The Feds Want Fuzz

(AP)  The government is selectively blurring some of its highest-quality aerial photographs of Washington to hide objects in plain view on the roofs of the White House, Capitol and Treasury Department.

Deferring to Secret Service worries about terrorists, the government also obscured aerial views of the Naval Observatory compound where Vice President Dick Cheney lives. It made no effort to blur detailed photographs showing the Pentagon, Supreme Court, CIA headquarters, Justice Department or FBI headquarters.

Experts said they feared the unusual decision reflects a troublesome move toward new government limits on commercial satellite and aerial photography, a booming industry driven by recent technology advances and including some major companies based outside the United States.

Some commercial satellites already can snap photographs almost as detailed as those images shot from airplanes ordered blurred by the government.

Some experts also questioned the effectiveness of blurring one set of government-financed photographs. Tourists can see the roofs of the White House and U.S. Capitol from dozens of tall buildings downtown, and the Web site for the National Park Service shows a June 2002 photograph of the White House from atop the Washington Monument.

"We have to accept that we're not going to be invisible from space anymore," said James Lewis, a satellites expert for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The knee-jerk reaction is to turn it off. Once in a while that makes sense, but not very often."

Some private companies that already purchased this most recent collection of detailed photographs did not know some had been degraded by the government until contacted by The Associated Press.

"This is the first time we've seen anything like this," said Chris Becwar of GlobeXplorer LLC of Walnut Creek, Calif., which makes satellite and aerial photographs available over popular Web sites. "We'd prefer that it not be there."

Becwar said the company will consider replacing the degraded government photographs with other commercially available images of downtown Washington that haven't been altered.

The Secret Service ordered the photographs degraded as a condition of permitting a contractor's twin-engine Piper Navajo Chieftain to fly directly over Washington in April 2002, where such flights have been heavily restricted since the 2001 terror attacks.

Secret Service spokesman John Gill said the agency worried that the high-altitude photographs, so detailed that pedestrians can be seen in crosswalks, "may expose security operations."

Mary Hiatt, a vice president for EarthData International of Maryland LLC, said the Secret Service "gave us guidance as to what they had concerns about," and the company used commercial software to blur parts of some photographs and obscure parts of others.

A civil-liberties expert, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said he wasn't troubled by the government's actions. But he said the government's demand "illustrates the tension that exists between the public's right to know and security concerns."

Still, Dempsey added: "I don't see the public interest in what the top of the White House looks like."

The affected images include:

• The White House, where the roof is obscured to hide objects in plain view.
  
  
• The nearby Old Executive Office Building where many presidential aides work. The roof on that photo is obscured and interior courtyards blurred.
  
  
• The Treasury Department, next door to the White House, where the roof also is obscured and interior courtyards blurred.
  
  
• The Capitol, where the main building and five nearby congressional office buildings are blurred.
  
  
• The Naval Observatory compound where the vice presidential residence is, which is blurred.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which paid for the photographs, has been distributing them publicly since last December without formally acknowledging they were altered. The Washington photographs were part of a national project to create high-resolution images of 133 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Las Vegas and Dallas.

About half the cities already have been photographed, and none of the images except those of Washington were blurred for security reasons, said Scott Harris, a spokesman for the Geological Survey.
By Ted Bridis