NEW YORK, Oct 19: The Pentagon has bought all rights to satellite pictures of Afghanistan which has put it at odds with the American media here.
The New York Times reported on Friday that the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, an arm of the US Defence Department, has bought all of the rights to pictures of Afghanistan taken by the world’s best commercial imaging satellite. That move opens a new front in the split between government secrecy and news media that try to use satellites to report military conflicts.
Officials at the imagery agency told the newspaper that it had signed a contract with Space Imaging Inc., to buy the entire capacity of the satellite to take pictures of Afghanistan and nearby countries.
The purchase is needed to support the American military operation in Afghanistan and to supplement government spy satellites, agency officials said. The Ikonos satellite owned by Space Imaging is the sole commercial satellite that gathers high-resolution images and can discern objects as small as one square meter.
The Pentagon contract, concluded on October 7, also means that news media and other organizations outside government will not be able to obtain independently their own high-resolution satellite images of the Afghanistan region. In addition, the contract effectively allows the Pentagon to keep the images it bought out of the public eye forever. None can be released without Defence Department approval.
The old disputes between the military and news media centred on access for the media pool. The new dispute is about access to images collected in the non-sovereign territory of space, the paper said.
The Times says that the Pentagon has also taken a more subtle approach to the fight. Under the law, the Bush administration could have blocked news media’s access to the satellite on national security grounds by invoking a never-used provision, “shutter control.” Such a move would have quite likely set off legal challenges and heated protests. Instead, the Pentagon achieved its desired result through its contract.
Other commercial imaging satellites are operated by the Israelis, the French and the Indians, but they lack the high resolution of Ikonos. Another American company, DigitalGlobe, the former EarthWatch Inc., launched a satellite Friday that has even higher resolution than the Ikonos. But that satellite, Quickbird, will not provide images before February.
The Pentagon has already expressed interest in that material. A DigitalGlobe spokesman said it would not object to selling the entire capacity for the Afghanistan area to the US government. With the approval of the Pentagon, Space Imaging today offered to sell the news media for $500 two images gathered by its satellite, of the airport near Kandahar, before and after it was bombed.