surveillance- but this is another example of the marvelous classified capability being overcome by the market and the tide of technology.

There is no reason a private customer could not hire private airplanes to accomplish the same thing that the national systems can do, only cheaper.

It is a question of waking up in this new world to see what other part of our collective liberty has been eroded. I can see my balcony at Big Pink quite clearly from the Google image. I cannot see myself looking back up, waving.

Or flipping the bird, as the case may be. I'm sure we can take care of that with the curb-side view, looking up,   when the Google people drive by to collect it.

Copyright 207 Vic Socotra
www.vicosoctra.com

Close Window