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Satellite Images as Courtroom Evidence 102

Posted by Roblimo from the no-way-that-was-me- dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Mark Johnson, director of motion graphics for Visual Forensics, has been using data from Earth-imaging satellites for a special purpose: sticking it to the bad guys and keep the good guys out of trouble. Now Johnson's looking forward to the launch of the Ikonos imaging satellite later this week, which is capable of taking pictures that show clearly the name of a football team in the end zone." Johnson's fees for testifying on your behalf in court are apparently $25,000 and up. Not a cheap alibi!
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Satellite Images as Courtroom Evidence More

Satellite Images as Courtroom Evidence

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  • Temporal Filters have been around for a while even going back 10 years. A simple time average computation isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical, as you would expect to have the 'correct' image on average while the fuzzyness caused by atmospheric affects would be random.
  • No, he is not in the business of selling cheap alibis, these hypocrites [alibi.co.uk] are! (Click on the UK link to see what they do.)

    There is a difference...

    Ben

  • Re:Very bad example. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    US citizens have been killed by European pilots too, flying training missions in the US and not a damn thing was done to those pilots either. A few years ago, in Wichita Falls, Texas, a European student pilot & his instructor (both either Dutch or German I can't remember which) were flying a T-38 from Sheppard AFB and had an engine failure while over the northwest portion of the city. While they still would have had more than enough airspeed and altitude to aim the nose of the plane a few more degrees northward where the plane would have come down harmlessly into an unpopulated area before punchine out, they did not do this. Instead, both student and instructor panicked and ejected out of the plane immediately with disregard for where the aircraft would crash into. The aircraft, almost full of fuel just a couple of minutes after takeoff, crashed into an apartment complex right next door to an elementary school. Two Jehovahs' Witnesses who were walking on the premises were squashed and killed instantly. The jet landed squarely on top of them while they tried to run away from it. One apartment building burst into flames next to the exploding wreckage, but luckily everyone who lived in it got out alive. If the plane would have come down less than one tenth of a mile more westward, it would have punched down through the roof of elementary school classrooms instead. Of course there was an "official review" of the incident but the pilot and his instructor were simply sent home with no real punishment for their negligence.
  • Fuck em.. let everyone take pictures of the bases. Hey the Ruissian's need money and they probable have spy sat.s Maybe they could set up a web site which gave real resolution pics for like $500 or something. That would be great..

    Jeff
  • OK sure that could be a problem. However the moment you requested an image of a 'sensitive' area you would be reported to the NSA or Secret Service or whoever is in charge of the nation security of whatever country you were looking at. Assuming the operators of the satillite are reputable (and haveing the resources and cash to put up a satillite they had better be).
    Ok, lets look at who'd have the resources to put a satellite up there: Microsoft, The American Government,... I don't think 'reputable' is quite the word I'd use. Whoever controlled the satellite would presumeably make sure that it wasn't used to spy on them or their allies, but it could still be used to infringe on the privacy of normal people. Celebrities look out! The paparazzi can see you from space now...

  • Orbit (Score:1)

    by dkm ( 42942 )
    Most satellites used for remote sensing (ie, looking at the earth) are either in geosynchronous orbits or polar orbits. The ones in polar orbits have a regular repeat cycle. For example, the NOAA AVHRR satellites [ccrs.emr.ca] have a daily repeat while the Landsat TM sensors [usgs.gov] have about a 14 day cycle (more often at the poles). The general rule of thumb is the higher the resolution, the longer the overpass cycle.

    This satellites has a polar orbit. They are really intended to be an alternative to aerial photography for planners, foresters, and farmers. They provide regularly updated imagery but not continuous coverage.

    The specific of the ikonos satellite, including orbit info, can be found here [spaceimage.com] on the Space Imagine Inc. Home page [spaceimage.com] .

    This applet [nasa.gov] shows the orbit and ground track for ~100 different satellites. It's really useful for visualizing the orbits.
  • There is a mock-up of the HST is the Smithsonian. Look at the date on it (in the 70's as I recall). I think the HST might be a re-purposed recon sat, and not current-generation technology, either. So 2.4m optics is brobably not a limiting factor for the people who are take the best images of the Earth.
  • Not at all - our core businesses differ too much. Landsat sells images at $400-$600 an image - I think. We build and sell micro (100kg) and mini (300kg-500kg) satellite systems to a client interested in his own satellite. Including launch and with a guaranteed turnaround time of 18 months, we supply a complete satellite with ground station for less than 6 million pounds ($10M ?). The fact that we have a very good imager is an added bonus.

