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from the government-overreach-at-its-finest dept.
The National Security Agency, while primarily occupied by sweeping up billions of phone calls, emails, texts and social media messages each day, wants better visual information about the earth and its residents, too, Admiral Michael Rogers said Wednesday.
"Signals intelligence ... ain't enough, you guys," the NSA chief told a gathering of contractors in the geospatial intelligence business. "We gotta create a much broader picture."
We need "the ability to visualize," he explained, because "man is fundamentally a visual creature."
Rogers, who also heads the Pentagon's United States Cyber Command, spent much of his keynote speech at the GEOINT 2015 conference pitching the technology, intelligence and defense companies in the audience on the importance of working together. The conference's slogan — appropriate, given the government's ever-growing demands — is "open the aperture."
"It's all about partnerships," Rogers told the audience. "How can we harness the power of the commercial sector?"
In how many other ways could the Director of the NSA gain a new perspective on the world?
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by VortexCortex on Sunday June 28 2015, @06:33AM
While data analytics might fall within purview of the NSA, it is the scope of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) [nro.gov] to watch and listen over this planet for the USA.
We really could defund the NSA and give it all to the NRO, and I'd be happy -- Despite NASA's shuttle decommission the USA still launches the biggest rockets in the world, thanks to the NRO. [youtube.com] The NRO observes from space and is the true reason we have nothing to fear from any army or terrorist force on Earth -- We can see them coming. No force on Earth make a bold move without the NRO noticing, not even nature. The NRO helps with weather observation and natural disasters such as hurricanes, the Haitian earthquake, Sri Lankan Tsunami and Japan's Fukushima disaster. They actually help preserve the security of nations.
I can get behind "spying" that increases our foothold in space and doesn't creep into my bedroom via my own technology. Hell, the NRO even gifted NASA three Hubble class telescopes the NRO doesn't need anymore, like a bigger sibling's hand me downs. They're not fitted with optics for deep space observation and the NRO made NASA promise not to point them at Earth, so now people are thinking up new missions for the spy satellites. [space.com] Perhaps one will wind up doing recon on Mars. If you can listen and read from space, that's more than enough to ensure national security; But that's not the NSA's jurisdiction -- they're petty citizen spying operations. Those who actually support real National Security work at the NRO.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday June 28 2015, @07:17AM
Yeah, but distinction without a difference.....
The Director of the NRO reports to both
the Director of National Intelligence and
the Secretary of Defense.
Here are a list of other agencies that report to the DNI: http://www.dni.gov/index.php [dni.gov]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.