Image identified as by USA 224, a classified satellite | Hacker News Reader

Image identified as by USA 224, a classified satellite

sattrackcam.blogspot.com

36 pointssimjue15 comments

Open articleView on HN

Really "cool" how my submission got another title and url, thus, it basically became another submission...

PREVIOUSLY

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20842474

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844394

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845111

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846040

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20851501

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861003

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864354

>This image has a much higher definition than anything the US has admitted to in the past. Other nations probably guessed that the US has advanced satellite imaging, but now they no longer need to guess.

I think they still have to keep guessing, and here's why:

>The satellites are believed to have been the source of some imagery of the Soviet Union and China made public in 1997; images of Sudan and Afghanistan made public in 1998 related to the response to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings;[citation needed] and a 2019 photo, revealed by President Donald Trump, of a failed Iranian rocket launch[10]. (Wikipedia)

If these things were flying in 1997, presumably what's up there now is even better. That's over 22 years of time for further developments.

>If these things were flying in 1997, presumably what's up there now is even better.

The USA-224 satellite was launched in 2011 and has much better capabilities than the ones that took the 1997/1998 pictures.

The Wikipedia article you quoted [1] is about the entire KH-11 series, spanning >40 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

Another article references USA-224 launched in 2011, that passed over the site in the time frame of the incident.

Being as the image has had some information blacked out (in the corner) I seriously doubt that Trump snapped a pic on his iPhone and tweeted it from inside the SCIF or whatever. Someone looked at this image and approved releasing it, and I really do hope that person was at least marginally aware of the intelligence aspect (specifically, not Trump)

While that's accurate, it looks like the classification markers were blacked out post picture. That's important because it indicates that they didn't go and declassify the picture on the original system to share it.

So the picture was taken, the classification markers were blacked out, and then POTUS tweeted it. We don't know the classification of the device which took the photo, the classification of the system on which the markers were blacked out, or when the decision was made to declassify the image.

I agree, and I think that's the largest concern here. Only a few years ago a sailor was jailed for a year (later pardoned) for snapping a photo in the general vicinity of certain classified items, and there is no excuse for the president behaving so flippantly with this kind of information.

My original point was that the president may be surrounding himself with people who are green-lighting terrible ideas, and that is what concerns me.

I get that. It's complicated because no one knows what happened; did he order it declassified and they just did it poorly or was he instead saving whoever originally took it a huge deal of trouble.

> I'm not trying to defend Trump

when do you think we won't need that kind of disclaimer

Even under that there's the open question of was it a free approval or was it an 'at least black out the section that says what satellite and settings this was taken with.' That is if Trump insisted on using a photo there's not much anyone could do to actually stop him, any classification or security concerns can be swept aside by the President.

This is blogspam.

Significantly higher quality article:

https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/09/image-from-trump-tw...

To get a faster reply, I've emailed your comment to the mods, since along with other comments it seems like they'll want to correct this, using the contact link in the HN footer.

Ok, changed to that from https://www.universetoday.com/143298/thanks-to-trump-weve-go.... Thanks!

I have heard him called a "social-engineering genius" (think The Atlantic, 2018) but this is just childish. So much for our intelligence community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com