President Donald Trump looks to have shared a photograph of an intelligence briefing that could have exposed US military secrets to the world while taunting Iran over Twitter.
Iran on Thursday suffered a failure of a satellite launch vehicle that blew up on the ground. Immediately after the test, commercial satellites photographed the wreckage and sold the images to civilian analysts.
But on Friday, Trump shared an image that put the commercial satellite photography to shame. Trump's photo looks like it was snapped from a large print out of a very detailed close up of the launch. The notations and presentation of the image suggests it likely comes from US intelligence services, possibly in a briefing for the president.
In releasing the high-res image, Trump noted Iran had suffered a "catastrophic accident," adding: "I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One."
Images shared on Wednesday were much more distant and less detailed.
So Trump's photo revealed either that the US has fantastic satellite photography capabilities, far beyond what Iran, or even US civilians can get their hands on, or that the US had a drone close enough to take pictures.
However, the extreme angle of the picture makes it look like it wasn't taken from space, but rather from an aircraft.
Some of the highest-resolution imagery available commercially comes from the company Maxar, whose WorldView-2 satellite sports 46-centimeter resolution.
But the image shown in the president's tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. "The resolution is amazingly high," says Panda. "I would think it's probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I've ever seen."
Panda says that the tweet discloses "some pretty amazing capabilities that the public simply wasn't privy to before this."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about the image to the White House, which declined to comment....
Glare in the center of the image suggest the image in the tweet was itself a photo of a briefing slide. Panda suggests it could have been displayed on a computer screen in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. It's also possible it was a photo of a piece of paper.
Either way, Panda notes that a small redaction in the upper left-hand corner suggests the intelligence community had cleared the image for release by the president.
But both he and Hanham question whether releasing it was a good idea. "You really risk giving away the way you know things," Hanham says. "That allows people to adapt and hide how they carry out illicit activity."
"These are closely held national secrets," Panda adds. "We don't even share a lot of this kind of imagery with our closest allies." In tweeting it out to the world, Trump is letting Iran know exactly what the U.S. is capable of. He's also letting others know as well, Panda says. "The Russians and the Chinese, you're letting them know that these are the kind of things that the United States has the capability of seeing," he says.
A U.S. defense official told CNBC that the picture in Trump’s tweet, which appeared to be a snapshot of a physical copy of the satellite image, was included in a Friday intelligence briefing.
Experts told CNBC that the shot was likely never meant for public view....
Speaking to reporters before departing the White House Friday, Trump said he had the right to release the photo.
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But the quality of the photograph quickly raised the eyebrows of national security experts, who say that images this clear are rarely made public.
“I’m not supposed to see stuff this good. He’s not supposed to share it. I’ve honestly never seen an image this sharp,” said Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network and director of the Datayo Project at the One Earth Future Foundation.
Hanham suspected the shot was taken from a high-altitude aerial vehicle using tracking technology, such as an RC-135S Cobra Ball or a similar aircraft.
“This will have global repercussions,” said Joshua Pollack, a nuclear proliferation expert and editor of the Nonproliferation Review.
“The utter carelessness of it all,” Pollack said. “So reckless.”
"It identifies for the world (not just Iran) the methods we have attained" in collecting imagery intelligence, which refers to information collected through photographs and other images, he said. "One doesn't use intel for the purposes of taunting. The Russians and the Chinese will be very happy to study this."
Alex Stamos, the Director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and adjunct professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, echoed that view, writing, "The propensity for saying the quiet part out loud is less amusing when it blows the cover on a multi-decade, multi-president campaign to disrupt Iranian missile and nuclear development with minimal loss of life."
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Alex Finley, another former CIA officer, agreed, telling Insider that Trump's actions were "outrageous and reckless," but that "it's hardly the first time we've seen this. And maybe he has a right to act this way, even if it is moronic."
Amateur satellite trackers say they believe an image tweeted by President Trump on Friday came from one of America's most advanced spy satellites.
The image almost certainly came from a satellite known as USA 224, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite-tracker based in the Netherlands. The satellite was launched by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2011. Almost everything about it remains highly classified, but Langbroek says that based on its size and orbit, most observers believe USA 224 is one of America's multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellites.
"It's basically a very large telescope, not unlike the Hubble Space Telescope," Langbroek says. "But instead of looking up to the stars, it looks down to the earth's surface and makes very detailed images."
But a small community of amateur satellite trackers was far more interested in the picture than the words. These individuals use backyard telescopes to watch satellites whizzing across the sky, and they know where most of them are—even classified ones like USA 224. "They're super bright in the sky and are easy to find," says Michael Thompson, a graduate student in astrodynamics at Purdue University who spots satellites in his spare time. Once a satellite is seen, it's relatively easy to work out exactly where it will be at any point in future. "Using math to calculate an orbit is really easy," he says.
Thompson was one of the first to use an amateur-curated database of known satellites to point the finger at USA 224. He showed it flew over the Iranian space center shortly after the accident.
Langbroek went further still. He was able to reconstruct the picture taken by USA 224 by matching the obliqueness of the circular launch pad in the image tweeted by Trump. His calculation showed that the photo was taken from the vantage of USA 224. Langbroek and another online researcher, Christiaan Triebert, also used shadows cast by towers around the launch pad as sun dials—allowing them to verify the time at which the photo was taken.
Both techniques suggest the pictures were snapped by USA 224, which flew near the site at 2:14 PM local time. "The match was perfect, basically," Langbroek says.
"When I saw the image, it was so crystal clear and high-resolution that I did not believe it could come from a satellite," says Melissa Hanham, a satellite imagery expert and deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network in Vienna, Austria. But she finds the new analysis persuasive. "Given that the satellite is in position at that moment, it's now very likely that it was [the source of the picture]," she says.
Hanham says she is amazed a satellite can provide such clear imagery. Spy satellites must peer down through earth's atmosphere, which is a bit like trying to look at objects in the bottom of a swimming pool. They also must snap their pictures while whizzing across the sky. Both effects can blur the fine details in images.
"I'm now scratching my head and curious about how they account for the effects of the atmosphere and motion of the objects," she says.
And she says she thinks she's not alone. Others will be trying to use the image to learn more about how USA 224 works. "I imagine adversaries are going to take a look at this image and reverse-engineer it to figure out how the sensor itself works and what kind of post-production techniques they're using," she says.
He also apparently has tweeted and announced that Dorian is supposed to hit Alabama.
Except it's not.
So all those Alabamazians who are now freaking out and doing hurricane prep are wasting their time and emotional energy.
But you know, that's what you would expect from a stable genius. He knows more than anyone, so even if every tracking map says Alabama is in the clear, we shouldn't believe them.
Posts: 35428 | Location: West: North and South! | Registered: 20 April 2005
Originally posted by Nina: He also apparently has tweeted and announced that Dorian is supposed to hit Alabama.
Except it's not.
So all those Alabamazians who are now freaking out and doing hurricane prep are wasting their time and emotional energy.
But you know, that's what you would expect from a stable genius. He knows more than anyone, so even if every tracking map says Alabama is in the clear, we shouldn't believe them.
You can't make this stuff up. It was the first thing that jumped out when he held up the map.
The original:
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After facing ridicule for suggesting over the weekend that Hurricane Dorian might strike Alabama, Donald Trump apparently decided to try to prove his point on Wednesday.
During a briefing on the storm’s threat to the U.S. east coast, the president had an aide show reporters a dated map from the National Weather Service showing initial projections of Dorian’s track into Florida. Someone appears to have altered the map with a Sharpie to extend the track beyond Florida -- into Alabama.
