‘This Is Ridiculous’

Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton) has resigned from the House Intelligence Committee on one count of principle and many counts of practice. If he gets what he wants, it will almost make up for the loss to the committee of one of the more thoughtful members of Congress.

The principle involves a double standard to which members of the committee are held. Magazines have published photographs and descriptions of a U.S. spy satellite, the KH-11, the Soviet Union bought an operating manual for it 10 years ago, and newspapers recently reported the launching of the newest version into orbit. But, under the rules, Brown is not supposed to say KH-11 out loud. “This is ridiculous, and I’m tired of it,” he said.

The practice is official Washington’s dread of disclosure, so strong that it would rather let foreign nations forge ahead in a field that the United States created, photographing Earth from space for commercial use, than show anyone what its best satellites can do. The Soviet Union, he says, is selling photographs taken from space sharp enough to pick out objects roughly 15 feet long. The only American photographs available to land surveyors, geologists looking for promising places to explore for oil and others come from the Landsat and are good only for defining objects of nearly 100 feet in length or more.

That is a far cry from the best of U.S. satellites, which, it is alternately claimed and denied, can deliver a photograph so sharp that you can read the numbers on an automobile license plate.

Satellite technology is not the only area in which excessive secrecy keeps America from competing in the things that it does best, but it is the one that Brown took on years before he joined the Intelligence Committee.

As he saw it, either he could stop talking about the satellites or he could get off the committee and out from under the rules of secrecy that silenced him.

In the federal city, who you are often is measured by what you know. Giving up a seat on the Intelligence Committee takes either guts or outrage at the system, or some combination of both. Brown obviously has enough of both to make up for the shortages of either that are so obvious in Washington these days.