Shooting the news from low Earth orbit: An interview with Mark E. Brender, Executive Director of the DigitalGlobe Foundation

by Dwayne Day Monday, January 6, 2014 Mark Brender is one of the pioneers in the use of satellite imaging for news gathering. The first reconnaissance satellites entered service in the early 1960s, but they were highly classified and their imagery was only available to government officials and the intelligence and military communities. The United States developed a civilian remote sensing satellite named Landsat, but its images were deliberately restricted to much lower resolution (the size of objects that could be spotted on the ground) than the classified satellites. By the mid-1980s, however, better resolution imagery was becoming available to civilians, and Brender was one of the first people to spot the opportunities that this imagery presented for news gathering. A portion of a SPOT 1 image of Chernobyl shortly after the accident at the nuclear reactor there. The image was the first from a commercial satellite used in media coverage, allowing media access to locations otherwise off-limits. (credit: CNES/Astrium) DD: How did you get your start with satellite imagery? We began lobbying Capitol Hill and the Executive Branch to encourage the government to let spy satellite technology move from the black world of intelligence to the white world of commerce. And when that happens, we wanted the First Amendment to protect the imagery. MB: While at ABC News in the early 1980’s I came across a quote in the Ladies Home Journal prediction’s column for the next 100 years. It was published in 1900. That quote got me thinking. It said, “Space Pictures: "Flying machines will carry powerful telescopes that beam back to earth photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street.” I began wondering why that prediction had not come true for people outside of the intelligence community. I knew that spy satellites existed since the US government launched the first one in secret in 1960. But spy satellite imagery was and is highly classified. The public or people in the media could not see that imagery. Actually, the first ever mention of the words “spy satellite” in a movie was in Ice Station Zebra in 1968 starring Gregory Peck. So knowing wisdom is a function of time and effort and knowing what industry I wanted to get into after my career at ABC News, I formed the Radio and Television News Directions Association’s (RTNDA) “Satellite Imaging Task Force” in 1984. We began lobbying Capitol Hill and the Executive Branch to encourage the government to let spy satellite technology move from the black world of intelligence to the white world of commerce. And when that happens, we wanted the First Amendment to protect the imagery. In other words, the government could not tell you where you could or could not point your space-based camera. The government could not stamp “Secret” on what your camera could see on the surface of the Earth. It was a long slog but all the work paid off when I left ABC News in 1998 to go work for then Denver-based Space Imaging. They were about to launch the world’s first high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite, IKONOS. (It’s still operational today.) I became their Director of Washington Operations. I knew that satellite imagery could be visual truth serum for newsgathering, providing the ultimate high-shot. And the imagery is all map-accurate so it can be tied to a specific location on the Earth. Orbital cameras could keep a close-up eye on areas of the world that some countries may want to keep secret, or be able to see remote places on the planet that are hard to get to.

France-UAE satellite deal shaky after US spy tech discovered onboard

Moscow (Voice of Russia) Jan 07, 2014

File image.

The sale of two intelligence satellites to the UAE by France for nearly a billion dollars could go south after they were found to contain American technology designed to intercept data transmitted to the ground station.
The equipment, costing 3.4 billion dirhams ($930 million), constitutes two high-resolution Pleiades-type Falcon Eye military intelligence satellites, which a top UAE defense source has said contain specific US-made components designed to intercept the satellites' communications with their accompanying ground station, Defensenews.com said in a report.
"The discovery [of the US-made components] was reported to the [office of the] deputy supreme commander [Sheikh Mohamm ed Bin Zayed] in September," an unnamed defense source said. "We have requested the French to change these components and also consulted with the Russian and Chinese firms."
"If this issue is not resolved, the UAE is willing to scrap the whole deal," said the source, adding that the incident has seen an increase in talks with Moscow, which - along with Beijing - has also been a frequent defense tech supplier to the Gulf state.