Governments no longer operate all the best spy sats in the sky: What this means in terms of geopolitical "hot spots": less privacy but also backup

In 2017. Trump released classified surveillance photos in Lebanon which gave acute heartburn for analysts from Tel Aviv, to Langley Virginia and above, as the resolution in 2017 of the classified photos were an order of magnitude better than what the commercial variants were doing at the time. Needless to say, with some of the military surveillance being bundled into multi billion USD platforms, the emergence of commercial platforms means that when one is not tasked to read the license plates of trucks, and the like, the commercial backup would still be precise enough to, say if one wanted to get a look see over Crimea in the current war, to use commercial platforms to confirm what other data from the classified collection systems. One could get the enhanced confirmation without risking loosing a multi billion USD platform.

In a word, redundancy and all that would be bought at a fraction of the price of the military systems, which costs billions of USD.

See this quote

Several expert analysts interviewed by?IEEE Spectrum?agree that the rise of affordable and easily accessible commercial satellite imagery played a role in?Biden’s early release of U.S. intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

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I.e. the cost of relative disclosure is going down, And in some respects this move could really enhance global security and cut down on Russian Federation Strongman gas lighting, The flip side to this is seen in

Quote

But commercial start-up companies are offering ways to cheaply cover much of the world, relieving the workload from the most important government satellites.

End of quote

As an example, the existence of Russian misbehavior could be far more easily released than before as even wealthy individuals could by sensitive (but not overly detailed images) information which could blunt the constant gaslighting by the Russian Federation.

See this article:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/commercial-satellite-imagery-national-security162

QUOTE

Commercial Satellites Are National Security’s Next Frontier? Governments no longer operate all the best spy sats in the sky

NATASHA BAJEMA

08 JUN 2022 5 MIN READ

SATELLITE IMAGERY NATIONAL SECURITY COMMERCIAL SATELLITE IMAGES

On 18 February, President Biden, citing U.S. intelligence, announced to the world ?“we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days.” In the months leading up to the invasion in late February, the U.S. intelligence community had been revealing details of?Putin’s war plans ?and disclosing?highly classified real-time intelligence in ?the form of?satellite imagery and providing detailed analysis of the movement of Russian forces .

Even an unsophisticated observer might notice something profoundly new about how we are experiencing major events across the globe today. Rather than waiting for bits of unclassified information revealed during official government briefings, the general public has watched the tragic crisis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfold day by day. Never before have we had access to so much real-time data about an ongoing war initiated by a major power such as Russia. Every day, there are countless images, videos, audio files, data about traffic patterns on Google Maps, and high-resolution satellite imagery being shared over social media.

“In the past, only a handful of countries had access to such exquisite capabilities. Today, if other governments, or even NGOs and individuals, disagree with the information provided by one government, they can release their own imagery to prove their point.”

Matt Korda, senior research associate at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), says the handling of this crisis differs from those in previous decades when “governments still maintained a monopoly on satellite imagery. They could decide whether to disclose particular images, how they wanted to do it, and when they wanted to inform the public about things. That is no longer the case. Today, people can conduct surveillance operations from their own homes.”

Korda has firsthand experience in making major discoveries using commercial satellite imagery about the most closely guarded secrets in the world: nuclear weapons. In July 2021, he and his FAS colleagues uncovered the?existence of more than 200 missile silos under construction in China with satellite imagery, ?shedding new light on the country’s plans for its nuclear forces.

Several expert analysts interviewed by?IEEE Spectrum?agree that the rise of affordable and easily accessible commercial satellite imagery played a role in?Biden’s early release of U.S. intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the?East Asia Nonproliferation Program ?at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., sees the U.S. government’s response to Syria’s August 2013 chemical weapons attack as a point of contrast. “In the wake of that attack,” he says, “the Obama administration provided a written dossier similar to the infamous prewar intelligence briefing on Iraq’s WMD programs in 2003. It was long on words, but short on images and actual data.”

Meanwhile, the general public already had access to “satellite imagery of the war operations in Syria, horrific videos on YouTube, detailed maps and timelines of events, and audio recordings.” Lewis says the sharp contrast between such information and the official dossier released on Syria, “further harmed the credibility of U.S. intelligence.”

This time around, the U.S. government appears to have learned from past mistakes. Lewis says “they’ve grasped that their public strategy had to be different because the expectations of their audience were different. They made falsifiable claims and released commercial satellite imagery to back them up. The government fully expected that civil society would be able to check and verify the claims.”

