Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [94]
But it is the American company GeoEye’s newest satellite that demonstrates the astonishing overlap between government and corporate intelligence technology. It’s not just that the private sector has access to the same types of satellite technology as U.S. spy agencies. In this case, companies will be using the same satellite as some of the nation’s most sophisticated intelligence operatives.
GeoEye participates in a program called NextView run by the federal government’s spy satellite operator, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The program is designed to allow the federal government to pick up much of the cost of developing the next generation of spy satellites, which cost millions to design, build, and launch. Under the NextView program, GeoEye developed a new satellite, and the NGA kicked in $237 million federal tax dollars to help build it. The contract allows GeoEye to use the satellite for its commercial clients, too.
Here’s what GeoEye said in its May 2008 quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): “The Company anticipates that NGA will account for approximately half of the satellites’ imagery-taking capacity during this time, with the remaining capacity available to generate commercial sales, including sales to international ground station customers and municipal customers.”1
The company launched the new satellite, GeoEye-1, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in late August 2008. Boeing rockets were used. Technicians from General Dynamics prepped the satellite. GeoEye-1 spends much of its time taking pictures for the CIA and the Department of Defense, and the rest taking pictures for paying clients, which have included Wal-Mart, commodities traders, and commercial fishermen.
GeoEye’s corporate spokesman is Mark Brender, an amiable former ABC News Pentagon producer. Sitting in a conference room at GeoEye’s headquarters, he flashes a picture on a display screen of the first spy photo ever taken. It is a grainy image taken by the highly classified spy satellite Corona on August 18, 1960. You can barely make out an airstrip at a base called Mys Shmidta on the Far East coast of what was then the Soviet Union. A parking area is also visible, but that’s about all.2 Still, the image was revolutionary at the time. Military leaders could now see what the enemy was building, and where. Piecing together the observed activities, military officers could infer the Soviet Union’s overall strategy. Brender flashes more images on the screen. Today’s commercial satellites can see individual people walking on the ground. They can see cars well enough to pick out the make and model. They can see coral reefs underwater in the ocean.
“For forty or fifty years, the intelligence community kept their overhead intelligence capabilities highly secret,” Brender says. “This technology was the family jewels of U.S and Soviet intelligence. It was developed in order for two cold war rivals to be able to watch each other very carefully.”
The doctrine of the time, Brender points out, was called mutually assured destruction. Neither side wanted to attack first, because the other side had the ability to strike back with devastating consequences.
Now, though, the technology is in corporate hands. “Now we’ve moved into an era of mutually assured observation,” Brender says. “Governments used this technology to better understand the capabilities of the enemy. There’s no reason companies can’t use this technology to better understand the capabilities of a competitor.”
GeoEye plans to launch a fourth satellite in 2011. GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite, launched in 1999, orbits the Earth from the north pole to the south pole and back again every ninety-eight minutes—“It’s moving fast,” says Brender, about 17,000 miles per hour. That’s about four miles every second. Because the Earth rotates underneath the satellites as they orbit at an altitude of more than 680 kilometers