As the military makes use of commercial satellite imaging for intelligence gathering abroad, defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon are creating homeland-defense programs with an eye to providing space-based support to Tom Ridge's Office of Homeland Security. With the overlapping boundaries between governmental and corporate interests comes concern over the potential for trampling of privacy and civil liberties statutes.

Joanne Maguire, vice president of business development at TRW Space and Electronics, said that existing satellite systems such as the global positioning system (GPS) were unlikely to raise hackles, even when used domestically. But as operations turn from prevention and protection to prosecution, the ability of law enforcement to use U.S. military space assets is more problematic, she said.

The GPS navigational system is to be upgraded late in the decade when GPS-III adds a third, military-only frequency to the two frequencies GPS now uses. But the war on terrorism need not wait for GPS-III, Rear Adm. James McArthur said. The Navy Space Command is involved in the new GPS Enhanced Theater Support, or Gets, program, which will allow existing GPS constellations to be used in "extreme precision targeting" managed out of Shriever Air Force Base in Colorado.

Swapping imagery

Panelists from commercial imaging companies Space Imaging Inc. and Digital Globe pointed out that imagery from the Ikanos, Spot Image and QuickBird commercial satellites were used in war operations in Afghanistan. John Copple, chief executive at Space Imaging, said that the Pentagon bought commercial imaging products as a useful adjunct to imagery from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The Pentagon also has borrowed NASA imaging spacecraft, using Terra and SeaWiFS systems as part of a Navy project to prepare strikes on the Afghan/Pakistan border.

John Stammreich, vice president for homeland-security programs at Boeing, said that the restrictions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Posse Comitatus Act make it very difficult to use space assets for tracking any targets within the United States. Insurance companies have given defense companies sterner warnings than have civil libertarians, he said. Stammreich reported that one attorney told him, "Just because you have an RFP request for proposal in hand doesn't mean it's legal."

Raytheon too has set up a homeland-defense program under vice president Hugo Poza, and the company is seeing the same type of concerns as Boeing. Raytheon is involved in domestic projects that will move to production soon, such as the Explosive Detection System to be fielded at all the nation's airports by the end of the year, as well as the Department of Justice/INS Smart Border program for using fingerprint and facial-recognition technology at the nation's borders.

Poza said there is plenty of technology from Raytheon's signals intelligence programs that could be applied to homeland defense, such as a two-way broadband Internet Protocol satellite program that could be modified for a Federal Emergency Management Agency command vehicle.

Poza said that one glaring need in civilian defense, where agencies like NRO and the National Security Agency have lots of expertise, is for easily searchable databases capable of handling many types of information and searchable by attribute as well as key word. Raytheon is working on a variety of programs in this field, while keeping aware of privacy concerns, he said.

Just as a signals intelligence system could select a waveform before looking at content, a civilian attribute database may be able to distinguish individuals based only on preselected characteristics, said Ed Bush, vice president of Raytheon's new ISRnet (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance network). However, President Bush has cautioned that such technology could look like "profiling" to some civil libertarians.

Meanwhile, Sue Payton, deputy undersecretary for defense for advanced systems, provided a long list of intelligence programs launched by her office's Advanced Concepts and Technical Demonstrations project, many of which have been sent to the field and four of which were used in the Noble Eagle operation to rescue victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.

Peter Teets, the former chief operating officer of Lockheed-Martin, has been named director of NRO, the nation's largest intelligence agency by budget. Not only does Teets hold the dual role of undersecretary of the Air Force, but his office has been named for the first time as the primary executive-branch agent for planning and procurement for national security space projects. This puts Teets in charge of a combined space budget in excess of $68 billion.

Changing face of battle

Teets and Air Force Gen. Ralph E. (Ed ) Eberhart, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, stressed the changed post-Afghanistan environment in their keynote speeches. Teets said no one can doubt the importance of "space supremacy" on today's battlefield. Only the combination of GPS, meteorological, commercial imaging and classified intelligence satellites could provide the level of support that enabled U.S. fighters and bombers, unmanned aerial vehicles and ground troops to rapidly overcome Taliban forces, he said.

Eberhart, who is slated to be named head of a new command charged with homeland defense, said that providing broadband services to soldiers from space was as important as intelligence gathering. "We in Space Command provided Gen. Tommy Franks commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan seven times the bandwidth that was provided to Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War," he said, "and an individual soldier had 322 times the bandwidth that was available in Desert Storm."

Indeed, said Teets, "at no time in our history has the capability of space been so pivotal." Some systems first tested in the late '90s, like the broadband distribution network called Global Broadcast System, played a key role in Afghanistan, he said.

A GBS system positioned on a Navy UHF Follow-On satellite above the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean carried traffic ranging from real-time video feeds from Predator unmanned aerial vehicles to what Teets called "data streams for Special Operations forces on horseback, who could download images of their surroundings on their laptops, using our satellites."

Teets said that the highest priority for new NRO programs comes in the Space-Based Radar. Though not scheduled to be fielded until late in the decade, the system could provide moving-target indication from space — a space-based equivalent of the JStars radar plane. Another high priority for NRO, he said, is a program for "transformational communications," in which new concepts of Internet Protocol routing, packet switching and laser communications would be tested for both intersatellite links and links between satellites and ground stations.