    ...by the pricking of my thumbs,

  • Maybe I don't understand the laws properly, but if they've got a picture of a crime occuring, that picture doesn't contain me, and I'm accused of a crime, I'm nailing their buttocks with a subpoena.

    Maybe *I* ought to set up a service that uses that subpoena'd data to do all the simulation work. Hey, I'll only charge $10K per trial. (:

    I wonder how the local police will react to photos of a crime scene they didn't take...
  • I remember when I was studying my Prof. used Landsat MSS to demonstrate that a cotton grower was drawing water from a river illegally. He was also scanning the hills for Ganga plants at one stage. MSS was pretty good for irrigation water since you have coverage every 16 days filed away that you can drdge up years after the event. Higher resolution stuff (sub metre) is a bit more difficult since you either have to deliberately scan an area, or have lots of satellites or a lousy revisit time. Never mind the insane volume of data you'd need to store.

    X.
  • Well, if you've got $25,000 for the picture, wouldn't it be easier just to *bribe* the judge? Or *gasp* pay the fine? Maybe you should have paid the parking meters instead. Exactly what sorts of crimes do people with that kind of disposable money need defending from anyway?

    Somehow this doesn't strike me as the "justice for all" device the article implies.

  • Re:I don't know about you.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They cited the example of a multiple car pileup. Cars could still be "identified" by their position in the carambolage (i.e. the satelitte video could answer the question: "did the first car do anything stupid before the accident happened"). And police reports would have shown who was where in the queue.

    It could also be used to bust false alibis: i.e. your friend claims to have met you at this that place at that time, and the video shows that there was nobody there at all at that time.

    Or it could show that a car left your driveway, went to the murder victims house, and came back to your driveway.

    You don't need to identify a person for every evidence. However, the real difficulty seems to be complete coverage. The satelitte would be useless if it happened to point in the wrong direction at the time of the crime. And given the high zoom factor, the probability that it pointed to the correct location (chosen after the fact) seems to be quite low.

  • Ok, I accept this. What do I have to pay some corporation to *NOT* be spied on. Unfortunately, I'm not a PAC so I can't buy off the Govt. too. Ahhh, the mafia to the left of me, the mafia to the right...
  • Not only is this a bad example because of the nature of the trial, but because of the nature of the information. Why do we need multimillion-dollar satellites to create a computer rendering of the scene? Why not just go over there in another airplane and take a picture? And why should anyone trust a computer rendering over a regular photograph?

    This kind of justification triviallizes the whole technology, (cynic mode on) but I guess that's just the sort of justification we need to get the people with the money to buy into hi-res satellites (cynic mode off).

  • I'll spare the mathematical details,

    please don't ;-p

    ...when a human being sees a blurry or distorted image (particularly of the sort produced by satellite), he can usually pick out most of the deviations from an "ideal" clear image. instantly.

    How does een human even know the deviation from a 'ideal' image if it can't be seen. (unless you assume what you are looking at)

    Damn, we sure could use this in astronomy research. We just need to recognize to protogalaxy in the fuzz ;-p. Heck, we dont even need bigger telescopes, since the only difference image-resolution-wise compared to small telescopes is convolving it with a smaller point spread function, which we recognize away anyway.

    I agree that temporal filtering of 100-1000 images would do nicely, but even that is bound to diffraction limiting. (at 200km height you need an equivalent of HST's 2.4 mirror.)

    Ivo
  • The biggest difference with this sensor isn't so much the 1m panchromatic resolution but the availibility of 4m multispectral data. This is considerably higher than the other current options.

    Keep in mind too that the target market for the panchromatic data are the people who are used to buying 1 foot planimetric aerial photos and are used to that level of accuracy. The closer you can get to that, the more interested they'll become.
  • isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical

    That might be a problem, if you require sub-meter pointing accuraty and stability, just by gyro-control, on a spacecraft at 200km height, traveling at say 7000km/hour, minimal exposure time some fraction of second. It might be quite undoable.

