Previous Politech messages: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04592.html http://www.politechbot.com/p-04562.html ----- To: politechat_private, gnuat_private Subject: Re: FC: Responses to Pentagon claim about basketball-reading spy gear In-reply-to: <5.1.1.6.0.20030326233334.02719bc0at_private> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:02:50 -0800 From: John Gilmore <gnuat_private> My suspicion is that if there's any truth behind the disinformation, it refers to unmanned aerial surveillance gear (that perhaps transmits images to satellites for relay back to the ground). But even if they have a dozen systems that can read the lettering on a basketball, they can't read the lettering on all the basketballs in the world. Or even all the basketballs in Iraq, or Columbus, Ohio. So what matters is having good judgment about what to look at. And good judgment is where our intelligence bureacracy, and our current political leadership, both have notoriously bad records. The spy agencies didn't predict the end of the Cold War, didn't predict 9/11, didn't predict the information revolution, are drowning in way too much data with little understanding, and resisted the spread of the encryption that barely protects our infrastructures today. Meanwhile the President and his gang are destroying freedom at home, wasting vast resources on third rate tinpot dictators, destabilizing international law and long-standing peaceful alliances, and supporting criminality and corruption and terrorism all over the world with price supports on illegal drugs. This government hasn't learned that if you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody. Our society was much safer when it was run by people who knew that if you spend 99% of your time investigating innocent citizens who you have no reason to suspect, you're going to have real trouble catching the people you have actual reasons to suspect. Either these guys are stupid, or they really are trying to build a police state. My friends in government try to convince me that incompetence is far more common than malevolence -- but they forget that positions of power attract such people. John --- Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 23:44:21 -0800 Subject: Re: FC: Responses to Pentagon claim about basketball-reading spy gear From: Elliott Frank <esfrankat_private> To: <declanat_private> In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030326233334.02719bc0at_private> on 3/26/03 8:39 PM, Declan McCullagh at declanat_private wrote: > From: Rod Van Meter <Rod.VanMeterat_private> > To: declanat_private > In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030313101911.02773cf0at_private> > X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.0.8 (1.0.8-10) > Date: 26 Mar 2003 08:19:54 -0800 > > This implies probably roughly 0.001 arc-second resolution (assuming > you're talking about reading the two-inch high "Spalding" on the > basketball). The Hubble Space Telescope has a resolution of roughly > 0.1-0.05 arc-seconds, depending on camera and wavelength. > > So, this resolution capability is 10-100x that of Hubble. > Extraordinary, but not beyond the bounds of physics. And yes, it's VERY > weather dependent; turbulent air will reduce that by at least one order > of magnitude, maybe as much as three. > > And it isn't basketballs you're reading -- it's license plate numbers, > faces, maybe a map laid on a table. Remember, the Hubble is the state-of-the-optical art for 1970 or so. It spent ~20 years in storage before going up, and the infamous "resolution improvement" fix was required due to optics tests that were regularly performed by the Hubble optical contractor on military satellites of that era (e.g. KH-17) NOT being applied and/or NOT being documented for the Hubble optics. An order-of-magnitude improvement in space-borne optics in 30 years? Rather likely. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH evening reception in New York City at 7 pm, April 1, 2003 at CFP: http://www.politechbot.com/events/cfp2003/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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