Ming the Mechanic:
The All Seeing Eye in the Sky

The NewsLog of Flemming Funch
 The All Seeing Eye in the Sky2007-01-21 15:11
10 comments
picture by Flemming Funch

An oddball retired aerospace engineer named Bill Grisham seems to maybe have invented something rather revolutionary, which the U.S. military complex would very much like to get their hands on. The site that explains it is here. And if we believe what it says, the idea is to provide globally accessible real-time 3D imaging of every point on the planet, and that it will be available to anybody. It says stuff like this:
According to Grisham, “MIRIAH is everybody´s Spy in the Sky. It´s like a Google Globe but in 3D and in real time. It´s like Internet, but with universal wireless remote wifi access without webservers. Anyone anywhere, will be able to virtually walk around anything or anyone, anywhere. Users will swoop down and walk around objects on the other side of the world. In the future when the Pentagon says there are WMDs somewhere anyone will be able to personally confirm whether or not that is true. There will always be spies on Earth and all that we can ever do about that is for all of us to spy on the spies. In the near future, the biggest secret governments will have to keep will be, How to hide from MIRIAH users? It’s Espionage4Everyone and Everyone2Everybody”.

In the official proposal MIRIAH is described as: an Interferometer satellite sensor which uses convergent illumination for a 2nd Power-Aperture to lower costs for the best characteristics of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Optical Satellites. It provides day or night, all weather, penetrating imaging with extremely fine spatial resolution (half a wavelength), and extremely fine spectral resolution in its 1st Power-Aperture, for automatic GIS capable hyper-spectral imaging. It offers 10 samples/day, with 10 channels, to form square matrix Eigenvector “signatures” to instantly isolate critical tactical targets. SAR captures digitized “virtual” images needing extensive, time consuming processing, while MIRIAH captures “real” images, needing only digitization for delivered images, allowing for faster delivery of finished intelligence. This throughput time also varies with the satellite population: from 12 hours for 3 satellites down to 30 minutes for 12 satellites. Its architecture is 3-D symmetric, so piggybacked launching cuts expensive boosters in half, while balanced moments reduce precession to enable simpler cost effective satellites, adding powerful and secure communication and navigation capabilities.
Which, uhm, I didn't quite catch. But they claim that NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office) has examined the patents and found no flaw in the scheme, and that they're very interested. And that it is thousands of times cheaper and more efficient that any competing proposals. And that Grisham refuses to sell out, and will only grant non-exclusive uses for his patents, because he wants everybody to have access to it. You can read another article about all this here. Of course you should take all of that with a big grain of salt. These might of course be crazy religious fantatics and conspiracy theorists with a lively imagination. Or it might just be right, which would be cool.


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10 comments

21 Jan 2007 @ 10:18 by swanny : Hmmm
Well let us pray for him, his safety and his integrity
Although there is some ethical issues here though as
the right to privacy is one of mammalities "natural" rights...

Privacy just for the sake of "reflection or grace in the safety of repose" for instance....
is there a way to construct a shield on private homes for instance?

"The Government has no place in the bedrooms of the Nation."
The Late Pierre Elliot Trudeau
Canadian PM 1969-1983 (1912?-2000?)

sir  



21 Jan 2007 @ 11:30 by Ken Larson @24.31.26.130 : SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION TO SYY IN SKY
USA Today reported on 16 January 2007 in its Washington Section that the CIA plans to utilize more open sources and blogs in its intelligence work and outsource more of its intelligence software development to commercial contractors in an attempt to re-establish itself as the premiere world intelligence agency.

The "Strategic Intent" is posted on the CIA public web site. Defense Industry Daily further reports that General Electric is gobbling up Smith's Industries for $4.8B.

http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2007/01/ge-buys-smiths-aerospace-for-48b/index.php

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak. Let's look at this for a moment and do our patriotic duty by reading along with the CIA (after all, they have announced they are reading this blog)

1. The new CIA approach comes exactly at the formation of the agency’s new "External Advisory Board", which consists of the following:

* A former Pentagon Chairman of the Joints Chief who is now a Northrop Grumman Corporation Board Member

* A deposed Chairman of the Board of Hewlett Packard Corporation (HP)

* A Former Deputy Secretary of Defense who now heads up a Washington think tank with Henry Kissinger

2. Northrop Grumman Corporation and Hewlett Packard are two huge government contractors in the Pentagon and CIA custom software development arena. Their combined contracts with the government just for IT are in the multiples of millions. I wonder what the advisory board is filling the CIA's ear with?

3. Washington "Think Tanks" are fronts for big time lobbies, sophisticated in their operations, claiming non-partisanship, but tremendously influential on K Street. If a lobby cannot buy its way in, why not sit on the advisory board?

4. GE already has the military aircraft jet engine market. In buying Smith's, it takes one more major defense corporation out of the opposition and further reduces the government's leverage through competition. GE now joins the other monoliths such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon with tremendous leverage in the $500B +++ per year defense market.