  • There's a big difference between an airplane having an engine failure ...

    ... and an airplane driven by some foolish pilots seeking the challenge of underflying the lifts cable. Yes: they didn't do it for the first time, and yes, they knew very well the cable was there. US Prowlers were often seen flying low and trying to underpass cable cars!

    The pilots unfortunately flew too high and touched the cable with the wing. They flew so fast, they didn't realize they touched. While 20 people where crushing to dead, the pilots loughed in their video. The video they wanted to show later to their friends to demonstrte how much courage they had, and how fun it was...

    ...when they landed and heared 20 people were killed, they destroyed the tape.

    See the difference?

    :-(
    Markus Senoner
    --
  • So don't besurprised that in the future the sun will be eclipsed every other minute given our society is paranoid enought to cover the skies with them.
  • Let's see, Iridium has lofted approximately 200 communications satellites (presumably they don't have cameras on them, but I haven't gone up and checked...), and they're just one company. There are thousands of satellites in orbit, and many are in *geosynchronous* orbit (that means they orbit over one place, NY City, for example) because they're expected to be there 24-7 for a specific purpose (usualy comm relays). If private telcom industry can loft hundreds of satellites, the US government or a private security firm can also loft enough satellites to cover the US with 1m resolution imaging cameras.

    Now, if you use the "excess" bandwidth of the whole slew of communications satellites in orbit to send the images constantly down to a sufficiently powerful server farm (hey, you could run it on Linux! ;-> ) then all you need to do is have the images properly tagged for time and place, and you have a database of continuous, or near-continuous (1-10 second frame delays wouldn't make much difference) video footage of the US (or Europe, or wherever) which is keyed on GPS coordinates and time. All you need to do to find the footage you want is to look it up in the database by its (GPS, time) coordinates...

    So if good guy claims he was at the Yankees game while bad guy was shooting someone on the Great Lawn in Central Park, just punch up those two locations and look for your guys (you'll have many thousands of frames to check through, but so what?). Hopefully they're looking up, or you can identify them by the tops of their heads (unless, of course, you're taking your images at the "right" angle for each meter), but other than that... you can find the meter you're looking for rather easily...

    This is all bad. This is definate Big Brother stuff, and additionally, even if the imaging is of rather poor quality and your face is difficult to see (and there is certainly feature enhancement software to clear things up if the image is shot at an angle preserves enough information to do so), the Gov't have a way of convincing juries that what they say is a picture of you IS a picture of you, because "pictures don't lie"...

    For all their good, powerful computers definately are presenting the possibility of a Panoptical surveliance society. Don't worry if you're a good guy, right? Well, that depends on what "good" is... What if you're a Communist or Pacifist or other "political undesirable" at an anti-government rally? What if you just feel like taking a stroll without it being recorded for posterity? Oughtn't that be your right?
    Do the security benefits outweigh the privacy infringement in this case? They do not seem to, frankly...

  • Well, be safe and secure in the fact that there are 5 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, 999 other nekkid butts in the world, nobody gives a rat's ass about yours in particular. How different does yours look from anybody else's?

    And if you wore shorts anyway, what's to stop somebody from photochopping in someone else's nekkid butt onto your picture, if they wanted a picture of your nekkid butt that badly?

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
  • The ability for the general public to take satillight photo's. With limits of course (no nude beaches etc etc..), but a place where you could plunk down $50 or so for a sat. photo of whatever you like, that would be great! Or even better a website :)

    my $0.02

    - Jimmy

  • Very bad example. (Score:5)

    by Jon Peterson ( 1443 ) <jonNO@SPAMsnowdrift.org> on Tuesday September 21, 1999 @08:47PM (#1668252) Homepage
    Well, they give the example that the system was used to help the 'good guy' USAF pilot who killed a number of skiers by flying so low he cut the cable wires of the gondola. I'm so glad he got off.

    The accident obviously had nothing to do with the fact the maps the USAF had were so old they didn't even show the ski lift.

