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08 September, 2008
Unknown to most of the world, satellites can perform astonishing and often menacing feats.
This should come as no surprise when one reflects on the massive effort poured into satellite technology since the Soviet satellite Sputnik, launched in 1957, caused panic in the U.S.
A spy satellite can monitor a person’s every movement, even when the “target” is indoors or deep in the interior of a building or traveling rapidly down the highway in a car, in any kind of weather (cloudy, rainy, stormy).
There is no place to hide on the face of the earth. It takes just three satellites to blanket the world with detection capacity. Besides tracking a person’s every action and relaying the data to a computer screen on earth, amazing powers of satellites include reading a person’s mind, monitoring conversations, manipulating electronic instruments and physically assaulting someone with a laser beam.
Remote reading of someone’s mind through satellite technology is quite bizarre, yet it is being done; it is a reality at present, not a chimera from a futuristic dystopia!
To those who might disbelieve
my description of satellite surveillance, I’d simply cite a
tried-and-true Roman proverb: Time reveals all things (tempus omnia
revelat).
But behind the facade of useful satellite technology is a Pandora’s box of surreptitious technology. Spy satellites - as opposed to satellites for broadcasting and exploration of space - have little or no civilian use - except, perhaps, to subject one’s enemy or favorite malefactor to surveillance.
With reference to detecting things from space, Ford Rowan, author of Techno Spies, wrote,
Using this reference, we can establish 1970 as the
approximate date of the beginning of satellite surveillance - and the
end of the possibility of privacy for several people.
NASA launches all satellites, from either Cape Kennedy in Florida or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, whether they are military-operated, CIA-operated, corporate-operated or NASA’s own. Blasting satellites into orbit is a major expense. It is also difficult to make a quick distinction between government and private satellites; research by NASA is often applicable to all types of satellites.
Neither the ARPA nor NASA makes satellites; instead, they underwrite the technology while various corporations produce the hardware.
Corporations involved in the satellite business include:
Spy satellites were already functioning and violating people’s right to privacy when President Reagan proposed his “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or Star Wars, in the early 80s, long after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had demonstrated the military usefulness of satellites.
Star Wars was supposed to shield the U.S. from nuclear missiles, but shooting down missiles with satellite lasers proved infeasible, and many scientists and politicians criticized the massive program. Nevertheless, Star Wars gave an enormous boost to surveillance technology and to what may be called “black bag” technology, such as mind reading and lasers that can assault someone, even someone indoors.
Aviation Week & Space Technology mentioned in 1984 that,
It was bound to be abused, yet no group is fighting to cut back or subject to democratic control this terrifying new technology.
As one diplomat to the U.N. remarked,
The typical American actually may have little to fear, since the chances of being subjected to satellite surveillance are rather remote. Why someone would want to subject someone else to satellite surveillance might seem unclear at first, but to answer the question you must realize that only the elite have access to such satellite resources.
Only the rich and powerful could even begin to contemplate putting someone under satellite surveillance, whereas a middle- or working-class person would not even know where to begin. Although access to surveillance capability is thus largely a function of the willfulness of the powerful, nevertheless we should not conclude that only the powerless are subjected to it. Perhaps those under satellite surveillance are mainly the powerless, but wealthy and famous people make more interesting targets, as it were, so despite their power to resist an outrageous violation of their privacy, a few of them may be victims of satellite surveillance.
No
claim of being subject to satellite surveillance can be dismissed a
priori.
A society in the grips of the National Security State
is necessarily kept in the dark about such things. Obviously,
though, if one satellite can monitor simultaneously 40 or 80 human
targets, then the number of possible victims of satellite
surveillance would be doubled or quadrupled.
One satellite firm reports that,
A surveillance satellite exploits the fact that the human body emits infra-red radiation, or radiant heat; according to William E. Burrows, author of Deep Black,
But opinion differs as to whether infrared radiation can be detected in cloudy conditions. According to one investigator, there is a way around this potential obstacle:
This same person reported in 1988 that,
But even at the time
she wrote that, satellite resolution, down to each sub-pixel, on the
contrary, was much more precise, a matter of millimeters - a fact
which is more comprehensible when we consider the enormous
sophistication of satellites, as reflected in such tools as
multi-spectral scanners, interferometers, visible infrared spin scan
radiometers, cryo-coolers and hydride sorption beds.
