🚀 go-pugleaf

>[...] the reason pictures of that quality
>were published is that one of the "secrets" in this area is just how
>high the resolution of reconnaisance satellites is. Every so often
>we read an episodic speculation ("able to read a license plate in
>a parking lot") in Aviation Week or elsewhere. By publishing the
>pictures in as high quality as possible, The Times was answering
>the question by implication, and cleverly enough that the Official
>Secrets Act folks didn't twig that that's part of what they were doing.

	Those pictures were from a KH-11. KH-11's are presumably
quite obsolete. We're talking a matter of years since those pictures
were published. If you extrapolate a little bit, based on the kinds
of advances in commercial electronic imaging that we've been seeing,
it's quite possible that far, far higher resolution pictures are
possible. That doesn't address the question of whether or not you
would *want* them. The pictures of the Kirov were pretty damn good
and an intelligence analyst could get a lot of information at that
resolution. I'm not sure what being able to read license plates
would buy you. In military terms, I guess you'd want to be able
to read unit flashes off of troops' collars and tank turrets, but
other than that ultra-high resolution just sells disk drives.

mjr.