    All pilots suffer from many kinds of illusion and distortion. That's why they learn to trust their instruments and not their instincts. It may well have looked as though his plane was high above the mountain side, but that's not an excuse. "Sorry officer, I didn't know I was doing 50mph in an urban zone when I killed the school kids - with this new car it felt like 25 mph!". Yeah right, good excuse.

    For those in the U.S. who may never have heard this story, people in Europe were deeply upset at the high handed way the US military handled this. They basically said "oh, whoops, sorry, accidents happen". Disgraceful, and using this dubious incident to promote the technology is a massive faux pas to anyone in Europe. The pilot should have been found guilty, and the US authorities should have been diciplined for having such outdated maps.

    Rather like the maps of Belgrade....

  • ..but I'm a little freaked out by this. Does this mean that there is no place outside, not under cover, that is considered private? What if I like to walk around butt nekkid in my backard, watering the azaleas? Don't I have the right to do so without fear of being on Hard Copy?

    dshahin
  • If declassified civilian stuff does this, you know the intelligence community can read the name off a football jersey... Scary stuff--wait until the FBI gets its hands on high-res satellite access for watching high-profile suspects. The only real obstacle to perfect resolution of anything larger than a matchbook is atmospheric interference, and with greater computational ability comes the ability to write super-accurate compensation algorithms--take a few hundred or even a few thousand frames, each blurry as hell but in a slightly different way, and you can create a very accurate single image. I give it ten years til the FBI uses satellite imaging in a high-profile case against someone it really, really wants to nail.

  • Wondering... (Score:4)

    by flamingdog ( 16938 ) on Tuesday September 21, 1999 @09:06PM (#1668255) Homepage
    How can this possibly be useful? It would have to be pointed directly at whatever it wanted to photograph. Therefore, it would have to KNOW when someone is committing a crime in order to take a picture of the innocent person as proof. Also, 1 meter resolution? How are they going to be able to use that as proof? You could be mistaken for a large animal very easily. Also, back to the sattelite pointing at a precise moment, I think that would be more incriminating to have that picture taken (Hmmm...if this guy didn't know about the crime taking place at that exact same time, why did he have this made as proof he didnt at the exact same time?) that to not have it...

    Another thing that bothers me, its called orbit. If this thing is in orbit, that means its only going to be over top of certain places at certain times of the day. Which means they'll need a lot of them to actually have coverage. This also bothered me in "Enemy of the State". It appeared they used the exact same sattelite every time....

    If I'm wrong about the part above, would someone please politely correct me.

    ---------------------------
    "I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
  • Have you encountered , the Bradford Robotic Telescope thing?
    Admittedly it points in the wrong direction altogether for the nudey beaches, but you can still get one or two pretty pictures out of it, and at the last count, even schedule jobs for it to do too :)

  • Not much of a problem... (Score:3)

    by anthonyclark ( 17109 ) on Tuesday September 21, 1999 @09:10PM (#1668257)
    Hmmm,

    Considering how much the average /. user ventures outside, I think that any paranoia about this is system is, well, rather silly?

    Wait for the 1mm resolution radar imager that can see inside houses, then start worrying ;-)


  • Oops, URL is http://www.telescope.org/rti/ .
  • This isn't a flame, (but),

    Enemy of the State wasn't a documentary, dude.

    However, I'd agree that most Hollywood flicks nowadays need more than the usual amount of belief suspension.
  • With a resolution of 1 meter, I don't think nude beaches would be a problem :)

    The real problem is taking photo's of "sensitive" areas IMHO. I've heard of a company that made underwater maps of the ocean near the coasts that were so detailed, that they were found to be dangerous to national security (however, from what I heard someone in the government got a contract with them, though they couldn't seel them to anyone else)

    What type of controls are going to be setup to prevent someone from buying photos of nuclear silo sites or army bases? Foreign governments have their own spy satellites by now most likely, but does anyone think the some branch of the government might get a little antsy about this? (Though I predict very soon that the tabloids will have a new "Jesus seen in snow bank" series of articles soon)

  • What's new about the satellites? (Score:3)

    by foul ( 89373 ) on Tuesday September 21, 1999 @09:14PM (#1668261) Homepage
    It's been possible for some years now to obtain 2-meter hi-res imaging data via SPIN-2, imagery taken with the russian sat Cosmos gone commercial. Check out http://www.spin-2.com/ [spin-2.com]

    Orbimage [orbimage.com] is also a global provider of satellite-delivered Earth imagery services with a planned constellation of five digital remote sensing satellites. They will launch 2 1-meter res. sats next year.

