The Homeland Security Department is relying more often and more broadly on geospatial information technology, including spy satellites, to collect and analyze intelligence for its counterterrorism and emergency response missions, raising domestic privacy concerns.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have overstated the performance of costly new radiation detectors designed to prevent the importation of radiological materials that could be used in bombs, according to an unreleased government report.

The sharpest commercial imaging satellite ever launched is now orbiting the Earth, sweeping over the North Pole and under the South Pole every 98 minutes, collecting high-resolution images of the scene below. From 423 miles up, the GeoEye-1 satellite can spot objects as small as 16 inches across.

The world's first and highest resolution commercial imagery satellite, the Google-sponsored GeoEye-1, has achieved first light, returning a 0.5 meter resolution satellite image of a small university in Pennslyvania. The imagery is the first .5 meter image to be released since the U.S. defense department allowed domestic firms to sell imagery below 1 meter resolution.

America has become so lousy at building spy satellites that "the United
States is losing its preeminence in space," a Congressional
intelligence report declares. What's worse, this decline comes as
"emerging space powers such as Russia, India and China" are getting
better and better at snooping from above.

Researchers at Purdue University are finding that expensive radiation detectors may not be as effective as widely distributed chips in cell phones.

The Department of Homeland Security will proceed with the first phase of a controversial satellite-surveillance program, even though an independent review found the department hasn't yet ensured the program will comply with privacy laws.

After the spectacular failure of the last spy satellite effort, the Bush administration is trying once again to put a new set of government eyes in space through a $1.7 billion project approved last week whose goal is to have two new satellites in orbit by 2012.

Images from high-resolution military spacecraft, combined with powerful change detection software at ground processing facilities, is enabling the space-based identification and tracking of specific Taliban and al Qaeda individuals in the isolated villages and rugged terrain of Afghanistan.

Chinese scientists have proposed a theoretical "anti-cloak" that would partially cancel the effect of an invisibility cloak.