In a generic-looking glass and concrete office building just a few miles from Washington Dulles International Airport, an independent company is—with the full blessing of the government—helping to peel away the last earthly vestiges of cold war secrecy. Unlike Beltway defense companies, where security often starts at the ground floor with guards and gates, GeoEye, one of two U.S. companies selling commercial satellite imagery (the other is DigitalGlobe), is notably open-door until you reach the fourth-floor offices, where a friendly secretary asks, apologetically, whether the visitor is a U.S. citizen.
Inside the company’s headquarters, GeoEye vice president Mark Brender provides a tour of operations. Young engineers in a NASA-style mission control room follow a GeoEye satellite, which is at that moment hurtling around Earth some 423 miles above the ground. Across the hall, GeoEye employees field calls from customers ranging from government agencies to insurance companies. CNN plays continuously on the TV so employees can be alerted to a crisis—a flood, a North Korean nuclear test, a border skirmish—and quickly send orders to the satellite to capture pictures of a specific site.
For a few thousand dollars, pretty much any American can buy up-to-the-moment satellite images of Iran’s nuclear sites, CIA headquarters, even the top secret Air Force testing site, Area 51, in Nevada. Short on cash? If you don’t mind older images, you can view these same sites for free on platforms like Google Earth, the ever-expanding Google service that uses 3-D visualization software to zoom in on different parts of the globe and deliver images to any PC hooked up to the World Wide Web.
This kind of imagery was, for much of the 20th century, part of the eyes-only world of intelligence; from the design of a nuclear submarine to the movement of Israeli troops, one needed high-level clearance for a glimpse. Not anymore. Today, with the advent of civilian satellites here and abroad, we have opened wide the window on places and events that, not so long ago, only spies could see.
Governments around the world have often reacted with outrage to the new age of transparency. And the Pentagon, while hardly thrilled, has had to adjust.