  • I wondered how long it was going to be before someone started using satellite imaging for personal purposes. I mean, international spying is one thing, but getting the "big picture" about domestic events such as car wrecks and the like is something that (some) people will pay good money for.

    I just want to know how long before I can use the thing to find out if my girlfriend is cheating on me.

    -davek

  • I realise this is OT, but it galls me to see this event used as if everyone recognised that the verdict was just, and to see this event used as promotion of a commercial product.

    If you care, here's a link to CNN info on it all.

    http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/04/marines.cablecar.0 3/
  • I think you misunderstood. These 1-meter res images will b used to provide a simulation of the environment at which something (accident, murder, whatever) has taken place. It might prove useful to influence jury members by presenting them the surroundings from a certain perspective (probably the defendant's, hehe)

  • does w/ "caller id" - one person pays the company to collect possible evidence (caller ID), the suspect pays the company to keep it secret (caller ID block) - thus they can collect fee's from both parties and keep the status quo.

    Chuck
  • Don't worry about the resolution. Ordinary US/RUSSIAN/[INSERT COUNTRY] spy-sats have 1-2 feet resolution, that's about diffraction limited (ie you just need bigger mirrors for improved resolution). Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but even if it did, you cant compute the interference away (because you have to know the exact interference to deconvolve it... basic image processing). Just statistics is certainly not enuff. The solution is active optics, such as used in the new eso [eso.org] VLT telescopes. But bringing active optics into space.... hmmm, think not, for now.

    Ivo

  • terraserver (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    www.terraserver.com

  • Re:Yes and no. Such algorithms exist... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course bigger mirrors=greater resolution, but only up to the point that atmospheric interference means you cannot gain greater clarity. But I think you make a mistake when you say: >Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but >even if it did, you cant compute the >interference away (because you have to know the >exact interference to deconvolve it... basic >image processing). Just statistics is certainly >not enuff. Statistics are not enough, but accurate algorithms which take into account various factors causing differences in hundreds or thousands of images will definitely yield an image of greater resolution and accuracy. I'll spare the mathematical details, but it should be rather intuitive (and common sense would hold true here). To show the intuitiveness of this without delving into graduate level mathematics: when a human being sees a blurry or distorted image (particularly of the sort produced by satellite), he can usually pick out most of the deviations from an "ideal" clear image instantly. A trained FLIR operator, especially. If you can design a complex set of computational algorithms to mimic this "instant recognition" and image correction on the part of human beings, which is really based just on a set of optical "norms" and generic rules we've grown accustomed to, then you can effectively increase resolution particularly if your algorithms can look for "optically correct" data across a large set of images. It's by no means "simple programming," but I'd be shocked if the NSA/CIA/military hasn't already spent several million developing the code and implementing it on supercomputer.
  • They did it already (the endzone thing). You can clearly read "Packers" in Lambeau field, Green Bay, WI. Gee, wonder where I live...?

    But seriously, this has to be one of the coolest things I've seen microsoft come up with. Or at least host...

    Dirk
  • I just went in the front yard and mooned the Man. Woo Hoo! Anytime I want! Now thats Democracy!

  • Re:Very bad example. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This was indeed a very bad example. And it was reported incompletely.

    Not only, that the maps were totally outdated, not only that this was not the first incident (people in the town repeatedly had complained about too low flying US pilots). No, the author Daniel Sorid also forgot to mention that the "good guy" who killed 20 civilians had deliberately destroid the video taping of his on-board camera after the fligh.

    Cynically, after the taped evidence was gone, an "optical issusion simulation" was made up for $25.000+ bugs. A clever idea if you have no honour.

    The author also forgot to mention that US government refused to pay adequate compensation to the relatives of the killed - they were only foreigeners, you know... Making up a $25.000 "illusion simulation" was definitely cheaper than opening the wallet. It was definitely cheap "justice".

    Would US citicens have been killed there wouldn't have been an "illusion simulation", but some serious ass-kicking regarding the responsibles. But for the foreigners the jury of "honorable" officers didn't care at all.
  • I have been working in the (micro/mini!) satellite environment for some years now and I'll try to comment on your quite valid question: How can this possibly be useful? ...

