Eyeless in Gaza

Yes, I purloined the title. Sue me. But there is a point to it; after all this time it finally occurs to me that the USofA intelligent community is falling down on the job. It's well documented that simple commercial satellites have high resolution cameras.

The best commercially available spatial resolution for optical imagery is 25 cm, which means that one pixel represents a 25-by-25-cm area on the ground — roughly the size of your laptop. A handful of companies capture data with 25-cm to 1-meter resolution, which is considered high to very high resolution in this industry.

So, what's been going on with the USofA's satellite imaging since the iconic Keyhole machines of the 1960s?

What can we civilians know about what the intelligence community can see from up in the sky? Here's a long essay.

In laboratory conditions, SAR has achieved resolutions less than a millimeter,

Now, that's implied to not be operational. Color me skeptical. When I was in DC (mid 70s to mid 80s), it was widely known(?) that Keyhole family satellites allowed one to read the NYT. From space. And that public disclosure of such capabilities from the intelligence community was very old news within the community.

What set me off on this old topic? A report in today's (dead trees version) NYT about the fiasco with the relief convoy.

The convoy that arrived in Gaza City before dawn on Thursday ended tragically. More than 100 Palestinians were killed after many thousands of people massed around trucks laden with food and supplies, Gazan health officials said.

Israel and the Palestinians now argue about who did what. Today's NRO (national reconnaissance office) machines certainly are overhead (if not then NRO/NSA/CIA are incompetent) and keeping an eye on all that. At least tell the two sides what really happened.