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‘Misty’ eyes in the dark
FOR many years now, outer space has been used as the preferred site for espionage by powerful western countries. Stealth satellites, keeping a close watch on plans deemed to be threatening to them, have been roaming the skies.
Before the 9/11 attacks, these satellites were only talked about behind closed doors. But now, the idea that there are eyes in the sky is an accepted fact. Recently, some United States senators leaked out details of a top-secret military spying programme. They were largely critical of the high cost of the satellites and questioned if they were worth billions of taxpayers’ dollars which were spent on them.
One such top-secret project is called “Misty,” which was brought to the public attention by Jeffrey Richelson, a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. The archive collects bits of information which are declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and claims to have the largest library in the world of declassified government documents.
Richelson referred to the “Misty” project in his book on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), entitled The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. He wrote that a stealth imaging satellite was launched in 1990, with the help of space shuttle Atlantis, to lessen the threat from Soviet Union’s satellites. Just weeks after the launch, the United States and the USSR both reported that the satellite had developed a malfunction.
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However, a space sleuth paints an entirely different picture. He says the so-called “malfunction” was an eyewash and part of a plot to conceal the whereabouts of the satellite. According to him, he had detected the existence of a technology which used “satellite signature suppression field” — something which made it extremely difficult to detect a satellite through laser, radar, visible and infrared signatures.
This hi-tech camouflage was courtesy an inflated balloon, which can be deployed quickly and made rigid when exposed to external or internal ultraviolet radiation. Additionally, it can be tailored according to a spacecraft or orbital situation.
The balloon is cone-shaped and deflects various types of waves, sending them off into deep space. It is not yet publicly known whether this technology is used in the ‘‘Misty’’ programme. “We don’t know exactly what technology was used to ensure stealth for the first couple of Mistys. So we don’t know what’s being proposed for this generation,” Richelson remarked while talking to SPACE.com.
“What difference there is, if any? The question is whether you think it’s worth it to persevere… spending the extra money to do something worthwhile,” he added.
He thinks there might be other technologies, which can be used to see what other countries are up to — technologies that are cheaper.
Today, several kinds of stealth may be under use, not only in space but also on the planet, says SPACE.com. Often, claims the organization, a satellite is launched with reconnaissance and stealth equipment on board, but the type of technology used ISLAMABAD: never revealed. A Misty is supposed to be invisible to the radar and optical tracking systems on the ground but its pictures are not as good as the other big satellites, which are bigger but not stealthy, for instance the Keyhole 11.
Theresa Hitchens, Vice-President of the Centre for Defence Information, also in Washington, says the ongoing Misty controversy “stems more from the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy and oppressing dissent regarding its budgetary policy choices. They do this by trying to intimidate those willing to speak out in the public.
“Space programs are expensive and it is important to carefully weigh the benefits of any programme versus the costs…as well as against alternatives for accomplishing the same mission,” added Ms Hitchens.
On the issue, Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, states: “I think this episode suggests that secrecy is sometimes used not to protect national security, but to line someone’s pockets.” Mr Aftergood works to reduce government secrecy and to expedite the declassification of cold war documents.
In addition, he tries to reform official secrecy policies. Regarding “Misty” itself, he states: “Even though the Senate Intelligence Committee has twice concluded that the programme is not justified on merit, it remains fully funded.”
The United States is also keeping a close watch on what is transpiring on its soil. The National Geospatial Agency (NGA), a not very publicized branch of the Defence Department, uses state-of-the-art aerial imaging technology to watch Americans closely. With a hundred employees, the agency is asked to assist with security events in the country, including helping to prepare imagery relating to information for protection of important sites against attacks. Ronald Reagan’s funeral procession was provided security with the help of this agency, which merged aerial photographs with 3D images, allowing planners to virtually walk or fly through the California route.
The scientific explanation for geospatial intelligence is the combining of imagery, like pictures taken by satellites, to show activities or features of what is going on anywhere in the world. The technology can be used anywhere on the planet as a powerful and useful tool for war planners to determine what kind of conditions prevail in a certain area. For example, it can help in measuring soil moisture to plan tank movements and detecting ground disturbances to help weapon and troop planners determine the location of underground bunkers.
Before 9/11, the National Geospatial Agency helped provide imagery of floods, wildfires and other natural disasters. Presently, it provides visual information on public places like shopping malls and even has been asked to cooperate with hotel security services to combine video footage with maps and imagery to ensure security.
