EYES IN THE SKY
Around 2000 satellites are circling the Earth right now, with that number set to double by the end of 2020. What do they do, how can we use them, and are they really watching us?
RICHARD A. LOVETT addresses some of the big questions of modern life. Why are there so many satellites? What do they all do? And should be we worried that they are watching us?
EARLY
LAST SPRING Spacex launched a “constellation” of 60 Starlink satellites – the start of a program that will put nearly 1800 new satellites in orbit by the end of 2020, with as many as 40,000 to follow. In the days after the launch, the satellites deployed into a string of bright dots moving in tandem across the sky. “They looked absolutely surreal,” says Chris Johnson, space law advisor to the Secure World Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting sustainable uses of outer space. “People thought it was an alien invasion [or] a missile launch.”
It was also a wake-up call about the increasing cloud of satellites watching our every move.
Not that most of these satellites are specifically designed to spy on us. The Starlink program is intended to provide space-based internet service to the entire planet, thereby ending the divide between internet “haves” and “have-nots” and promoting a more equal-opportunity future.
Other satellites provide telecommunications and the GPS signals we routinely use when we ask our cars or phones to give us directions.
Space-based cameras and other Earthstudying sensors also play important roles in making sure other aspects of modern life run smoothly: “everything from weather monitoring to tracking ships at sea”, Johnson says. They can also help stave off public health risks, by spotting places where conditions are ripe for the proliferation of mosquitos and the spread of West
Nile virus, malaria, Zika virus, or chikungunya fever, for example, or by helping direct emergency responders after an earthquake or typhoon.
According to Johnson, it’s even possible to track the
It’s possible to track the number of cars in the parking lots of stores, using that to see whether business is increasing or slumping – information of value not just to the company, but to investors trying to decide whether to buy its stock.
number of cars in the parking lots of stores, such as “all the Wal-marts in America”, using that to see whether business is increasing or slumping – information of value not just to the company, but to investors trying to decide whether to buy its stock.
All told, says Kevin Pomfret, a former satellite imagery analyst turned space-law attorney with the firm of Williams Mullins, in Tysons, Virginia, there are a “host” of ways in which satellite information can be used, “which people don’t realise, because they are behind the scenes”.
I personally first became aware of the power of this information a few years ago, when I got to wondering if the course of a local five-kilometre road race was accurate. (In my spare time, I’m a coach, and one of my runners had run a time that seemed too fast to be real.)
The race was a simple out-and-back, and I knew where it started and that the turnaround had been at a mailbox, near a farmhouse driveway. I discovered that the satellite images were good enough that I could not only find the farmhouse but see the mailbox. Based on that, I used an internet app which allowed me to overlay a satellite image and mouse click a route to measure the course – and found it to be 300 metres short.
Curious, I tested the app’s measuring abilities on a college football field and a local track. The track came up within a half metre of the correct distance: impressive, because it wasn’t easy to measure around the curves. But the stunner was the football field. American football fields are 100 yards long. I got 100.1 yards – limited mostly by my ability to position the cursor. I had, I realised, discovered an incredibly precise measuring tool, which I have since used many times. But more importantly, it was my personal introduction to the power of satellite-based monitoring technologies, and how many potential uses there are for them.
“[It’s] everything you can imagine,” Johnson says. “A lot of companies are still trying to imagine what else we can use imagery for.” Overall, he says, “people are trying to get a grip on how this changes everything in our society”.
One change, of course, is that it’s now possible for anyone to peer at almost anything on the globe.
In some ways that’s a good thing. Not all that long ago, it was easy for governments to hide clandestine activities by conducting them in remote areas, far from spies. Now, even ordinary citizens can spot such activities from space, as happened in 2018, when a variety of people and organisations, including the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, used Google Earth and related sources to prove that “vocational schools” for China’s Uighur Muslims were actually detention camps, complete with watchtowers, reinforced walls and razor wire.