    As someone in one of the threads replied the application as stated in the article is for post-evaluation of an incident so I won't dwell on that.

    You are quite right that the satellite will only be covering a certain area at a certain time - all dependant on the orbit... As some of you may be aware, a satellite (or any object orbiting the earth) has an orbit period determined by its altitude. The higher the altitude - the longer it takes to orbit the earth. Some figures: a typical LEO (Low Earth orbit) satellite at an altitude of about 800km will have an orbit period of approximately 100 minutes. Geo-stationary satellites on the other hand has a 24 hour orbit period but has to be at a very high altitude - 35786 km to be precise!

    To get back to the point. For high resolution imaging you would like to be as close as possible to earth. Obviously this will bring the complexity and cost of your optics down - and believe me, it is expensive! But you have to consider that a LEO implies a fast orbit with some advantages and disadvantages.

    A LEO orbit (600-1200km) has the advantage that the satellite's footprint will cover most of the earth in approximately 12 hours. As you need daylight for good imaging, your coverage (for imaging at least) goes up to 24 hours in practice. Allowing for good weather you can see the problem for a quick turnaround time for images e.g. car pile up example stated in the article.

    Even a constellation of imaging satellites may proof to be impractical, you'll need quite a few satellites ($$$) to have an image within a few hours. In a previous /. article [slashdot.org] about this 1m resolution imager (Ikonos) you'll notice that they claim to have the image ready within 30 minutes. What they don't say is that they'll have it ready in 30 minutes after the image has been captured. Impossible to take the image of a certain target within 30 minutes of requesting it!!

    IMHO visual forensics (using satellite imaging) will only be practical if the 'crime scene' stay's the way it is for a prolonged time. I can't imagine rescue services waiting for hours until an imaging satellite comes over the horizon before clearing up the debris!!

    If you're interested please visit my company's homepage [sstl.co.uk] for some earth observation images taken with our LEO satellites over the years. Please note we're not close to 1m resolution - currently 30m multi-spectral and a 10m b/w experimental imager.

    I'll be happy to answer more questions if anyone's is interested.

    ...by the pricking of my thumbs,

  • There is a type of satellite that will stay above a particular point on the earth's surface. It is called a geo-stationary satelite, and it is in a geo-stationary orbit.

    Basically, the time for the satellite to orbit the earth is 24 hours, which is obviously the same amount of time for the earth to rotate once. Consequently the satellite stays above the same point.


    As far as I am aware this occurs when the satellite is at a specific distance from the earths surface. ie. All satellites at this distance would take one day to orbit.


    Finally, the idea was initially conceived by Arthur C. Clarke.



    But the satellite is still only available for a certain area... I suppose they'll just stick it over the US where all of the high profile, rich criminals are.

    Kintanon
  • Had a conversation with my insurance agent a couple of weeks ago and he told me a story about a guy who reported his boat stolen. It was a rather large boat somewheres in Florida, I beleive. After he called it in stolen the insurance company called one of the sattelite tracking companies and on the next pass by one of their sattelites of his property, click a picture. The picture was taken the day after the claim was filed, and lo and behold the boat was still on his property. In jail now for insurance fraud.

  • Not only that, did this make the "bad guys" to be the people who died in the accident? Yeah. They got what was coming to them, trying to hurt the career of a US military pilot. Bastards.

    That brings up the problem with courtroom simulation (whether based on satillite data or otherwise): they're simulations. They leave out facts. Facts that could be important to the case (like the fact that the pilot's altimeter told him he wasn't climbing). A little bit of technical gee-whiz can cover up a whole lot of truth.

    What's particularly galling in this case is that the simulation was necessary because the pilot destroyed the cockpit videotape that would have shown the jury what he saw. In particular, it would have shown clearly that while the mountain was apparently receding, the HUD display would have told him he was too low.

    And, at $25,000 a pop for the defense, who do you think will really benefit from the technology? Think big bucks. Think OJ. It won't benefit your average defendant.

    I wonder if, ultimately, taxes paid for the defense of the pilot. That would add insult to injury.

