[iwar] U.S. blurs high-tech White House images

U.S. blurs high-tech White House images

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ted Bridis

Dec. 23, 2003 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- Deferring to Secret Service worries
about terrorists, the government is deliberately blurring its
highest-quality aerial photographs over Washington to hide objects in plain
view on the roofs of the White House, Capitol and Treasury Department.

The government also obscured aerial views of the Naval Observatory compound
where Vice President Dick Cheney lives. It made no effort to blur detailed
photographs showing the Pentagon, Supreme Court, CIA headquarters, Justice
Department or FBI headquarters.

Experts said they feared the unusual decision reflects a troublesome move
toward new government limits on commercial satellite and aerial photography,
a booming industry driven by recent technology advances that includes some
major companies based outside the United States.

Some commercial satellites already can snap photographs almost as detailed
as images shot from airplanes that were ordered blurred by the government.

Experts also questioned the effectiveness of blurring one set of
government-financed photographs. Tourists can see the roofs of the White
House and U.S. Capitol from dozens of tall buildings downtown, and the Web
site for the National Park Service shows a June 2002 photograph of the White
House from atop the Washington Monument.

``We have to accept that we're not going to be invisible from space
anymore,'' said James Lewis, a satellites expert for the Washington-based
Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``The knee-jerk reaction is
to turn it off. Once in a while that makes sense, but not very often.''

Some private companies that already purchased this most recent collection of
detailed photographs did not know some had been degraded by the government
until contacted by The Associated Press.

``This is the first time we've seen anything like this,'' said Chris Becwar
of GlobeXplorer LLC of Walnut Creek, Calif., which makes satellite and
aerial photographs available over popular Web sites. ``We'd prefer that it
not be there.''

Becwar said the company will consider replacing the degraded government
photographs with other commercially available images of downtown Washington
that haven't been altered.

The Secret Service ordered the photographs degraded as a condition of
permitting a contractor's twin-engine Piper Navajo Chieftain to fly directly
over Washington in April 2002, where such flights have been heavily
restricted since the 2001 terror attacks.

Secret Service spokesman John Gill said the agency worried that the
high-altitude photographs, so detailed that pedestrians can be seen in
crosswalks, ``may expose security operations.''

Mary Hiatt, a vice president for EarthData International of Maryland LLC,
said the Secret Service ``gave us guidance as to what they had concerns
about,'' and the company used commercial software to blur parts of some
photographs and obscure parts of others.

The affected images include:

_The White House, where the roof is obscured to hide objects in plain view.

_The nearby Old Executive Office Building where many presidential aides
work. The roof on that photo is obscured and interior courtyards blurred.

_The Treasury Department, next door to the White House, where the roof also
is obscured and interior courtyards blurred.

_The Capitol, where the main building and five nearby congressional office
buildings are blurred.

_The Naval Observatory compound where the vice presidential residence is,
which is blurred.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which paid for the photographs, has been
distributing them publicly since last December without formally
acknowledging they were altered. The Washington photographs were part of a
national project to create high-resolution images of 133 cities, including
New York, Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Las Vegas and Dallas.

About half the cities already have been photographed, and none of the images
were deliberately degraded for security reasons, said Scott Harris, a
spokesman for the Geological Survey.

-- This communication is confidential to the parties it is intended to serve --
Fred Cohen - http://all.net/ - fc@all.net - fc@unhca.com - tel/fax: 925-454-0171
Fred Cohen & Associates - University of New Haven - Security Posture

------------------
http://all.net/

Yahoo! Groups Links

To visit your group on the web, go to:
 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iwar/

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
 iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
 http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Received on Thu Dec 25 21:37:13 2003