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Comment by nonameiguess | Hacker News Reader

This is fundamentally wrong. I doubt the NGA is actually lying to these writers and more likely just not saying anything and leaving people to guess, but we have long had the ability to see the entire earth and commercial imagery is still a tiny, insignificant part of the national geointelligence enterprise with capabilities dwarfed by the state-sponsored tech this writer doesn't know about. Private companies gaining the ability to track vessels that turned off their transponders is cute and all, but this is not a new capability by any stretch.

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>commercial imagery is still a tiny, insignificant part of the national geointelligence enterprise

This is a false statement.

Without getting into things that aren't talked about online, I assure you that commercial imagery is regularly used in .gov/.mil settings for a variety of purposes. This includes gap-filling (both geographically and historically), the ability to disseminate product widely without sanitization, etc. There's nothing insignificant about its use.

We may just disagree on what counts as significant for whatever reason, but I have had direct access to the resource management and capacity planning database of ADF-E and ADF-SW showing exactly how many of each geointelligence product was created and disseminated and for the RROC this included products being created from commercial sources. To me, they were not significant, but I understand this is not necessarily the case at a tactical level, for many of the reasons you're giving here like impracticality of downgrade to a classification level that actually allows you to disseminate to a forward-deployed commander only cleared for Secret.

For MDA specifically, though, we cracked that nut and can downgrade to the point we're just giving out pngs with no evidence of where they came from.

The significance of the proliferation of such technology is that there will actually be people and processes 'watching' the screen. To my mind this is fundamentally different than the knowledge that a few state actors had the capability but not the manpower (or desire) to do so.

Sort of and sort of not. I keep typing up long comments all over this post and then deleting them and I better just stay away. I'm not at all comfortable pushing the limits of what I can actually say without getting in trouble, even if it isn't technically classified. If you mean data like this isn't already being collected on every vessel on earth and accessible from a terminal somewhere, that is incorrect. Creating the system that does that was exactly my job five years ago. If you mean the Navy largely doesn't care what you're doing and isn't really paying attention if you're not a drug runner, pirate, or state actor, then yes, that is true.

Exactly. Focusing on capability gives you a very myopic view of the situation. Capabilities are a moving target, with very few truly revolutionary leaps between the first film-based spy satellites and whatever we've got today.

Proliferation is huge. I can buy a high-resolution satellite photo of my neighbor's property every day if I feel like spending the money. That's something that wouldn't have been available at any cost a decade or two ago.

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