Spy Satellites Evolve Into Private Eye in the Sky

Since January, John Pike has been taking his own satellite pictures of the world’s most secret military bases and then making them public on the Internet.

The images and the debate they have provoked are an experiment in the high technology of democracy, for anyone now can share a view from orbit once reserved solely for those with the highest of superpower security clearances.

Like the fax machine, pirate radio and encrypted e-mail, the commercial imaging satellite is becoming a tool of grass-roots political action.

Pike, an owlish policy wonk with a derisive drawl and a horselaugh, is producing detailed vistas of the classified landscape: a nuclear weapons plant in India, a plutonium production facility in Pakistan, military airfields on the China coast, a missile base in North Korea, even the infamous Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nev.--perhaps the most restricted military reservation in the Americas.

Not so many years ago, any one of those pictures might have landed him in jail.

Today, however, Pike makes each new image public with impunity on an Internet site maintained by the Federation of American Scientists, where he works.

Indeed, the way private surveillance satellites are being linked to the Internet is more than an electronic convenience. It is the inevitable next step in an information revolution that with dizzying speed is transforming what we can know about our world and who controls that knowledge.

With as many as 11 companies in five countries planning to launch private imaging satellites in the next few years, it is only a matter of time and market competition before anyone can afford to see just about anything on Earth at any time, no matter what the weather--with little more than a home computer and a ready credit card.

That is a radical departure from the decades of secrecy shrouding U.S. and Russian surveillance satellites, when even the name of the office that managed U.S. intelligence satellites was classified. The U.S. government did not loosen its national security restrictions enough to permit the launch of such sharp commercial eyes in space until 1994.

Not until this year--when the first of those new privately owned, high-resolution imaging satellites actually became operational--did such crisp pictures from space go on sale.

“The commercial imaging data has fundamentally changed things,” said Vipin Gupta, a senior systems analyst who specializes in satellite imaging at Sandia National Laboratories.

“Not only are the skies open but the data can be disseminated to anyone at a market price. You are opening up possibilities on how these images can be used in ways that defy imagination.”

They can make everyone an eyewitness in a world in which anyone--not just Big Brother--can be watching.

Seeing 3-Foot-Square Objects From 423 Miles

Pike buys his images from a privately owned satellite called Ikonos, launched by Space Imaging in Thornton, Colo., last September, the first private, high-resolution imaging satellite to reach orbit safely.

The clarity of its images rivals the best the military can command. Anyone can buy images from its picture archive--growing by 23,000 square miles of new territory every day--through the firm’s Web site at https://www.spaceimaging.com/.

From 423 miles above Earth, the Kodak camera aboard Ikonos can peer through fog and haze and into shadows to detect objects on the ground as little as 3 feet square--twice the resolution of any other commercially available satellite imagery.

Indeed, Ikonos is sharper than the secret satellites used to safeguard U.S. national security at the height of the Cold War and about one-tenth as sharp as the most advanced government photoreconnaissance satellites today, several arms control experts said.

And in the next month or so, a federal advisory panel is expected to decide whether companies should be allowed to sell satellite imagery twice as sharp as currently allowed.

“By 2003 all the countries and companies involved are claiming they will have a system equivalent to ours on orbit,” said John R. Copple, Space Imaging’s chief executive.

By that time, Copple plans to be launching an imaging satellite able to produce color images with a resolution of about 19 inches--twice that of the Ikonos in orbit today. Doubling the resolution means that the resulting pictures will be four times easier to interpret, Pike said.

Already, the new generation of commercial imaging satellites is eroding every nation’s sense of privacy.

The satellite images offer ways to second-guess governments, blur national borders and rearrange a host of relationships that until now depended on the ability to hide things--even entire cities--from the public’s prying eyes.

Even from orbit, a photograph of an unguarded moment can speak volumes.

For example, U.S. government satellite images of newly dug mass graves in Kosovo and Bosnia have been used to call attention to possible war crimes, showing that human rights abuses can be detected from orbit.

“It is sort of like visual truth serum,” said Space Imaging Vice President Marc Bender.

Commercial satellite imaging eventually promises to transform everything from arms control and human rights investigations to environmental monitoring and pollution control, several satellite experts said.

“There are a whole bunch of non-government groups who are trying to do this,” said Ann M. Florini, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace on commercial satellite policy. “There are enormous potential applications in environmental issues and in humanitarian relief.”

Eco-activists could use the satellites to monitor destructive logging practices, mining operations and remote construction projects as easily and inexpensively as emergency planners can use them to map storm damage and flood debris.

In California, some environmentalists already have started ordering Ikonos images.

The Center for Natural Lands Management is using the satellite to monitor the habitat of an endangered lizard that lives among the sand dunes of the 20,000-acre Coachella Valley Preserve north of Palm Springs. An environmental consulting firm is using the satellite to gauge the impact of land development between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

It is only a matter of time, Gupta said, before networks of amateur Earth watchers spring up and use the new satellites to systematically monitor the planet from orbit, routinely posting their discoveries on the Web, just as thousands of amateur astronomers today systematically scan the heavens for new comets.

A Way to Verify Government Claims

When Space Imaging announced it was ready to start selling Ikonos images in January, John Pike was among the first in line.

As a matter of business planning, company executives expected their $750-million corporate gamble on orbital imaging would be repaid by customers in agriculture, urban planning, insurance and a range of other areas that depend on detailed mapping. They expected their best customer to be the federal government and foreign governments that could not afford to launch their own satellites.

The company began the year with a backlog of orders for Ikonos images totaling about $15 million, mostly from commercial customers and NASA. Unwilling to disclose more specific sales figures, company officials said that new orders for images so far were strong--at up to $5,000 apiece to commission each new view. Customers have been divided equally between companies and foreign governments.

