Eye in the Sky

What the fuck?

George Bush yesterday offered to help China deal with the aftermath of its earthquake, including sharing detailed images of the devastation taken by American spy satellites.

In a White House statement, Bush said: “I am particularly saddened by the number of students and children affected by this tragedy. The United States stands ready to help in any way possible.”

Spy satellite images?  So the US is going to let China know just how good the NSA’s satellites are?

Ok, now I’m sure. Bush is just fucking Clinton lite or on the payroll. He has been to cozy with them throughout his entire term.

cozy?
uh the P23- orion incident?  anyone recall that>?

also as i stated over at right thinking, they will not get teh sub meter resoultuion, hell if i was the NSA id muck the image sup a bit to fuck with their intell guys.

Harley, so would I.

Odd thought this- wouldn’t the Chinese already have access to the eyes in the sky?  They made the onboard chips.....

I kid, I kid.  Wonder if the NSA will see the “Free Tibet” banner Lee posted a while back?

I don’t think being cozy with the Chinese is such a bad idea.  It is inevitable that they will be the world’s next superpower.  We can either deal with that reality or we can deny it.  The argument that I made during the Olympic torch issues was that were are going to HAVE to get China’s help on any number of issues in the future.  Two, off the top of my head, are North Korea and Burma.  China has IMMENSE pull with both these regimes.  Being on China’s good side will benefit us in dealing with those situations.

After 9/11 we had the whole world sympathetic to us, at least until Iraq, and now the world is against us.  We’re still on virgin territory with China.  The people here are FIERCELY nationalist and proud of their country and culture.  We can play that to our advantage, or we can piss off the whole country and turn them against us as well. 

There is no democracy here, of course.  But the government often gives in to the demands of the people, because they want to keep the people happy.  (Note the recent withdrawal of the smoking ban due to popular opposition.) Happy people don’t revolt.  So if the people of China look well upon the United States, it will be politically advantageous for the Chinese government to be seen cooperating with us.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best option we have.  We can still be opposed to China on many issues, and we can push for reforms, but it has to be done in the right manner, not the “bull in a China shop” (pardon the pun) manner that the Tibet protesters engaged in.  Protesting is one thing, but sabotaging the torch was another entirely.  Humiliate the Chinese people and it will bring on a shitstorm the likes of which we can’t even begin to imagine. 

Right now the Chinese generally like the foreigners.  They get to know us, they see we’re good people, and they love our popular culture.  What we don’t need is for them to start seeing us as trying to embarrass or bully their culture.  The Chinese don’t think in terms of years or decades, they think in terms of centuries.  We want political reform NOW, they want it to go slowly, on their terms.

This is one of the few areas where I think Bush has generally been right on the money, his dealings with the Chinese.

Lee, I must admit your expereinces in China offer a perspective one does not see often: the average Joe’s (or Chinese equvalent) daily life.  I had many of the same insights when I was in Yugoslavia.

I agree the Olympic torch fiasco was a typical “feelgood” left brainer goatrope, and I apologise if my comment came across that you, personally, posted the banner on Google Earth (another leftbrainer etc.)

One of the biggest mistakes Bush&Co;made in Iraq was a failure to understand the mindset of the Iraqi people.  So far as I can tell, Bush&Co;has not made the same mistake with China.  I’m not so hopeful for the next administration.

Like the Chinese don’t know what our resolution is?  Or like NYO (not NSA) wouldn’t reduce the resolution before they provided it or like Bush didn’t have a dis-information reason for providing full res photos.

Well, when you scale down the resolution of an image it softens it.  The same thing happens if you rotate an image at anything other than 90° increments, or transform (i.e. move) the image less than in whole pixel increments.  When you scale down an image you are, at its basest element, performing a simple arithmetical average on it, so what you end up with on a per-pixel basis is an average, and averages are never as accurate as the real thing.

You can then run sort of adaptive sharpening algorithm on it to enhance small details.  If this is what the NSA is planning on doing then no problem.  The Chinese will be able to tell, though that the image has been sharpened, so it will give them an idea of how good our satellites are.

Do I think the Chinese know for sure how good our tech is?  No.  They probably have a general idea, and providing satellite imagery might give them at least a baseline idea of how accurate their guess is.  Maybe there’s a method to this apparent madness, maybe there’s a strategic advantage to letting the Chinese know just how good we are at watching them.  I have no idea.

But from my armchair this doesn’t seem like such a hot idea.  The satellite imagery provided by commercial satellite companies (i.e. Google) should be perfectly acceptable to see wide areas of damage.  You can see people sunbathing on rooftops in Google Earth, why would having a resolution higher than that be beneficial?  “Look, a toe is poking out from under that rock!”

Something seems a little fishy here.

It’s kinda interesting.  The emperor was overthrown by the nationalist Kuomintang Party.  They were subsequently overthrown by the Communist Party.  Now that the CCP has disavowed the idiocy of Marxism, they’re using fierce Chinese nationalism as the glue to bond the people together, exactly the ideology that the CCP was allegedly supposed to be against.

Funny how history works out sometimes, isn’t it?

I think it’s cool. Help them out a little, give them an idea what we can see if we want to.