“Unclassified commercial satellite data acts as an ‘unblinking eye’ and is giving the world access to what was once only held by governments, promoting greater global security and accountability.”

Melissa Hanham , an independent expert on weapons of mass destruction, has built a national security career on analyzing satellite imagery while working at nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). She says each image represents “a moment in time that happened. To determine what might be happening on the ground, we pair satellite imagery with all sorts of open-source data to provide explanations for what you’re seeing. Basically, you’re looking at before and after shots of activities on the Earth’s surface and identifying those that defy known patterns of life.”

Hanham says she’s “hopeful and inspired that the United States is providing actionable intelligence to build trust. This is data that you can share with allies and adversaries alike, and intelligence sources remain protected. Because it’s commercially available, it’s subject to verification by third parties.”

Commercial satellite images, she says, have exerted a powerful equalizing force. “In the past, only a handful of countries had access to such exquisite capabilities,” she says. “Today, if other governments, or even NGOs and individuals, disagree with the information provided by one government, they can release imagery from a commercial provider to prove their point.”

A number of private companies such as?Planet ?and?Capella Space ?are changing the way national-security professionals do business by offering affordable access to high-resolution imagery and having an impact on the ground. Planet says “unclassified commercial satellite data acts as an ‘unblinking eye’ and is giving the world access to what was once only held by governments, promoting greater global security and accountability.”

Planet operates the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, capturing a daily scan of the Earth’s entire surface at a resolution of 3 meters with its?PlanetScope ?constellation of 200 satellites. According to Planet, the company’s SkySat constellation of 21 satellites captures images of ground-level detail down to 50-centimeter-length scale—up to 10 times per day. This unique combination allows customers to monitor changes on the entire surface of the planet and then zoom in on specific points of interest within a single platform.

AI and machine learning “will unlock the potential of geospatial data to everyone—not just the experts.”

Dan Getman, vice president of product at Capella Space, speaks about the advantages of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, which “can provide visibility through all weather conditions—clouds, fog, smoke, rain—and capture clear imagery 24/7, day and night, across the globe.”

As recent as five years ago, SAR imagery was far beyond the reach of most organizations except for advanced intelligence agencies. Today, Capella offers a wide range of commercial customers access to SAR imagery in a 50-cm ground resolution, allowing for identification of specific features and characteristics of objects on the ground.

Customers will be soon able to use AI-enabled analysis of commercial satellite-imagery data to decipher the meaning of subtle changes on the Earth’s surface, including data we are unable to understand with our eyes, to determine specific activities of states or individuals. Lewis says “we’re currently focused on what we look at with our eyes, but we’re entering an era where there’s a ton of nonvisible data, and the way to process that data is going to be with computers.”

Large numbers of satellites in orbit and massive volumes of data will allow machine learning tools to establish a baseline and train the algorithms to detect small changes. According to Planet, advances in AI and machine learning “will unlock the potential of geospatial data to everyone—not just the experts.”

It’s hard to imagine national security ever returning to a world in which governments held all the secrets gathered by their own spy satellite programs. “People are visual learners,” Lewis says. “It’s one thing to be told about a facility and another thing to look at a picture. This is a different way of knowing—the difference between showing and telling. It’s not perfect, but it’s really helpful. And it fundamentally changes how you think.”

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Also

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/politics/intelligence-agencies-commercial-satellites.html

Quote

Intelligence Agencies Pushed to Use More Commercial Satellites

Congress wants the government to turn to the private sector to augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites.

The Senate version of this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act contains provisions to increase spending on commercial satellite programs.Credit...

Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

By?Julian E. Barnes

Published?Sept. 27, 2021

Updated?Oct. 22, 2021

Sign Up for On Politics, for Times subscribers only.??A Times reader’s guide to the political news in Washington and across the nation.?Try the On Politics newsletter for 4 weeks.

WASHINGTON — A cluster of?satellites ?operated by an American company called HawkEye 360 looked down on the Middle East early this year and discovered radar and radio waves associated with a Chinese-based fishing fleet off the coast of Oman.

When the company matched the data up with information from NASA satellites that track light sources on the Earth’s surface, it discovered the vessels were using powerful lights — a telltale sign of squid hunting — as they surreptitiously sailed into Oman’s fishing waters with their tracking transponders turned off.

