He's the guy who runs this website https://dreamlandresort.com/
The warrants cite "Photographing and Sketching Defense Installations" a.k.a. it's over stuff like this https://dreamlandresort.com/area51/panorama_0523.html
The warrants cite "Photographing and Sketching Defense Installations" a.k.a. it's over stuff like this https://dreamlandresort.com/area51/panorama_0523.html
They develop aircraft here, stuff that is wildly important to the (current) global security regime. Not a thing I’d personally want to be recklessly/ignorantly poking and prodding by releasing photos like that.
If you film stuff from public space, you are not breaking any law.
The onus is on the government to secure their stuff, not punish people taking photos from public lands.
18 USC 795: It's illegal to photograph or sketch secret military installations (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/795)
18 USC 796: It's illegal to use an aircraft to photograph secret military installations (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/796)
18 USC 797: It's illegal to disseminate photographs of secret military installations (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/797)
Arresting people for openly breaking the law is a perfectly valid component of "securing their stuff." In fact that is precisely how almost everything in our society is actually secured: by threat of law.
It's not really spying if it's done completely out in the open.
The same way you can't 'spy' on police or other government buildings by filming them from public view, something explicitly allowed.
They are largely meant to operate in the public eye. Some weapon development programs aren’t (thus they are secret).
Please note: If you pull up to the gates of CIA with a zoom lens and start taking photos of their doors and windows, you will also have a very bad time, despite the fact that both inside and outside the gates are public land.
It's the equivalent of sunbathing naked on your front lawn and getting angry that someone is taking photos.
The world you’re describing is one where government facilities have to all be in profoundly challenging places to operate facilities in, and even once you do that, a Chinese or Russian national is 100% within their rights to pull up a tent right alongside it, put a camera up on a 300 foot tower, and surveil the site 24/7.
Under the Constitution, anyone in the US has the right to do what you’ve described, and so they have the right to do what I’ve described too.
I think I would just prefer if rather than making it illegal to photograph a base that happens to be visible, actual treason or espionage should be the only things which are illegal, and the government needs to prove that.
It might make things harder on the government, but I think it is fundamentally more fair.
Compare the quality of satellite photography a well funded nation state has access to against Mr Arnu's taken from 42km away.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/2019-08-...
https://dreamlandresort.com/area51/panorama_0523.html
It's not an unknown problem either and the 3 letter people have decades of experience dealing with it including moveable shelters.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/is-this-a-secret-aircr...
We’re also actively tracking where their satellites are at any given point in time and move things when they aren’t overhead.
So to act as if an individual on the ground couldn’t get info the satellites cannot is just silly.
With the proliferation of commercial LEO imaging satellites there's pretty much always one above you.
Synthetic aperture radar satellites work at night and under the clouds as well so if you're trying to hide an aircraft development program it's going to be rather difficult.
edit: Radar messes with SAR as well but the government hasn't even bothered to try to shield Area 51.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2022/02/11/radar-interf...
Try buying pictures of Area 51 from one of those commercial leos and let us all know how that conversation goes.
> Synthetic aperture radar satellites work at night and under the clouds as well so if you're trying to hide an aircraft development program it's going to be rather difficult.
Which provide
1) I would prefer the US maintains a military advantage over all of its adversaries, and these types of programs have historically been extremely, extremely important to that.
2) I trust the military’s assessment of whether any particular images compromise those programs much, much, much more than I trust the assessment of random internet commentators or of a random guy who got sufficiently obsessed with Area 51 to move to its outskirts and start photographing it.
You, I, and the blogger have no way of knowing what important pieces of information he may be filling in for our adversaries. If you don’t care about our advantage, fine, or if you are of the “information wants to be free” religious persuasion, fine — I don’t think those are commonly held views however and I don’t think they will or should shield this guy from due process.