Of course it's military...
...why else would it have a classification (albeit that of unclassified) on it?
That the US and other nations operate spy satellites capable of taking very detailed photographs of Earth is not in doubt. But the idea that those satellites have been pressed into service to find downed Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, and that it is therefore possible to infer some of the satellites' capabilities, is very …
Who imposes a classification if not the military? Also, citation please for most government documents having a classification. Or are you just an opinionated loudmouth?
I worked for the HMRC. Every single document was given a classification, even if that classification was that it was completely unimportant security-wise. Hope that helps.
Apologies Tromos my FYI was more tongue in cheek. I didn't realise that there would be anybody on here who was sufficiently ignorant to not know that all official government documents are classified.
Government classification 101 link below -
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/251480/Government-Security-Classifications-April-2014.pdf
Tromos you complete .....
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-security-classifications
As per the previous posts, its not just the Military that 'classify' OFFICIAL documents, general governments also 'classify' documents. In addition, many private or commercial organisation also classify documents such as "Commercially Sensitive" in order to make p
These classifications are also known as 'Handling Codes', which dictate how an individual within an organisation should handle, store or distribute documents or files (e.g Data etc)
Documents get 'classified' the clue is in the name - that is arranged in classes or groups of document types.
An
@AC - These classifications are also known as 'Handling Codes', which dictate how an individual within an organisation should handle, store or distribute documents or files (e.g Data etc)
Your along the right lines but you're not correct either, you are confusing different labels. I'll try and explain :-
Classification refers to the level of information security afforded tot he document.
Handling codes, or 'Handling Restrictions' to give them their proper title, go alongside the classification to denote who may (or may not) see the document (which is different from the level of classification the document has). Usually the handling restriction is usually a list of countries.
Caveats go alongside the classification and/or the handling restriction to denote extra information about why the document is classified or how to treat it 'Commercial' or 'Personal' could be two examples.
A Security label on a document could include many words, but the classification is the one that will always exist, even if it is just 'unclassified'. Handling restrictions, caveats, etc may or may not be included as appropriate but they aren't the same as the classification.
I think it's unlikely to be military because there's not a lot of point in surveying, spending valuable limited bandwidth and analysing thousands of square miles of the strategically and tactically unimportant Southern Ocean.
Spy sats are good for surface targets, like ships, but the Southern Ocean is a very hostile place for surface vessels to operate and whilst it may be a good out-of-the-way sort of place for subs to loiter subs aren't good spy sat targets, which are better tracked by other systems, such as SOSUS. There just aren't really any targets from where the Southern Ocean is the best place to operate; apart from loitering to waste time there's just not a lot of point in having military resources in the Southern Ocean so there's little point in having spy sats survey it.
Just FYI, SOSUS is apparently only for the Northern Hemisphere.
I think you & Wikipedia are largely correct but I'd be a bit surprised if there weren't a few stations off the south coast of Australia/Tasmania; targets detected in the northern Atlantic and moving south would be followed by a western sub but you'd also want to keep an eye on subs entering the Indian Ocean from the East via the South Pacific. I certainly agree that there won't be any SOSUS sensors in the Southern Ocean itself; there isn't really anywhere for the sensors to be linked to, apart from Australia (I don't think that political relations have been good enough for stations to have been set up on Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Luck).
"so there's little point in having spy sats survey it"
But spy satellites have to fly over the southern ocean to be of any use for spying on the north. The only constraints for surveying the southern ocean are the amount of image storage space available and how quickly those images can be downloaded to free up that storage space. Twenty years ago, when I worked on some satellite mission scheduling software for ESA, these were real issues, but I can't imagine that this is the case now.