Despite all this Laura Jennings, NGA’s Associate General Counsel, maintains that it is not encroaching on the privacy of American citizens. “In most cases it is not intrusive. It is information to help secure an event and to have people prepared to respond, should there be an attack, or to analyze the area where a threat has been made,” she says.
NGA claims that it wants to build trust with private and public companies. Before the 9/11 attacks, sites like chemical plants were not as cooperative as they are today because they know that they can now be monitored easily through aerial imagery.
According to recent reports, in the suburbs of Washington DC are located the offices of the secretive National Imagery and Mapping Agency (Nima), which is an archive for the most sensitive spy satellite pictures. “Our goal is to be able to have layers of information, from terrain and buildings to troop movements. Our maps have to be relevant, timely and accurate,” says Darryl Garrett, Nima’s Chief Technology Officer.
“I don’t know of anyone else in the world who is as comprehensive as we are.” The ultimate goal of the agency, he adds, is to key in 40 “petabytes” of data into the agency’s supercomputers, which means 20 times the data that is on the internet.
In the not-so-distant past, some Israeli lawmakers suggested that Israel must accelerate the deployment and further development of spy satellites if it wanted to improve its intelligence capabilities. Reports did not specify the kind of stealth satellites they would like to be deployed but a Ministry of Defence official told Space News that the country intended to launch four spacecraft by the year 2008.
The launch of its Ofeq-6 electro-optical satellite is scheduled for this year. “Techsar,” a synthetic aperture radar demonstration platform, is to be launched in 2006, followed by Ofeq-7 in 2008. Additionally, it plans to launch, in 2007, a satellite dedicated to military communications. On the other side of the planet, Japan too is likely to throw a couple of eyes into space.
Such sophisticated technology could be put to good use if, instead of peeking into the lives of others, we could explore the final frontier: the cosmos. This is one idea with which many experts agree. Australia-based writer James Carter says: “The idea of intelligence agencies becoming involved in star-gazing probably won’t fly for now. But given some of the dubious operations they have been involved with in the past, there’s some hope if political conditions can catch up to the technical achievements and scientific aspirations.”
Anyway, with everyone watching everyone, will the skies turn into a giant ball of mirrors one day, like the one in a discotheque, under which a “dance of death and destruction” will be played out? Will the world become a chessboard of human pawns? That is the question that must addressed.
The writer
A spy in the sky
Satellites can perform astonishing and often menacing feats. This should come as no surprise when one reflects on the massive amount of resources spent on space technology since the Soviet satellite “Sputnik” which was launched in 1957, causing panic in the United States.
A spy satellite is capable of monitoring a person’s movements, even when the “target” is indoors or deep in the interior of a building or travelling rapidly down the highway in a car in any kind of weather. There is simply no place to hide on the face of Earth.
Astonishingly, it takes just three satellites to blanket the world with detection capabilities. Besides tracking a person’s actions and relaying data to a computer screen, spy satellites can read minds, monitor conversations, manipulate electronic instruments and physically assault someone with a laser beam.
Travelling at Mach-25, the satellites pass over every spot on the planet twice a day, grabbing digital snapshots of places that the CIA, and policymakers and military officers it serves, want to see.
From missile fields in China or Russia to environmental disaster areas in Africa or Asia, spy satellites provide a steady stream of black-and-white images.
Remote reading of someone’s mind, through satellite technology, is quite bizarre, yet it is being done. It is a reality today, not a chimera. As early as 1981, G. Harry Stine in his book, Confrontation in Space, wrote that computers had ‘read’ human minds by means of deciphering the outputs of electroencephalographs (EEGs).
Early work in this area was reported by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1978. EEGs are now known to be crude sensors of neural activity in the human brain, depending as they do upon induced electrical currents in the skin.
In 1992, Newsweek reported that “with powerful new devices that peer through the skull and see the brain at work, neuroscientists seek the wellsprings of thoughts and emotions, the genesis of intelligence and language. They hope, in short, to read your mind.”
It appears, meanwhile, that the first attempt to hide a satellite from radar and optical sensors was made in the mid-1970s, with an experimental military satellite. But it was not until the 1980s that this effort was dramatically increased.
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) of the United States initiated a number of stealth satellite programmes during the 1980s. NRO manages the nation’s spy satellite programmes. The most notable of these was dubbed Misty, a non-acronym but apparently a photoreconnaissance satellite for snapping pictures.
Another stealthy satellite was launched in 1999 atop a Titan 4 rocket, launched from California. The amateur satellite trackers followed it, although after a while they began to suspect that they were actually following a decoy and that the satellite itself was in a different orbit. — Sci-tech World Report
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