Commercial Satellites as “National Technical Means”
U.S. intelligence agencies could do more to incorporate commercial satellite capabilities into the U.S. intelligence satellite architecture, an advisory panel told the Directors of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in a study last year.
The report (pdf) laid out several scenarios for integrating commercial capabilities into the government’s “National Technical Means.”
The panel’s preferred scenario “that mitigates the most risk is for the US government to competitively acquire satellites and supporting infrastructure to ensure maximum control and access to imagery data on demand.”
Purchase of satellites is warranted, the panel said, because “The US government cannot rely on or be dependent on any external entity to responsively get needed data.”
The report “contains general findings about the technical competency and business viability of commercial remote sensing vendors, suppliers, and CDPs [commercial data providers] in the United States.”
The report also specifies the standards that commercial vendors need to meet in order to satisfy a spectrum of intelligence requirements.
“The requested review was in response to concerns/criticisms by Congress of how NGA and NRO have under-utilized commercial remote sensing capabilities.”
The unclassified report has not been publicly released, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News. See “Independent Study of the Roles of Commercial Remote Sensing in the Future National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG),” Report to the Directors of the NGA and the NRO, July 16, 2007.
The current lack of public trust in AI risks inhibiting innovation and adoption of AI systems, meaning new methods will not be discovered and new benefits won’t be felt. A failure to uphold high standards in the technology we deploy will also place our nation at a strategic disadvantage compared to our competitors.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.