But it also means you can peer into your neighbour’s backyard or see if their car was at home when the satellite flew over. The images are good enough that when I try them on my own neighbourhood, I can see lounge chairs circling swimming pools in apartment buildings, count the number of people waiting at a nearby bus stop, and easily distinguish cars from vans, trucks and buses. What I can’t do is read licence plates, identify individual people, or determine which bus the people at the bus stop eventually board. Partly, that’s because even the best commercially available satellite images don’t have the kind of resolution needed to do this. Whatever you might see in science fiction movies, and whatever might become possible for the military, “we’re not going to have licence-plate readers in space in the near future”, Pomfret says.
Furthermore, even the best images are merely snapshots – isolated in space and time.
That said, it is possible to compare images taken at separate times. Planet Labs, an Earth-imaging company based in San Francisco, California, is running a constellation of satellites dedicated to taking images of the complete surface of the Earth at least twice a day at resolutions up to 72 centimetres/per pixel. Based on that, Planet used images of the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus epidemic, to show that by late January the city had become “almost bereft of cars and people” in response to China’s efforts to quarantine the rapidly expanding virus. “A January 28 image of a bridge across the Yangtze [River] shows it deserted of vehicles,” the company said in a 30 January press release – a radical change from a 12 January image showing a “surge” of vehicles “flooding” across the same bridge.
But impressive as that is, it’s not the same as tracking individual people. Nor are satellite images ever likely to pose much risk to that kind of privacy, Pomfret says, because even if the technology becomes available to recognise individual people from space – or to read licence plates – satellites aren’t likely to be the easiest way of doing it.
There are a number of other platforms out there, both in the air (such as drones) and on the ground (closed-circuit TV cameras, licence-plate readers, or even Amazon ring doorbell cameras), collecting information about individuals, he says, “so at a general level, satellites aren’t going to be the most effective way to do it”.
Johnson adds that the place where privacy issues are most likely to arise won’t be so much from the satellite images themselves, but from the “big data” consequences of “marrying” these images to groundbased data. For example, he says during our interview, “right now, I’m on a cell phone. The metadata is stored somewhere. I’m also using Wi-fi on my phone. I’ll go to lunch and use my credit card. I’ll probably walk through CCTV cameras. We’re creating a lot of data in our daily activities.”
In other words, if you’re looking for something to fear, don’t fear the satellite images themselves. Fear the combination of how those images might be linked up with everything else.
PJ Blount, a law professor and PHD cybersecurity researcher at the University of Luxembourg, says that legally there are two basic ways of dealing with this. One is the US system, which is based on the premise that anything in public view is open to surveillance by anybody, including the government – although there are laws that keep the military from using its satellites to peer down on US citizens.
Many of the legal cases related to this, he says, have involved the use of airplanes to spot marijuanagrowing operations or environmental infractions by large companies, focussing on the question of whether the government needed to get a judge to issue a warrant in order to obtain the information. That’s potentially an issue for the government, he says, but not for commercially available information.
“If anyone can buy the imagery, in the United States there are very few limitations.”
Europe is different. It has a privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes what has become known as the “right to be forgotten”, prohibiting the accumulation of individual-level cyber data on individuals who prefer to avoid it. “In Europe, you have very good control of your data,” Blount says. “You can call a company and say, ‘Take it out’.” In Europe, he says, the company will comply, but in the US, the answer is ‘No, I don’t have to’.
According to Steven Freeland, a professor of international law at Western Sydney University, Australia’s approach is closer to Europe’s than America’s, with the goal being to facilitate the use of appropriately public data without compromising data privacy. The law also calls for “an operating environment characterised by ubiquitous encryption” – a good thing for preventing hacking, but not for keeping government agencies who know the encryption codes from using them.
“So,” Freeland says, “mixed signals... At this point, Australia is not on the European Commission’s list of countries outside the EU that have an adequate level of data protection.”
Meanwhile, Pomfret believes that people concerned about privacy should remember the many benefits satellites have already given us, and realise that the privacy issues with satellite images aren’t all that different from those with anything else. “My feeling is that lawmakers are going to be less concerned about the platform and more concerned about the data and how it’s used.”