The surveillance was something of a technological test — in this case the company did not notify either Oman or China. But the work, company officials said, demonstrated the kinds of intelligence that can be gleaned from their satellites, which have also detected military activity on the border between China and India, tracked poachers in Africa for wildlife groups and followed the satellite phones used by smugglers working refugee routes.

With Congress pushing the Biden administration to make more use of commercial satellites, intelligence officials are starting to award new contracts to show they can augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites with the increasingly sophisticated services available from the private sector.

On Monday, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced that it had awarded a $10 million contract to HawkEye 360 to track and map radio frequency emissions around the world, information the company says will help identify weapons trafficking, foreign military activity and drug smuggling.

The contract follows a study contract awarded to the company by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2019.

David Gauthier, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s commercial group, said collecting radio frequency data would help “tip and cue” imagery satellites, in essence telling officials where to look. The commercial data is also unclassified, allowing intelligence agencies to more easily share the data with allies and partners.

The expansion of commercial satellites with greater abilities to peer down at Earth worries some civil liberties experts. The ever-growing number of commercial satellites has eroded privacy, said Steven Aftergood, of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

But the government contracts with commercial satellite companies themselves have not yet drawn much criticism, Mr. Aftergood said, because government satellites are far more powerful, at least for now, than commercial satellites.

The exact capabilities of the government’s satellites are closely guarded secrets. However, during the previous administration, President Donald J. Trump?posted on Twitter a picture of an Iranian launch site ?taken by a classified American satellite that had been included in his intelligence brief. The picture was far more detailed than commercial satellite pictures of the same site.

In some quarters of the intelligence agencies, those lagging commercial capabilities have dampened enthusiasm for pushing forward with more private-sector contracts. But Congress is pushing the intelligence agencies to move faster.

The Senate version of this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act contains provisions to increase spending on commercial satellite programs. While the leadership of intelligence agencies is on board, there is still reluctance in some corners of the agencies to embrace commercial technology, according to congressional aides.

Current and former congressional officials acknowledge that the most exquisite and cutting-edge intelligence technology is still designed and operated by the government. But commercial start-up companies are offering ways to cheaply cover much of the world, relieving the workload from the most important government satellites.

The new intelligence bill, if approved by Congress this year, would set up an innovation fund that should make it easier for the National Reconnaissance Office to purchase more commercial capabilities faster and push the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to experiment more with awarding outside contracts to analyze a variety of imagery.

Mac Thornberry, the former Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee who now sits on the HawkEye advisory board, said part of the problem was a reluctance within the government to use a lesser, but far cheaper, product for intelligence collection and analysis.

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FTR

In 2017. Trump released classified surveillance photos in Lebanon which gave acute heartburn for analysts from Tel Aviv, to Langley Virginia and above, as the resolution in 2017 of the classified photos were an order of magnitude better than what the commercial variants were doing at the time. Needless to say, with some of the military surveillance being bundled into multi billion USD platforms, the emergence of commercial platforms means that when one is not tasked to read the license plates of trucks, and the like, the commercial backup would still be precise enough to, say if one wanted to get a look see over Crimea in the current war, to use commercial platforms to confirm what other data from the classified collection systems. One could get the enhanced confirmation without risking loosing a multi billion USD platform.

In a word, redundancy and all that would be bought at a fraction of the price of the military systems, which costs billions of USD.

See this quote

Several expert analysts interviewed by?IEEE Spectrum?agree that the rise of affordable and easily accessible commercial satellite imagery played a role in?Biden’s early release of U.S. intelligence on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine .

end of quote

I.e. the cost of relative disclosure is going down, And in some respects this move could really enhance global security and cut down on Russian Federation Strongman gas lighting, The flip side to this is seen in

Quote

But commercial start-up companies are offering ways to cheaply cover much of the world, relieving the workload from the most important government satellites.

End of quote

As an example, the existence of Russian misbehavior could be far more easily released than before as even wealthy individuals could by sensitive (but not overly detailed images) information which could blunt the constant gaslighting by the Russian Federation.

Summary

The articles refer to an equalizer effect, diminishing the clout of earlier platforms. I am concentrating upon future relative ease of transmitting of geospatial intelligence to challenge false narratives . This will mean that Putin and his ilk will have to skew toward more authoritarian practices for their countries, but it would be far harder to have this effect in less repressed societies. Needless to say though, this would also lead to multiple invasion of privacy issues, all of which have to be worked out, in an overstressed planet with "instataneous " electronic transferal of information. Will make the future information warfare jousting in future conflicts far more convoluted than in the past

Andrew Beckwith, PhD