  • Bullsh*t The best possible resolution in the 80's was just getting under one meter. Current typical resolution available to certain agencies from the KH-12 series of satellites is around 10 cm. Even this will not let you identify faces. However, this 10 cm resolution can be accomplished with visible near infrared and thermal imaging all in real time. Additionally multispectral analysis can be performed to pull out signatures of objects revealing more information than simple pictures can provide.
  • This is a very common technique. With commonly achievable resolutions down around 10cm in real time with visible, IR near IR, thermal modes available. Additionally, multispectral analysis allows one to pull out significantly more information than is available with "photo's"
  • Wait for the 1mm resolution radar imager that can see inside houses, then start worrying ;-)


    Yeah.. and then get one of those polarized screens for your monitor, and lock your bathroom door, and...


    ;-)


    Of course, as we know, that wouldn't work, unless you lived in a glass house, because of annoying things like solid walls, doors, etc, etc...


    Just wait til you start getting fibre optic cameras placed in, say, the ambiguous looking microphone "holes" on those computers that have them built in, so forth and so on.


    Or, just do something really rambuncious (sp?) anyway, so they'll _really_ have something work looking at... ;-)
  • 10 cm is typical achievable resolution from the latest KH-12 series.
  • How could you trust someone like that? If that service is actually used they must have a huge amount of dirt on their customers. After a year or 2 of doing this they could turn and charge 10 times as much to divulge what they did a few years ago. Scary.
  • If we had a massive parrallel database of images that covered 90% of the earth at a resolution of 10 CM (sorry no nipples), and if the image was refreshed twice a second what would be the storage requirement? Would we be able to use a Linux system to roam the image?
  • There is a type of satellite that will stay above a particular point on the earth's surface. It is called a geo-stationary satelite, and it is in a geo-stationary orbit.

    Basically, the time for the satellite to orbit the earth is 24 hours, which is obviously the same amount of time for the earth to rotate once. Consequently the satellite stays above the same point.

    As far as I am aware this occurs when the satellite is at a specific distance from the earths surface. ie. All satellites at this distance would take one day to orbit.

    Finally, the idea was initially conceived by Arthur C. Clarke.

    Polite enough I hope *smiles*.

  • If it is over 1 metre you deserve to be on Hard Copy... :)

    (Sorry couldn't resist)
  • If you only show up as a diffuse shadow.. what purpose does this have in identifying people? I mean, what good is a photo of an ambiguous shadow in a court of law?

  • Because if it does, it would be great to find out exactly how I managed to get home from the pub last Saturday night! :)

  • I'm sure that's the best civillian res we get to use, but...

    There was a project called 'keyhole' from memory where it was claimed that a satellite could read a number plate on the ground. Don't recall how substatiated the rumors were though. Still, that's a fair resolution considering all the atmoshpere the light has to go through.
  • OK sure that could be a problem. However the moment you requested an image of a 'sensitive' area you would be reported to the NSA or Secret Service or whoever is in charge of the nation security of whatever country you were looking at. Assuming the operators of the satillite are reputable (and haveing the resources and cash to put up a satillite they had better be).

    There isn't anything from stopping the ppl who have access to these satillites from looking at whever they want right now, except for government restrictions they may have placed on them. The same restrictions would be placed on anyone useing Earth-imageing satillites and selling custom images.

    Note: when I said 'website' I ment a website where you could place an order of sorts and they would send you either a high res print or image file.

    It would still be damn cool to get a nice image of my City, or even my house :)

    - Jimmy
  • From the Slashdot article:

    [...]sticking it to the bad guys and keep the good guys out of trouble

    I like the way a similar sentence is used every time some sort of surveillance system is introduced. I bet they said this for Echelon too.

    In my mind, that's Govspeech for, 'Spying on everyone so if you've got nothing to fear, you won't mind. Right?!?'

    This system is used to spot crimes happening, not to solve them. As such, it's actually a backward investigation idea backed by modern technology. In the late 1800's, the length of a police investigation was to catch the criminal in the act again. Modern investigation techniques have led to an in-depth investigation with the help of, for instance, DNA analysis.

