1
0
“No one can hide,” one of five sources familiar with a classified program to construct a new global spy satellite system, told Reuters about its potential surveillance capabilities.
Designed and under development by the SpaceX Starshield unit, details of the classified contract recovered by Reuters state it’s under development for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the many lesser-known US intelligence agencies, and that manages spy satellites.
Nearly ten years since Edward Snowden revealed that the extent of the National Security Agency’s top-secret mass data collection software was beyond what anyone thought possible, the NRO responded to a request for comment from Reuters by saying “the National Reconnaissance Office is developing the most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen”.
The spokesperson added it “would enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe, aiding intelligence and military operations”.
The revelations show just how embedded billionaire rocket developer Elon Musk and his company have become inside the national security apparatus.
The technology would consist of hundreds of small satellites operating in swarms in low Earth orbit that would enable continuous imaging of any part of the Earth’s surface—the veritable “panopticon” of Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, and eventually of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Three of the sources told Reuters that between 2020 and now, a dozen prototypes have already been tested. A US government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government ever acknowledged, two of the three said.
Chinese state-affiliated media and a PLA-run Facebook group raged about the revelations, coming just days after the US House voted to ban TikTok in the United States on surveillance and national security grounds. The hypocrisy deepened when on Monday the US representative to the UN Sec. Council introduced a resolution reaffirming the fundamental obligations that parties have under the Outer Space Treaty and not putting nuclear weapons in space.
Such an obligation is enshrined in the treaty’s fourth article, but the first one states that “…use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind,” which “the most capable, diverse, and resilient space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system the world has ever seen,” most certainly conflicts with.
A social media account run by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said the SpaceX program exposed the United States’ “shamelessness and double standards” as Washington accuses Chinese tech companies of threatening US security.
“We urge U.S. companies to not help a villain do evil,” the post read.
“The United States’ high-profile intelligence reconnaissance of countries or regions it is concerned about will inevitably cause some hot issues to become more sensitive or even escalate,” Wang Yanan, chief editor of Aerospace Knowledge, a magazine overseen by the ruling Communist Party, told The Global Times, a Chinese state-controlled newspaper, in an interview published on Sunday. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: SpaceX headquarters at Hawthorne, California. PC: Steve Jurvetson, CC 2.0. Flickr
We Humbly Ask For Your Support—Follow the link here to see all the ways, monetary and non-monetary.
