50 Years of Secret Spying

Thanks Irma of Tampa for your comment on my first post (See, "What the %$#@! is This Blog About?" below). Irma corrected me on the location from which the GeoEye was launched. When I wrote that post earlier this week I was explaining how fed up I was with the way important national news goes unreported while celebrity %$#% makes headlines every day. I was going from my memory. I remembered it as being late last summer and that I thought it was important enough to do a whole 60-minute radio show about it. But of course, after a year of reporting other news stories, the details are vague. Thanks to Irma's correction however, I went back into my files and will tell you a little bit about this GeoEye today. Sept. 6, 2008, the first commercial GeoEye was launched with the help of a Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This commercial imaging device can see a 16-inch area on earth while traveling at a speed of 4.5 miles per second. Note the operative word "commercial" in the previous sentence. This GeoEye - though launched with government help- is a commercial venture. One of the benefits of it is Google Earth, where we can all view anything from Washington DC to Rome to our own houses on our computer screens. But research shows me that the U.S. government was using this technology for almost 50 years before we knew anything about it. The once "Top Secret" program was dubbed "Corona" (like the typewriter) and was a highly classified part of our space program, Discover. Now think about this a minute: If the government could look that closely at us 50 years ago way before we even knew the technology was invented, what can the government do now? I mean, if any company with enough $$$$ can buy its own GeoEye and stare at whatever (or whoever) it pleases, the government has to be way ahead of that. So tell me national media, where the &@%$ are you reporting about this?