Meet the classified artificial brain being developed by US intelligence programs
But Executive Order 12333 outlines principles governing intelligence agencies and doesn’t apply in the same way to the private Earth-observation companies that have proliferated in recent years, BlackSky being one of them. Corporations can point their telescopes pretty much anywhere they like. Although the government does reserve the right to exercise “shutter control,” prohibiting photography of a certain area, it has never done so (sometimes the government does buy exclusive access to an area, a practice known as “checkbook shutter control”). Limits do exist on the resolutions at which private companies can sell images to the public and to other countries.
For the most part, companies like Maxar, Planet, and BlackSky take pictures that anyone with a fat enough checkbook can purchase — including you, and including organizations like the NRO. That raises some interesting legal questions that researchers like Aftergood are still trying to figure out: if NRO was interested in surveilling the US, and can’t deliberately use its satellites to focus in on your house, could it simply buy pictures of your house from a private company instead?
The NRO did not provide a specific answer on commercial data’s role in Sentient. But limits, says Aftergood, should still exist on paid-for data. “What they do with that should in some way be mission-oriented,” says Aftergood. “They’re not supposed to be snooping for snooping’s sake.”