Snowden unveils NSA spy satellite SAURON program targeting US citizens

[The Straight Story]

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who recently unveiled the NSA’s ubiquitous wiretapping program PRISM, unveiled yet another insidious surveillance system targeting US citizens Friday afternoon, in a chat with Internet Chronicle reporters. SAURON, or the Semi-Autonomous Ultra-high-Resolution Orbital Network, is a series of hundreds of low-orbiting cameras which can make out objects on the ground as small as one centimeter in size. There are so many satellites in this network that they are able to effectively monitor the entire planet’s populated surface without interruption. According to slides Snowden shared, taken from the NSA presentation on SAURON, each spy satellite feeds directly into a data bank so large that it is able to retain the captured imagery indefinitely.

SAURON is also a reference to a villain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, an evil god of discord who appears in the material world as an ever searching eye.

Snowden, looking as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, spoke with Internet Chronicle reporters in the transit corridor of Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow. In a near whisper, Snowden said, “It is shocking that the US government would appropriate such evil imagery for a so-called security system like this. There is little doubt that this program — I won’t utter the name here — is not concerned with the security of citizens, but rather, it is a bald grab at power for power’s sake.”

http://www.chronicle.su/news/snowden-unveils-nsa-spy-satellite-sauron-program-targeting-us-citizens/

Edward Snowden ‏@EJosephSnowden 42m

I have revealed to staked-out journalists NGA/#NSA satellites monitoring all citizens at the literal centimeter. http://wp.me/p2ZGuS-3n9

[Pholus]

1. Considering their seeming need for "badass" sounding code names

you almost got me. SAURON.

Well, no, but still.

[StrayKat]

2. Sounds like Google Earth. nt

[leftstreet]

9. LOL

[MannyGoldstein]

3. This is a joke, right?

Getting hard to tell...

[The Straight Story]

8. Hell I don't know anymore :) Between the lies and satire this story is crazier

than a room full of drunk hill billies.

[The Magistrate]

5. Best To Poke About A Bit, Sir...

http://www.chronicle.su/category/politics/local-politics/

Current events protester has no idea what he’s protesting



Shelton said he is fed up with the direction American politics are heading. He said the decisions being made at the top affect everyone, including children.

“They’re raping our rights,” Shelton said, “like we raped the lands of the Native American Indian Redskin Savages.”

Shelton was later discovered to be a rapist with no actual opinions about anything.

Get it together, Shelton.

[The Straight Story]

10. Us folk in the Shire don't like to poke our nose in the business of others

[GeorgeGist]

6. Good one.

http://www.chronicle.su/about/

[Thinkingabout]

7. You got anything better or is this your best? Still have charges of espionage.

Still a zero, never will be a hero.

[xtraxritical]

16. So you say, so what.

[leveymg]

12. So, how did UBL manage to wander around for ten years?

Who are they looking for, and how much did this program cost? Hello, up there, how's the view of America tonight, SAURON?

[The Straight Story]

13. I think UBL was playing the role of Gollum and hiding in caves. Now they think Snowden has the ring

And Sauron's spies are everywhere....

[leveymg]

19. They have got to stop renovating our national monuments:

[Rex]

14. Great, I for one welcome our new evil god of discord

and pray that he goes easy on my sour stomach.

[pinboy3niner]

15. This story is Preshus!

[Enrique]

17. a real company called "Palantir" conspired against Glenn Greenwald

Palantir being a Tolkien reference...

In 2010 Hunton & Williams LLP allegedly asked Berico Technologies, Palantir, and HBGary Federal to draft a response plan to “the WikiLeaks Threat.” In early 2011 Anonymous publicly released HBGary-internal documents, including the plan. The plan proposed Palantir software would “serve as the foundation for all the data collection, integration, analysis, and production efforts.”[26] The plan also included slides, allegedly authored by HBGary CEO Aaron Barr, which suggested “[spreading] disinformation” and “disrupting” Glenn Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks.[27]

Palantir CEO Karp ended all ties to HBGary and issued a statement apologizing to “progressive organizations… and Greenwald … for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." Palantir placed an employee on leave pending a review by a third-party law firm. The employee was later reinstated.[26]

[Motown_Johnny]

18. Sauron is not a god, he is the chief lieutenant of the first Dark Lord, Morgoth

and even Morgoth is not a "God" per se. Eru is the creator God in Tolkien Mythology.


Sauron is the same as Gandalf, Saruman or a Balrog. They are all Maiar.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandalf

^snip^

In Valinor, Gandalf was known as Olórin.[1] As recounted in the "Valaquenta" in The Silmarillion,[19] he was one of the Maiar of Valinor, specifically, of the people of the Vala Manwë;



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiar

^snip^

Melkor (known in Sindarin as Morgoth), the evil Vala, corrupted many Maiar into his service. These included Sauron, the main antagonist of The Lord of the Rings, and the Balrogs, his demons of flame and shadow.[4] These are called in Quenya Úmaiar.






So someone please explain to me why I should be afraid of people who can't even get the most basic and simple things in the world correct. Please!

[Rex]

21. I think you just answered your own question.

'So someone please explain to me why I should be afraid of people who can't even get the most basic and simple things in the world correct. Please!'

[Drew Richards]

20. No worries it is prophetcized that a ranger from the north will rise up and spite sauron and

Her name is....Elizabeth Warren.

[frylock]

22. okay that was funny!

[RC]

23. The Watchers

A Silicon Valley startup is
launching a fleet of imaging
satellites that are cheap, small,
and ultra-efficient. Their up-
to-the-minute snapshots of
the planet will give us data
that could upend industries,
transform economies—even
help predict the future.
[hr]
>SNIP<

Forty years after humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it’s remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market’s two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government’s claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.

>SNIP<

Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.

But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:

— The number of cars in the parking lot of every Walmart in America.
— The number of fuel tankers on the roads of the three fastest-growing economic zones in China.
— The size of the slag heaps outside the largest gold mines in southern Africa.
— The rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing brighter.



http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/startup-skybox/

The plan is to cover the whole Earth with imaging satellites. If you have the money, you can get twice a day high resolution satellite pictures of any place on this planet. You think your privacy is being invaded now, just you wait.