"....there's not a lot of point in surveying, spending valuable limited bandwidth and analysing thousands of square miles of the strategically and tactically unimportant Southern Ocean...." Well, apart from the efforts made tracking Soviet and Chinese nuke subs. Oh, and arms smugglers and sanctions buster (especially North Korean ships). Anyhooooo, it is not a military satellite's pic, not unless they deliberately reduced the clarity and resolution. If it was a spy-sat shot you would not only be able to see any text on the mystery object, you'd probably be able to read it if it was bigger than the text on a car registration plate. To give an idea of the capabilities of the tech, USN P3C Orions have been able to read the labels on drums on smuggler boats in the Mexican Gulf at a range of 100 miles plus using electronic imaging. This is a commercial shot and I suspect they lucked out as a real spy-sat would already have confirmed what the floating object actually was.
Regarding the "unclassified" classification, all satellite images gathered by DigitalGlobe and the like must be screened by a government agency before release to the public (by law). Nothing surprising there. I have processed many satellite images (all previously cleared) and in terms of resolution this looks like many commercial images I have seen. I have no clearance (nor feel an urgent need to get one) for military work.
The only higher-resolution remote sensing images I have seen were aerial (not satellite) images taken after the Haiti earthquake. These were 15cm in resolution. More is probably possible, but not needed in most applications, as it only leads to an explosion in data size. For commercial images, this is an important consideration. Many, if not most applications only really need a resolution in the order of 1m which already leads to roughly 150 terapixels of data to cover just the earth's land mass. Moving to 0.25cm you have a 16-fold increase in data size (and processing time if your processing algorithms are O(N), otherwise it is worse). You need a very good business case to justify that.
"Of course it's military...
...why else would it have a classification (albeit that of unclassified) on it?"
That's the most stupid thing I've read all day.
You do realise that your nation's clandestine services (NSA, GCHQ, CIA, whatever) are all non-military, right? By your telling they can't create classified documents!
Some information doesn't even need to be designated with a classification after creation by *anyone*: Any document created by anyone in the US which would be of use in creating atomic weapons is 'Born Secret'. So if you doodle a bomb design on a post-it, then it's classified.
Having been told that I was barking up the wrong tree (or words to that effect) in previous MH370 comments when I suggested that someone should have found signs by now using the much vaunted spy satellite technology, all I can say now is:
(1) Nyah!
(2) Hope that they have really found the wreckage if the plane has gone down. At least the relatives will get some kind of closure.
Beer just because it is Friday.
A shoe bomb (or any other kind) could have caused critical damage to the aircraft, requiring it to immediately try to return home; which could have explained the new route programming. The same device could have crippled communication systems, and/or filled the cockpit and cabin with toxic smoke, meaning communication could have been impossible.
Not my theory, read it in a paper somewhere...
The oceans are full of debris... it could be a wrecked ship, a load lost at sea, tons of things...
But the image just shown, to me looks like a wave... just like the one to the side of it... nothing odd about it at all. but that is to my un-trained eye... now if we had 3d images, then we'd know the depth of that object.... You know, like the british did during WW2 with their spy planes...
They said it was in three parts:-
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mbvd/the-continued-search-for-the-missing-malaysia-airlines-fligh
But they couldn't find anything, apparently. It seemed strange that they would just say that it's categorically not the plane when they didn't find anything in the area. Not that I'm suggesting anything. :)
Reported on BBC, the "door" was actually a cable reel.
I think this article makes it clear, the images that are being released are not the best images available. They're just the completely unclassified reduced-resolution versions. To my mind there's nothing sinister if a government with spy-sats says "we think you should be looking at (coords), but we can't tell you why". (Ditto if it's got passive sonar arrays for detecting submarines, and they picked up the sound of a big impact, or a military radar system that works better / worse / differently to how other players think it does ).
"now if we had 3d images, then we'd know the depth of that object.... You know, like the british did during WW2 with their spy planes..."
You need stereoscopic cameras for that... which are used on imaging sats (obviously not side-by-side as you wouldn't have sufficient binocular effect to get a 3D image, but instead taking photos forwards and aft), but not all of them.
