US lifts restrictions on more detailed satellite images | Hacker News Reader

US lifts restrictions on more detailed satellite images

bbc.co.uk

55 pointsdarrhiggs45 comments

I don't like this. What is the business of a government in regulating the resolution of whatever form of imagery???

If it can be seen from the sky, or from the street, it's public. Planes, satellites, drones, whatever - you should be free to take pics and sell them if you want.

Fortunately, digital camera didn't exist where such kind of laws had been passed, or there would have been similar stupid restrictions (imagine google streetview with n-times 640x480 pics crafted together, or worse - a law restricting the resolution of the reconstructed google streetview you can view on your screen!)

I don't think I can agree with that. To a certain extent, I think this will be another one of those fronts where modern technology tries to breach fundamental and human rights.

What should give you the right, just because you can fly something over someone's property, to take pictures of them and their private space. The issue is a similar one to drones. Should you be permitted to violate someone's privacy in their own back yard or on their property just because you have the technology to circumvent safeguards?

There is no real difference whether the drone is 100 feet above your property or in the ionosphere? If someone put a camera on a stick and held it high enough to tape what goes on in your bedroom or back yard when your children are swimming they would be considered committing an illegal act?

In a way, you should have the right to automatically remove your property from satellite imagery. Or maybe you should get royalties for your property being part of the service. In fact, what is the difference between royalties due for commercial use of their images and that of your back yard? There is none, other than that the imagery of your back yard, especially at those resolutions, are a violation of your most basic and fundamental rights as a human. What, is it going to be left to individuals to build visual obstructions to prevent observation from above?

So you are now rationalizing how this is all different and how it's justified. Well, what happens when technology is developed that allows real time 1cm resolution, live, 24/7 observation? Or what if technology is developed that allows reconstruction of the interior of your home, maybe even in color resolution based on chemical analysis, and maybe even in real time?

Where is the limit? It should lie with the most fundamental rights that are being violated right as we speak. Everyone should have the right to privacy or a choice to profit from it.

We are already having the value of our identities and activities harvested from us, are we really going to allow constant and pervasive surveillance to steal our humanity too? At what point do a certain subset of people simply regress to becoming a commodity that is monitored and maintained like cattle on Big USA Ranch?

I agree with your general point but:

> In fact, what is the difference between royalties due for commercial use of their images and that of your back yard?

The difference is that the photographer holds to copyright to any picture they take. The drone/satellite operator would have to explicitly sign the copyright over to you of the pictures of your backyard.

> Fortunately, digital camera didn't exist where such kind of laws had been passed, or there would have been similar stupid restrictions

Non-digital cameras did exist, and some of the laws were passed because of them. A common class of laws, colloquially called "peeping tom" laws, make it illegal to photograph people through their bedroom windows with high-powered telephoto lenses.

It was more the military side than the civilian, so digital cameras and the like weren't even a consideration[1]. The military was afraid of others having access to the images or knowing how good the images were they were getting. It seems like those concerns have lessened and thus the new rules.

1) digital is just catching up with film for resolution these days.

So if I point a FLIR camera at your house and show every human in it and broadcast it on the internet, that should be public too? I can see it from the street, after all.

The resolution limit is due to privacy concerns, the same as with the FLIR cameras.

That's actually what StreetView is required to do in Germany:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicate...

http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-many-germ...

As a US-based company, DigitalGlobe launch and operate their satellites at the whim of Federal regulators. With the advances in privatized spaceflight, I see this field as ripe for disruption from Chinese or Russian based competition.

Good reason to invest in satellite-killing weapons, then.

Which in turn will lead to a booming market in ammunition, MREs, and shovels for digging bunkers.

I mean for the U.S. Gov.

Does "images that showed features as small as 31cm" means 1 pixel = average color of 31x31cm or is it more complicated?

That is roughly correct. There is typically a bayer-mask filter on a grayscale sensor, so any given pixel is actually only either blue, red or green, but then a mixing algorithm is applied and you get the full resolution with the appropriate mixing. Of course, there are a variety of filters and a variety of algorithms, so the exact mix will vary across different technologies, but roughly speaking, yes.

For anyone concerned about privacy, higher resolution imagery already exists and is used heavily in industry. See http://www.pictometry.com. They use airplanes.

Right. This is a win, because it allows you to get images that previously required airplanes over areas where airplanes aren't feasible or cost-effective.

For years now Google has shown high resolution images of my own house. The rim of my garden is bright and clear, which is made of 2x4s (9 cm across).

I thought that some of the higher-res photos from google earth and competitors were taken by plane, rather than satellite. I wonder how/if the new restrictions apply to lower-flying photography?

Most of the higher-resolution photography on Google Earth and Google Maps is taken by airplanes rather than by satellites. Google calls it "satellite" view just to emphasize that it is from above, whatever the source.

I don't like this. You can already see a lot of detail on these satellite photos. This is a huge breach of privacy. (Not that a 50cm lower limit isn't a breach of privacy.)

Effectively the resolution of commercial satellite imagery will be changing from 50cm to 40cm and then 25cm later this summer when WorldView-3 is online. This is vastly less commercial aerial photography which has been around 15cm for the last decade and increasingly around 7cm at affordable costs. I don't believe that satellite imagery will be getting much better due to quantum diffraction.

I'm not saying that this isn't a privacy issue it's just that the situation hasn't gotten appreciably worse because of this announcement.

Deleted comment

It was just relaxed. But Digital Globe doesn't yet have a bird in the air capable of it. In the fall they will, and it will be available to everyone.

At some point you will just have to realize that this illusion of privacy you have is just that... an illusion.

