SATELLITE PICS GOING DARK?

You might be able to see the hur­ri­canes head­ing for Florida. Maybe. But just about all other com­mer­cial satel­lite imagery could be put off-​​limits, if a new Senate bill goes through as planned.
The mea­sure, “Nondisclosure of Certain Products of Commercial Satellite Operations,” would exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) unclas­si­fied, com­mer­cial satel­lite pic­tures bought up by the gov­ern­ment, as well as “any… other prod­uct that is derived from such data.“
“Almost every clause of the pro­posed exemp­tion embod­ies patent hos­til­ity to the con­ven­tions of open gov­ern­ment and pub­lic access to gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion,” Secrecy News fumes.
For exam­ple, “maps, reports, and any other unclas­si­fied gov­ern­ment analy­ses or com­mu­ni­ca­tions that are in some way ‘derived from’ a com­mer­cial satel­lite image would all of a sud­den become inac­ces­si­ble.“
News reports would get a whole lot thin­ner, too. As Barbara Cochran, head of the Radio-​​Television News Directors Association, notes, the press relies on satel­lite pic­tures con­stantly, to track every­thing from weather to war to pop­u­la­tion shifts. “Recent uses include cov­er­age of the Iraq and Afghanistan con­flicts; nuclear and other WMD sites in Iran, Pakistan, India, Libya, North Korea, China, and other coun­tries; flood­ing in Bangladesh and Eastern India; defor­esta­tion in Brazil; wild­fires and tor­na­does in the United States; and refugee crises in the Sudan [and] Rwanda,” she writes.
If this reg­u­la­tion passes, much of that imagery not clas­si­fied in any way, and col­lected by a pri­vate com­pany, not a gov­ern­ment agency — would van­ish from pub­lic view.
“In essence,” Cochran says in a let­ter to Congress, “this new FOIA exemp­tion would result in tax­payer dol­lars being used to pre­clude the media from ade­quately inform­ing the pub­lic about mat­ters of crit­i­cal impor­tance that in no way impli­cate the national secu­rity.“
THERE’S MORE: “The Justice Department has asked an appel­late court to keep its argu­ments secret for a case in which pri­vacy advo­cate John Gilmore is chal­leng­ing fed­eral require­ments to show iden­ti­fi­ca­tion before board­ing an air­plane,” the Washington Post reports.

September 8th, 2004 | Space | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.