Sales to the U.S. government so far have been slow, Copple said. Earlier this year, the Defense Department vowed to increase government spending on commercial space images by 800% over the next five years, but that promise has yet to make its way into a federal budget appropriation.

But the most public application of the Ikonos images so far has been to serve as a check on government pronouncements in the global game of nuclear bluff and bluster.

It is a topic of special interest to the Federation of American Scientists, a policy think tank that was founded by members of the Manhattan Project who produced the first atomic bomb.

Over the decades, it has tried to act as a knowledgeable, independent voice in debates over the science and technology of global security. Like so many groups that challenge government policies, it frequently is handicapped by official secrecy.

So, Pike and his colleagues at the federation’s Public Eye Project regarded the ability to commission their own spy satellite images of secret bases with something resembling glee.

Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, they have spent $50,000 since the beginning of the year on orbital images depicting secret sites in China, South Africa, Pakistan, India, Iraq, the United States and North Korea.

“Each image was a revelation,” Pike said.

What Pike and his colleagues could see from orbit--for as little as $500 an image--sometimes confirmed, sometimes confounded the official pronouncements about international military threats and potential arms control violations.

While many experts disagreed on what the facilities in the pictures mean, anyone in the world now can look at them via the Internet at https://www.fas.org/ and join the argument.

“It makes all the debates on these issues two-sided,” said USC international law expert Edwin M. Smith, who until recently was a consultant to the U.S. undersecretary for arms control and international security affairs.

Interpreting the Photos Takes Some Expertise

The governments whose secrets Pike has put on public display by and large have kept their own counsel. But some arms control analysts dismiss his efforts as the work of an ill-informed amateur who does not know enough to properly interpret what the satellite is showing him.

“They don’t know what they are doing,” said Jeffrey Richelson, a satellite expert at the private National Security Archive, which monitors intelligence issues.

“A lot of their analysis is just half-baked.”

When it comes to satellite images, it is hard to know just when to believe the evidence of your eyes, several experts acknowledged. There is a history of mistakes.

In 1998, for example, Newsweek magazine published a satellite image that purported to be an Indian nuclear test site. But what Newsweek identified as the hole left by a nuclear blast actually was an animal pen, said Florini of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

But for those who do know what to look for, the Ikonos photos are easy enough to interpret, said nuclear weapons expert Frank von Hippel at Princeton University, a former national security advisor in the Clinton administration.

He just paid $500 for his first Ikonos image--a close-up of the two plutonium production reactors at the Indian nuclear weapons complex.

“I was interested to see that cooling water was flowing from the reactors, indicating they were operating,” von Hippel said.

The biggest stir, by all accounts, is among those least likely to make their complaints public--the operators of the U.S. intelligence satellites, for whom such telling views from orbit have until now been their own exclusive specialty.

They are most upset that such images--although perfectly legal under U.S. and international law--are public at all.

“John Pike has stirred a hornet’s nest,” said Florini. “There is an awful lot of complaining going on in the defense and the intelligence communities. They think they can still control the imagery somehow.”

To be sure, in some key ways they still do.

By law, the U.S. secretary of state and the secretary of commerce retain the right to exercise “shutter control.” They can temporarily shut down any U.S. commercial imaging satellites in the name of national security, to shield military maneuvers or at the request of an ally.

And by order of Congress, Ikonos and all other American commercial satellites must deliberately coarsen any images taken over Israel to blur the details of military facilities there. That restriction will remain until a foreign satellite company offers sharper images on the open market.

Imagery from French and Indian imaging satellites is commercially available. So are pictures from Russian intelligence satellites.

But none of those satellites so far offers images as crisp as the Ikonos pictures.

The Russian government, however, is expected to offer satellite photographs as sharp as the Ikonos images beginning next month, several U.S. experts said.

Russian satellite images are marketed by the Soyuzkarta company. They are available internationally through several firms, including the Terraserver Web site at https://www.terraserver.com/, which claims the largest online atlas of high-resolution satellite imagery and aerial photography.

This month, Pike is seeking satellite photographs of secret nuclear bases in Israel and Iran, to help settle the question of whether the nations are building nuclear weapons.

If the congressional restriction prevents Space Imaging from selling high-resolution Ikonos pictures of Israel, Pike hopes the Russians will offer them.

When Space Imaging was unusually slow to sell Ikonos images of Area 51 earlier this year, detailed Russian images of the U.S. base quickly appeared on the market.

In the meantime, Pike is feeling a backlash.

Last week, Space Imaging hiked the cost of publication rights for its satellite pictures for smaller academic journals and nontraditional media groups like Pike’s.

To reprint the Ikonos images that accompany this article, The Los Angeles Times was charged $500 for each of them.

Public policy groups like the Federation of American Scientists and academic researchers had been charged the same rate. Now they will have to pay $1,000 to reprint any Ikonos image of U.S. territory and $2,000 for each image of foreign terrain.

Pike believes the price hike, which will force him to cancel orders for images of Chinese and Indian missile facilities as well as an Iranian nuclear complex, is in response to the publicity generated by his online, political use of the satellite pictures.

The high prices can silence a critic as effectively as more traditional government censorship, Pike said.

But executives at Space Imaging said they are not trying to muzzle anyone, nor has the U.S. government pressured them to do so. They are only tightening existing pricing restrictions to maintain their profit margin.

“We didn’t launch this satellite for public policy,” said Copple at Space Imaging. “We did this because there was a market and a benefit to our investors. You don’t see a lot of emerging companies give away things for free in their start-up phase.”

Certainly, commercial imaging companies have no obligation to ensure that images serving humanitarian aims or broadening a political debate are easily available, experts said.

“Who is going to see to it that this kind of imagery gets used for the public good?” Florini said. “That is not the responsibility of the private companies.”