President Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image of Iran
npr.org
npr.org
Worth noting the image was cleared for release.
Either way, that isn't really the story here since the President could declassify it anyway. The main story is the potential security and diplomatic repercussions from releasing this information in this manner.
From the angle it wouldn’t be feasible, but it was an interesting idea.
http://thescienceexplorer.com/technology/new-satellites-will...
Drones I suspect could find a dime dropped in the street and read the date off it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump%27s_disclosures_o...
Does this current action have immediate repercussions?
The main thing is not wanted to show potential adversaries the extent of your capabilities. It also allows them to glean information on how to counter the newly disclosed capability as well.
For example: If this was a satellite, the specific one is almost certainly outed. Satellites are tracked constantly and by the angle of the photo and approximate time you should be able to figure out where in the sky it was and what satellites were in orbit. With that you now know to not do anything when those are present.
If Iran isn’t capable of doing that sort of analysis, certainly every other major power in the world is.
Frankly, I’m betting it was the X-37B or a previously unknown spy satellite hiding in plain sight as a commercial satellite.
But notice how much of the discussion here does involve terms like "classified" or "cleared for public release".
If I delete a production VM at my job, zero part of the postmortem will involve figuring out why I had access to do so. I have root on all our hypervisors, of course I have access to do so. That doesn't answer the question of why I did so, whether I knew it was a production VM, whether our standard tools should have safety checks (even if I can muck around with ssh and virsh), etc.
Just because you dont like the president ?
rm -rf / as root ( to what you refer) will run until it runs into the proc file system but it too is not bad if that is what you want to do ... and as root you have the ability to make that choice.
As president you have the ability to make the choice to declassify anything.
As president you have the ability to choose to murder people via the military for 60 days without congressional approval
Perhaps the better question is "Why does the president have so much power ? "
There could be the one and only possible employer in Sunnyvale for adaptive optics specialists, something that people in such a narrow field all got notice of years ago.
I think the flag misses the point about the amazing technical capabilities of the satellite image by considering it as a purely political post.
He definitely shared surveillance but it's not as if everybody and their mom didn't know the US had these capabilities.
This is either: (1) a major screw up or (2) the US gov't making it clear to Iran they can see more than Iran thought they could.
Maybe we'll know decades later when someone writes a book about the conflict.
Except this generation of political operatives grew up believing the misinformation spread by the previous ones. Consequently, they are so arrogant and naive as to believe that literally everyone who works in US National Security (and may be expressing concerns over irreplaceable sources and methods) are just "deep state haters."
Because we can't just argue that he bumbled his way to being a billionaire.
What we do know is that he inherited a very large sum of money, has a very long public record of losses and bankruptcies, and overinflating his claimed net worth.
This is what happened the time he started a publicly traded corporation, one subject to actual public accounting requirements:
Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts lost money every single year that Trump ran it as a public company. Net losses of $13 million in 1995 ballooned to $134 million by 1999, and $191 million in 2004. ... In total, from 1995 through 2004, the company booked total losses of $647 million ... Trump had complete control — both as the chairman and as the owner of a special class of stock that carried many more votes than those he sold to the public. He even gave the company his initials, DJT, as its stock ticker symbol.
Its debts mounted, the stock collapsed — and in the end, the creditors had had enough. The courts stepped in, the company had to go through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization... By April 2004, someone who had invested a notional $100 in the IPO was left with about $10.
Over the same period, investors in competitor Harrah’s Entertainment more than doubled their money. Investors in luxury hotel, casino and resort companies like Starwood and MGM earned returns of more than 400%. Even the plain old stock market index more than doubled.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/donald-trump-was-a-stock-m...
That's not to say that I necessarily think it's all part of some kind of larger master plan, but if you look at it from the point of view of fame and power, Trump has done really well for himself.