    Compare DNA analysis with satellite surveillance: one is used to identify a potential suspect, the other is used to catch a criminal red-handed. One is performed on you when you are a possible suspect already, the other is used whether you commited a crime or not. There is a hell of a difference, and while the first one speaks of the marvels of modern forensics, the last one makes me cry out 'Big Brother!'

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • ...lets all go out to our nearest football field and use fertilizer to burn the message:

    BIG BROTHER GO AWAY!!!

    Seriously...this is too much like Enemy of the State for me. Not that the government can't already spy on me as a sneak a quick nose pick in the backyard but...isn't this a private company?

    I don't want some punk kid working at Visual Forensics as a $10/hour contractor getting to surf my life on his lunch hour as easily as I may surf the web...

    My $0.02, not necessarily yours...

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • What is the maximum resolution for satelites?
  • The whole privacy/security issue was a big deal when the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor was launched. A number of countries were very concerned. That's part of why the TM sensor has a 30m resolution. The government felt that at this resolution, the military utility was diminished. Hasn't been much disscussion about this with these new satellites.

    It is important to realize how much privacy is being invaded both online and off, most the time without the public even realizing it is happening.

    There is a possible upside though. There was some discussion a while ago this could dramatically change news reporting in times of war. For example, in the Gulf War, the news agencies wouldn't be dependent on the filtered military briefings. You can have access to almost real time imagery of the action.

    This will probably never happen though. There's probably some clause that lets the goverment black out certain areas for national security purposes. Even so, it could make the government more accountable since the data will exist and could be reviewed by the public after the fact.
  • Apologies, the images on the web site are mostly 50m resolution images taken by our micro-satellites. The 30m and better images are not yet available on the official page. But you'll find some of the processed images (be warned, some are huge!!) here. [sstl.co.uk]

    Note that most of these are NIR red, green false-colour images - i.e. red regions are grass/vegetation and the light blue is the built up areas.

    My favourite is the one image of Washington DC [sstl.co.uk] and surrounding area captured in July, clearly showing the White House, Jefferson Memorial and National Mall leading to the US Capitol.

    These are all JPG's - if you have the bandwidth to burn you can download the bitmaps here. [sstl.co.uk]

    ...by the pricking of my thumbs,

  • On top of other problems people have noted with geostationary satellites, they must remain over the equator. This means that you cannot have a geostationary satellite directly over any U.S. city. You can have one directly south of a major U.S. city, but you will always get your views from an angle.

    If I want to hide from a geostationary satellite, I just need to stay a few feet north of a building, even single-story. In a big city, you shouldn't be able to see the streets beneath the skyscrapers.

  • Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just pay the bloke a new boat, instead of retasking a satalite and then paying out the court fees... (or maybe, they could've just sent an investigator out to his house....)
  • Well, to hell with privacy I guess.. Everyone wave at the camera.. ;-P

    I wonder if anyone who can't afford the 24k$ figure will ever try to subpena (sp?) the data, to get around having to pay to see if they have any evidence.. ;-P
  • You think this is amazing news? The DOD and CIA have been able to do this for YEARS now. Heck, I wouldn't be suprised if they have managed to get the resolution down to 3" by now.
  • 1 meter I belive....

    - Jimmy
  • The problem with geostationary satellites is that while they stay at the same spot (viewed from earth), they must keep the specific distance you were talking about, which is > 30000 km. At that distance, you can broadcast television signals, but you can't have the same level of detail as from a satellite that is in an orbit only a couple of hundred kilometers. That's why there usually is a 'time frame' of some minutes for satellites that fly low and are designed for spying into people's backyards (the exact time frame should be dependent on the distance from earth I guess, the higher it is positioned, the longer you can observe the same spot).
  • I can just hear how it would go:

    If not enough resolution

    you must grant absolution

    If the rays don't meet
    the case is beat

    from the image bits
    return your aquits

    - Seth Finkelstein
  • you know the intelligence community can read the name of a football jersey...

    Sorry, but if you were in my position, could you resist? That line is funny for so many reasons...
    (No offence intended :P)

    M

  • From the article:

    For $25,000, you could hire Visual Forensics to help defend you from charges that you caused a multi-car pile-up [...]

    Erm, so, does this mean that this satellite is going to be gathering an archive of video footage of the entire planet, for ever and ever?

    Might there not be some mild privacy concerns here?

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