Privacy exists in small pockets, and only in places that you control access to. Aside from that, you might as well consider it public.

Thanks to drones and satellites, privacy no longer exists in private yards, even those with high fences lined with trees.

Thanks to infrared photography, structure-penetrating radar, cell phones, etc., privacy no longer exists indoors either.

This is not right.

Interestingly, the U.S. Supreme Court surprised many people in 2001 by putting limits on government use of infrared imaging. (They didn't ban it entirely, but they said that it would be regulated as a search, normally requiring permission from a judge.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

This means that police may not be able to routinely use imaging technologies, including active radars, to look through the walls of people's homes.

(Interestingly, this is a way in which police now have fewer powers than the general public, since in most places there are no laws preventing you as a civilian from using infrared imaging to look at someone's house.)

Presumably citizens are allowed because they don't have the power to charge & convict you of some alleged crime. If the citizen's imagery were somehow brought into a legal matter, then it would be up to the judge to determine its legality. Conversely and unfortunately, law enforcement and government seem to enjoy a defacto legality until someone says otherwise. By limiting their use of this technology, hopefully it mitigates the defacto and clandestine nature of it, bringing it at least to a level of awareness during legal proceedings.

>This is not right.

This is reality though. Our expectations of privacy must adjust to changes in technology.

What is allowed with technology does not dictate what is right or even legal.

It comes down to a simple concept. You change with progress or you get left behind.

Even when progress is, in your view, undesirable... our world isn't a private place anymore... our expectations of privacy will seem silly to future generations... its jus how things work. Right or wrong are abstract concepts, and the marching of time pays no attention to them.

Only the truly privileged feel comfortable without privacy. Only once there is no such thing as an outcast, an undesirable, a freak, or a nerd, can a world without privacy be livable.

That assumes your vision is accurate, and that we have no control over our futures. Do only large computer industry companies get to decide the future?

When has the law ever been able to prevent the use of technology?

If we just assumed that whatever could be done (with technology or otherwise) should be accepted, what would the point of laws be in the first place?

People have expectations that the FDA will ensure the safety and efficacy of their medicines. Consequently, there are medications that I can't have in the US because of the law.

People have expectations of a level of safety on the highways. The technology under the hood of my car allows me to reach speeds of at least 100, and the law effectively prevents me from using it.

There are many ways in which people have expectations that technology could subvert. Automatically changing our expectations to allow for any technologically possible breach of those expectations isn't currently the way we do things.

Is there a suitable material for a lightweight "roof" you could put over your property that would block aerial photography but still allow sunlight and rain to penetrate?

One could even make it shielded against electromagnetic frequencies. No more drones hacking your wifi!

Is there a suitable material for a lightweight "roof" you could put over your property

Yes, well-placed trees, plants, and some lattice material.

I once visited the roof of the Limn building on Townsend in San Francisco. It turns out there was a lush garden, nice eating areas, and an Airstream trailer, all on the roof. Absolutely none of it was visible from the ground, and you'd be lucky to make out much of anything from overhead.

Camouflage netting is perhaps the only surefire way to do this, although I'm sure that will attract far more attention than doing nothing at all. Something that would work kind of OK would be to create a large radiometric difference in your property like having a dark black roof and making your lawn as reflective as possible (white cement or gravel, swimming pool). That way when the imagery is processed in an automated fashion it will render your area badly. It still would be possible to go back to the original images and enhance the area manually but can be quite a chore.

Build your property (partially) underground? Like this http://www.trendir.com/house-design/grass-roofed-home-built-... or similar. You'd need to deal with waste heat somehow for the infrared signature not to look suspicious. And ground-penetrating RADAR would pick you up as well, I expect.

I think something like this would be cool: http://twistedsifter.com/2012/01/camouflage-cali-hiding-air-...

Do you worry about people flying planes over your house, looking over your fence, etc?

It isn't unreasonable to be afraid of something becoming easy to the point of negligible, correlation of personal data across multiple databases as a result of mass data collection comes to mind.

What worries me more is what kind of corporate espionage these satellite images will be put to use for. They've been able to see the car(s) in a driveway for awhile now. But imagine: now they can pay to see what the most popular cars are in a geographical region; they can look at your deck and determine furniture brands; they can see you sunbathing; they can see what you play with, etc. No longer is it just "buying habits" but they can, en masse, buy the rights to psychoanalyze your lifestyle base on what they see from the outside of your house.

I'm pretty certain that a company paying a team of photographers to stalk the average citizen to psychoanalyze their world would be creepy, if not illegal. But this is exactly what they will be doing—and we'll have no ability to "outrun" their team of photographers. Technically, we won't even know when they're overhead.

And that does bother me.

Write an app to calculate orbital elements and pop up an alert: "Imaging object arriving over horizon, take action"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_elements

http://www.heavens-above.com/

Other countries have done this for years, and cover their equipment with camo cover when opposing country assets are overhead. This is why the Air Force/Boeing X-37B is such a big deal; its an asset that can shift orbits to counterattack known orbit information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/X_37B_Gets_Stranger_999.ht...

For all the browbeating about erosion of privacy, I have yet to come across practical, consumer-proof solutions to anything that protects against said loss of privacy. Digital, software, hardware anything? The only solutions out there are range from impractical to ludicrous. Go hoodies, go Tor, go klutzy-PGP, go burkas!! /sigh

If you're worried about satellites and black helicopters, I think you've already left the realm of practicality. You might as well toss up the camo netting and don your tinfoil hat.

> For all the browbeating about erosion of privacy, I have yet to come across practical, consumer-proof solutions

Agreed. And with few technical options, the solutions must be legal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com