FC: John Gilmore on government trustworthiness and spy gear

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous Politech messages:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04592.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-04562.html

-----

To: politech () politechbot com, gnu () toad com
Subject: Re: FC: Responses to Pentagon claim about basketball-reading spy gear 
In-reply-to: <5.1.1.6.0.20030326233334.02719bc0 () mail well com> 
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:02:50 -0800
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>

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 <esfrank () hwy9 com>
To: <declan () well com>
In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030326233334.02719bc0 () mail well com>

on 3/26/03 8:39 PM, Declan McCullagh at declan () well com wrote:

> From: Rod Van Meter <Rod.VanMeter () nokia com>
> To: declan () well com
> In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030313101911.02773cf0 () mail well com>
> 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/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------