The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.
The author explores ways to secure valuable space resources against 'assymetric attack' and suggests that a space surveillance system, similar to the proposed system for observing and tracking Earth-crossing objects, is the best solution.
Insurgents could be using satellite images from a popular website to mount attacks on British and American bases in Iraq, according to defence experts.
President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology.
Kuo outlines the challenges that space professionals face as they support traditional power-projection missions and new homeland-security tasks. Many navigation, communication, and weather-support missions translate easily from military roles to domestic-security support. But legal constraints, security classification, and complicated relationships among many agencies may make space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities difficult to integrate with local, state, and federal response agencies. Colonel Kuo also states that partial solutions to such challenges can come from innovative and creative uses of space assets.
Orbiting 500 miles above the planet, satellites give scientists a "big picture" view of changes to the Earth's landscape -- from suburbanization trends to shoreline erosion. Now, an Ohio University researcher is using the technology to try to detect a more dangerous activity: terrorism and the areas of the country most vulnerable to potential attacks.
Seismologists are using advanced digital seismic arrays and Global Positioning System sensors to help intelligence officials listen for the construction of underground weapons stores and terrorist havens.
After years of acknowledging its Global Positioning System assets are vulnerable, the United States is moving to correct weaknesses in the system, which would be heavily relied upon by first responders in the advent of a weapons of mass destruction attack.
John Baker examines the risks of terrorist use of commercial satellite imagery and concludes that "the potential perils posed by commercial satellite imagery are less than might be expected."
The effort to track down Osama bin Laden and rid the world of terrorism could be bogged down by clogged pipes on the military's satellite-based information superhighway, forcing the military to purchase satellite time from private companies.