It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a satellite pointed at you! The Department of Homeland Security is at it again with a new and improved way of protecting freedom and liberty with the new push for domestic use of military spy satellites to fight terrorism.
That’s right. President Bush has spoken. Should the Iraq war be brought to a close before the election, America can expect a huge influx of Iraqi heathens to swim across the ocean and start terrorizing Americans in the Fatherla… Homeland, within days. A flood of bloodthirsty Iranians will surely follow…with the support of Mexicans drug lords. Unless we trust in God and the DHS to keep us safe, we’re doomed. With our military spy satellites pointed at ourselves, we can detect a vehicle bomb parked outside of a government building or even catch a suicide bomber approaching Times Square. This stuff works. Ask an Iraqi.
Look at the capabilities. Most people already know something of the conventional sensor packages that can track and photograph items of military interest at high resolution from orbit. More exotic and less well known are the payloads that can detect certain chemicals via the manipulation of different frequencies within an infrared wavelength. The Air Force has even developed something similar to what is known as side looking radar that can penetrate the earth and detect underground structures. Sounds good. We should be ready for those pestilential jihadis.
Some malcontents may wonder why the United States isn’t using all of those conventional high resolution sensors and cameras that can watch you pick your nose from orbit to find Osama Bin Laden or that funny looking guy who looks like a militant owl. Well, the answer to that is simple. This isn’t the movies. Those types of sensors aren’t useful for following people around because of the time constraints involved with the satellite’s passing. Even if we could track someone for longer than 30 minutes at a time, the Defense Department has better things to do than track a bunch of Saudi or Pakistani suicide immigrants into Iraq or Afghanistan.
Those sensors are useful for one thing and one thing only: targeting. And anyone should be glad that the DHS wants to target our homes for freedom. It makes me sleep better at night to know that I’m under the watchful eye of the government and that Uncle Sam’s got their back. Besides, what do you have to worry about as long as you’re not doing anything illegal? It’s not like some sweaty bureaucrat is going to use his camera to watch you sunbathe nude beside your backyard swimming pool or something. The Paranoia.
A faithless anti-patriot may ask: if all of those whiz-bang infrared payloads can detect explosives; then, why are we spending billions of dollars trying to defeat improvised explosive devices? Or, why do we need brigades of troops to find a bomb factory when we can already see all of them from space? I mean, it’s easy right? Some guy in a control room in Colorado guides the little satellite over Baghdad until he spots a factory. He knows that’s where bombs are being made because there’s a little red chemical cloud at such and such grid coordinate at such and such a frequency. He tells his commander where it is, the commander tells the Apache pilots where it is and whoosh! They light up those hellfire missiles. Well, yeah. We could do that. But the government is saving the really good stuff for more useful things.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