As early as 1981, G. Harry Stine (in his book Confrontation in Space), could write that Computers have “read” human minds by means of deciphering the outputs of electroencephalographs (EEGs).
Early work in this area was reported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1978. EEG’s are now known to be crude sensors of neural activity in the human brain, depending as they do upon induced electrical currents in the skin. Magnetoencephalographs (MEGs) have since been developed using highly sensitive electromagnetic sensors that can directly map brain neural activity even through the bones of the skull.
The responses of the visual areas of the brain have now been mapped by Kaufman and others at Vanderbilt University.
Work may
already be under way in mapping the neural activity of other
portions of the human brain using the new MEG techniques. It does
not require a great deal of prognostication to forecast that the
neural electromagnetic activity of the human brain will be totally
mapped within a decade or so and that crystalline computers can be
programmed to decipher the electromagnetic neural signals.
In 1994, a scientist noted that,
I believe that surveillance satellites began reading minds - or rather, began allowing the minds of targets to be read - sometime in the early 1990s. Some satellites in fact can read a person’s mind from space.
The means is a little sketchy, like much of this technology
in general, but the basic procedure is to bounce channels of energy
from the scalp, into space to be down-linked by giant mirrors or
prisms to a ground station on earth, at which point the data is fed
into a computer that has been programmed with information from the
science of brain mapping.
In that novel, people hold onto a metal knob to get “feely effects” in a simulated orgy where,
Though not yet applied to sex, the Neurophone - or more precisely, a Neurophone-like-instrument - has been adapted for use by satellites and can alter behavior in the manner of subliminal audio “broadcasting,” but works on a different principle.
After converting sound into electrical impulses, the Neurophone transmits radio waves into the skin, where they proceed to the brain, bypassing the ears and the usual cranial auditory nerve and causing the brain to recognize a neurological pattern as though it were an audible communication, though often on a subconscious level. A person stimulated with this device “hears” by a very different route.
The Neurophone can cause the deaf to “hear” again. Ominously, when its
inventor applied for a second patent on an improved Neurophone, the
National Security Agency tried unsuccessfully to appropriate the
device.
Burrows observed that satellites can,
Walls, ceilings, and floors are no barrier to the monitoring of conversation from space.
Even if you were in a high-rise building with ten stories above you and ten stories below, a satellite’s audio surveillance of your speech would still be unhampered. Inside or outside, in any weather, anyplace on earth, at any time of day, a satellite “parked” in space in a geosynchronous orbit (whereby the satellite, because it moves in tandem with the rotation of the earth, seems to stand still) can detect the speech of a human target.
Apparently, as with reconnaissance in general, only by
taking cover deep within the bowels of a lead-shielding-fortified
building could you escape audio monitoring by a satellite.
For example, the digital alarm on a watch, tiny though it is, can be set off by a satellite from hundreds of miles up in space. And the light bulb of a lamp can be burned out with the burst of a laser from a satellite. In addition, street lights and porch lights can be turned on and off at will by someone at the controls of a satellite, the means being an electromagnetic beam which reverses the light’s polarity. Or a lamp can be made to burn out in a burst of blue light when the switch is flicked.
As with other satellite powers, it makes no difference if
the light is under a roof or a ton of concrete - it can still be
manipulated by a satellite laser. Types of satellite lasers include
the free-electron laser, the x-ray laser, the neutral-particle-beam
laser, the chemical-oxygen-iodine laser and the mid-infra-red
advanced chemical laser.
A satellite beam can also be locked onto a human target, with the victim being unable to evade the menace by running around or driving around, and can cause harm through application of pressure on, for example, one’s head. How severe a beating can be administered from space is a matter of conjecture, but if the ability to actually murder someone this way has not yet been worked out, there can be no doubt that it will soon become a reality.
There is no mention in satellite
literature of a murder having been committed through the agency of a
satellite, but the very possibility should make the world take note.
