Eyes In The Sky

CBS News Technologist Dan Dubno says high-resolution photos of the Earth are a click away with the right software.

The pictures are for sale and two commercial satellite companies, Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe, are selling them. While the U.S. government has just announced plans to purchase as much as a billion dollars of such imagery in the next five years, it is the public that is likely to be the greatest beneficiary.

Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite offers better than one-meter resolution and DigitalGlobe's sensor captures pixels of the Earth at an astounding .6-meter resolution: sharp enough (and colorful enough) to see something just larger than a football. While intelligence agencies are likely to remain the key customers of such high-resolution imagery for the near-term, already many industries, including real estate, insurance, energy, telecommunications, etc., now rely on this technology.

Broadcasters are using these pictures to reveal "denied areas" of the Earth: taking viewers to places where governments or nature otherwise bar access. In recent days, North Korean and Iranian nuclear sites have been made public; even Saddam Hussein's palaces and enormous swimming pools are now subjected to public view.

To capitalize on the availability of such imagery, ingenious companies like the California-based Keyhole Corp. have designed ways the public can view such imagery over the Web.

After downloading Keyhole's "Earthviewer," anybody with a PC can navigate their way through imagery and data of the Earth. Not only can you see downtown Baghdad but you can look at even higher resolution spectacular aerial photographs of the U.S., most taken by AirphotoUSA. Plus, with a click of the button, significant data can easily be overlaid on the imagery: neighborhood restaurants, census data, crime statistics, etc.

Several years ago, then Vice President Al Gore envisioned we would one day create a "Digital Earth," where comprehensive views of our planet would be within the grasp of the public over the Internet. It seemed like a vision decades away from reality but within the last few months companies like Space Imaging, Digital Globe, and Keyhole have surpassed that goal.

As the likelihood of a war with Iraq increases in the weeks to come, the public has an unprecedented opportunity to get independent and largely unfettered access to images showing the conflict on the ground.

These U.S. commercial satellite companies are not alone however: the RAND Corporation estimates that as many as 50 other commercial remote-sensing satellites are likely to be launched in the next decade (most foreign owned and controlled.) Already India, Israel, Russia, and other countries have companies selling commercial satellite an image, meaning global transparency is upon us and the "genie" of imagery is out of the bottle.

Since September, the National Security Council has been reviewing U.S. space policy, with the real possibility of increasing "shutter control" against the fledgling U.S. commercial satellite companies. America would be stronger if we had more commercial satellites, operating at the highest resolutions, providing information in the timeliest manner with fewer restrictions. Other governments have more to fear by openness than we do. Had better imagery been publicly available, it is likely that massacres in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in Serbia could have been averted; that rogue nations developing weapons of mass destruction would more easily be uncovered.

Our decision makers and our citizens need a common base map of the earth. It should have the highest quality imagery of the earth with the best topography. It should be overlaid with a myriad of data of every type, lifesaving data, political and economic data; etc. It should be streamed on the web and available in every class room, in every office and every home.

After Hurricane Floyd struck the Carolinas, nine Northeast governors wrote to complain to the White House that potentially lifesaving federal data was not made available. After Hurricane Mitch hit Central America, geo-referenced data finally dribbled out months after it would have made a difference. Since Sept 11th, we've learned that disasters come in ways we could not reasonably expect. But we've also learned that prepared and available imagery and data can and does save lives.

When journalists in Afghanistan recently revealed critical new information about al Qaeda, the CIA admitted there were more journalists in the field than intelligence agents. Let's make a virtue out of the broader resources we have: allowing those who can use imagery to identify potential sources of terror; to find possible locations in Iraq or Iran or North Korea where weapons of mass destruction could be made. There should be more imagery for legislators, for scientists, for journalists, and for the public to pore over to determine what threatens us, not less.

By Daniel Dubno