5. Note the synergy that now exists between the Pentagon and the CIA. Note the influence by the major corporations.

6. Also note the balance in your bank account and your aspirations for the generations of the future. Both are going down.

7. The huge Military Industrial Complex (MIC) continues to march. Taxes and national debt will be forced to march straight up the wall to support it. Do you have any "Intelligence” to offer the Pentagon, the CIA and the MIC? For further inspiration please see:

http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com  



21 Jan 2007 @ 14:17 by swanny : personally
Personally I don't think the government military media or the internet
have any place in the bedrooms and such of the planet
hmmmmmmm

what does mirah stand for
what is the history of the word
and the call the wind mirah  



21 Jan 2007 @ 14:50 by ming : Seeing eyes
I don't think the government has any place in anybody's bedroom either. But if there needs to be surveillance, I think everybody should have access to it. If all the surveillance is in the hands of a few centralized powers, that's a major problem. Particularly when those powers tend towards being mindless and soulless, as they usually do. You know, when they can get the technology for measuring people's speeds on the freeway, it is just perfect to set up an automated system that sends people traffic tickets and deduct points from their driver's license, all automatically, without any humans involved. Just as perfect in such thinking would be if the justice system and the tax system were all automated. No escape, you break the law, you automatically get locked away.

Of course that's complete insanity, because laws usually aren't very sensible, so they only work relatively well when there's lots of humans in the machine who can make human decisions, and they have room for maneuvering.

So, if there were a system that allowed somebody to monitor any point on earth, I certainly wouldn't want it to be the sole property of a government. But since they happily and secretly would pay billions for such a system, they should at least be forced to share it with everybody else.

We are many more people, with many more eyes, than there would be watching us from a government's side. So, that could even out the playing field quite a bit, as we would be watching them more than they would be watching us.  



21 Jan 2007 @ 15:26 by swanny : Open source
Well the closest I seen that fits that bill is open sourcing
and if the patents belong to an open source foundation
all the better.
Like the open source auto idea or concept but open source with the patent
so it would still be in the hands of a foundation but
at least an open source foundation

Ive read somewhat into there licenses and they are not to bad...  



21 Jan 2007 @ 16:20 by i2i : -)

[]http://www.newciv.org/pic/nl/artpic/232/000232-000598.jpg  



22 Jan 2007 @ 01:08 by bushman : Its true,
in one part of the main house we have the internet going thru the house power lines, anything, a light bulb the toaster and TV, has direct access to the net.
Kind of scary. Because it also means that the signal is going out onto the power grid for a certin distance. The right filters and an amplifyer, anyone could read your packets.  



27 Jan 2007 @ 02:08 by Matt @71.71.13.154 : looking over shoulder
I see some problems here. If it is available to everyone then it is available to the "bad" guys. Locally, organized crime could identify marked and unmarked cars from police stations and schedule their day accordingly. Enemy military and para military groups could watch troop movements and using gps overlays could target missiles or just use them to stay one step ahead if they are moving undercover. "It's harder to hide a tank than it is a group of rebels."

As for "could you have a shield?", I used to work with experimental radar sensors. They were sort of primitive versions of the tricorders on Star Trek. They broadcast a slice of the radar band and by what was reflected back could read what a material sample contained to some degree. We used a Faraday cage to keep the radar in during test since while one unit wouldn't put out enough electromagnetic radiation to ever hurt anyone 30 of them might. A Faraday cage is nothing but a structure similar to a greenhouse but with very fine brass or copper wire mesh instead of dual paned glass or plastic. Now radar is microwave radiation. The early microwaves were called Radar Ranges. There was a good reason for this, they actually used aviation radar units in the test stages and I believe even in some of the early models. When I was in the Air Force we had one guy walk in front of a plane with its radar on test and it cooked his brain inside his head.

Check out this

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

I had thought about when I remodel my shop getting some fine metal mesh and putting that up on the wall studs, ceiling studs and floor joists, grounding it then putting up a thin sheet of plywood on the walls and ceiling and subfloor on the floor, then another layer of mesh and grounding that, then putting up the sheet rock using adhesive and putting down my floor with adhesive as well. In effect my shop would be a Faraday cage. It would also allow me to test signal generators for strength and play with tesla coils without screwing up the neighbors telly so much.
I bet that it wouldn't be able to see through that. I also think that older building have metal lath in the plaster. If you simply grounded this you would have a shield for a lot of stuff.

Here is another link that shows what can be seen with millimeter wave imaging from the ground. This is somewhat different but on the same general subject list.

http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/17/qinetiqs-millimeter-wave-sees-through-walls-and-your-clothes/


later
Fuzzy  



27 Jan 2007 @ 09:43 by ming : Waves
Hm, yeah, maybe it will become fashionable to build houses with built-in Faraday cages. Might not be a bad idea, as there probably is a lot of electromagnatic pollution around, and a little peace and quiet would be a good thing. But, of course, now I expect my cellphone to work indoors, and the regular phone is wireless, and I use WiFi between several computers, and the TV gets its signal wirelessly from the cablebox, etc.  


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