In trying thereby to get a person to do what you want him to do, it does not matter if the target is asleep or awake. A message could be used to compel a person to say something you would like him to say, in a manner so spontaneous that no one would be able to realize the words were contrived by someone else; there is no limit to the range of ideas an unsuspecting person can be made to voice.
The human target might be compelled to use an obscenity, or persons around the target might be compelled to say things that insult the target. A sleeping person, on the other hand, is more vulnerable and can be made to do something, rather than merely say something. An action compelled by an audio subliminal message could be to roll off the bed and fall onto the floor, or to get up and walk around in a trance.
However, the sleeping person can only be made to engage in such an action for only a minute or so, it seems, since he usually wakes up by then and the “spell” wears. It should be noted here that although the “hypnotism” of a psychoanalyst is bogus, unconscious or subconscious manipulation of behavior is genuine.
But the brevity of a subliminal spell effected by a satellite might be overcome by more research.
A Russian doctor, Igor Smirnov, whom the magazine labeled a “subliminal Dr. Strangelove,” is one scientist studying the possibilities:
Combining this research with satellite technology - which has already been done in part - could give its masters the possibility for the perfect crime, since satellites operate with perfect discretion, perfect concealment.
All these satellite powers can be abused with
impunity. A satellite makes a “clean getaway,” as it were. Even if a
given victim became aware of how a crime was effected, no one would
believe him, and he would be powerless to defend himself or fight
back.
As writer Sandra Hochman foresaw near the beginning of the satellite age, though seriously underestimating the sophistication of the technology involved:
This terror is in the here and now. It is not located in the mind of an eccentric scientist or futurologist.
Satellite surveillance is currently being abused.
Thousands of Americans are under satellite surveillance and have
been stripped of their privacy. And presently they would have little
or no recourse in their struggle against the iniquity, since
technology advances well ahead of social institutions.
(As an article in Science explained,
As long as his tormentor or tormentors - those with the resources to hire a satellite - desire, the victim will be subject to continuous scrutiny. His movements will be known, his conversations heard, his thoughts picked clean, and his whole life subjected to bogus moralizing, should his tormentor diabolically use the information gained.
A sadist could harass his target with sound bites, or audio messages, directly broadcast into his room; with physical assault with a laser; with subliminal audio messages that disturb his sleep or manipulate persons around him into saying something that emotionally distresses him; with lasers that turn off street lights as he approaches them; with tampering with lamps so that they burn out when he hits the switch; and in general with the knowledge gained through the omniscient eyes and ears of satellites.
In short, a person with access to satellite technology could make
his victim’s life a living nightmare, a living hell.
According to an article in Time magazine from 1997,
The Journal of Defense & Diplomacy stated in 1985 that,
In addition, The New York Times reported in 1997 that
But this last article discussed
photographic reconnaissance, in which satellites took pictures of
various sites on earth and ejected a capsule containing film to be
recovered and processed, whereas the state of the art in satellite
technology is imaging, detection of targets on earth in real time.
Currently, industry is hard at work miniaturizing surveillance
satellites in order to save money and be in a position to fill the
heavens with more satellites.
Since actually a satellite is rather passive in that it reflects to a ground station on earth a beam of energy containing information; the giant mirrors and prisms of the satellite do the crucial reflecting, thereby uniting, in a manner of speaking, two points on earth, point A, the ground station, and point B, the unfortunate target.
No satellite features an on-board EEG, Neurophone, brain-mapping device or other nefarious instruments.
Instead, the satellite is a means of delivering information that, when received by a technician at a ground station on earth, can be used for mind reading, conversation monitoring, and so forth. Also, no satellite has ever read a person’s mind per se; that can only be done by a human being in the very special situation of access to the information down-linked to a satellite’s ground station.
Thus, it should be clear that the satellite in space is only one link—although an inseparable one—in the technology of satellite surveillance. Yet no source of information on satellites indicates whether the abuse of satellite surveillance is mediated by the government or corporations or both.
More telling is the following disclosure by the author of Satellite Surveillance (1991):
Few people are aware of the destruction of the rights of some Americans through satellite surveillance, and fewer still have any inclination to oppose it, but unless we do, 1984 looms ever closer.
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