Obviously, the moment you put a second camera on-board, you've just added a few million to the bird's cost, so I don't imagine every civilian has (or has the need) for stereoscopic imaging.
It is pretty cruel to just cut a ship loose at sea and the perps should be strung up by their gonads for some righteous drying ... but then:
In January 2014, there was speculation[19] based on an interview with a salvager in the British tabloid The Sun that the ship might be nearing the coast of England and be infested with cannibal rats. The rumours were subsequently debunked.[20][21] Psychic Uri Geller offered to help locate the ship.[22]
Okay.jpg.
Regarding recent political events, the correct approach is "report whatever fits into a prevailing narrative, don't care about any facts, even later".
You could gas whole editorial boards and the garden sheds full of gnomically idiotic "opinion" page writers (WaPo and NYT I'm looking at you E.J. Dionne, Krauthammer etc. ) and nothing of value would be lost. Indeed, the average sanity of Earth would be markedly increased.
"The old"
That's unfair/
The old way of reporting is What/Where/When/Why? If you don't have that you don't have a story.
Nowadays the news doesn't provide information for us to make up our minds, it provides opinion on what we should think.
Thus a headline about a murder suspect *should* tell us a bit about him; it should NOT say 'Hang the scum'.
If only somebody had a plane that could have been scrambled to the area...
If only said plane was really fast with a large range...
If only it was (mostly) declassified because it was made in the 60's...
If only it could cruise at mach 3 and cover the "arcs" without waiting for a satellite...
If only someone hadn't been short sighted enough to think that there was no place for a true spy plane anymore...even in an civilian oh sh"t we need to see what happened there role.
Hell the world can't not have the technology to create a slightly less exotic plane.
Maybe I'm just too optimistic but it would help to have one in a global SaR scenario.
sorry not buying this -
a) I've heard the search area described in percentage terms of the total globe, if that's the scale you are using then frankly the chance of ever finding your target if its not actively emitting a signal for you to track is going to be extremely low. Going fast over a stripe is still a tiny fraction of that search area so having a couple of high speed long endurance plans would make very little difference to your odds.
b) you've got to consider the cost of such a program vs the benefits it generates - I am not suggesting that the likely loss of the plane and those on board isn't a tragedy - but in a global context it wouldn't justify an annual multi-billion pound/dollar program which might make a fractional difference to the chance to locate them in this extremely odd scenario.
if a repeat of this scenario becomes a serious concern for policy makers going forward then it would be cheaper and simpler to insist that:
1) every aircraft on certain routes had to subscribe to the service which allows them to relay back in flight data in real time and that the on-board hardware be redesigned/moved such that it couldn't be disabled by the pilots
2) aircraft start to carry an inflatable buoy with a homing beacon which could be deployed in the event of a crash (so that you have an active signal above the water).
Alternatively it could be used to justify a standing fleet of airborne patrol radars if a military force was looking for a budget argument (although again I think this would be massively expensive relative to modifying the planes)
Ok maybe I was too subtle. a modern SR-71 is what you need here.
The original was made to search Russian for nuke bases etc. If it could do that with 60's tech in a country almost the size of China and the US combined this area is not that big.
If you could quickly scan them and get a rough idea enough to target satellites or another run then how is that not increasing the odds. Being able to search the predicted areas in what 24hours maybe less.
Cost is a worry but a less exotically manufactured aeroframe(s), less titanium would be a good start, built to do SaR and standoff surveillance is surely a viable task for NATO countries. I've never seen a decent reason for ditching the SR program other than satellites and they aren't up to the task.
The KH-11 family of NRO satellites, the last series of big spy satellites we the public know much about have a camera mirror about eight feet across. On a good day they can image down to about 8cm per pixel at ground level, not quite able to read newspaper headlines but not far off. They can't be shot down by the Bad Guys and under international treaties it's OK to fly them over other people's countries without starting a war and they can cover everything from coast to coast in multiple passes and they're always operating.
The SR-71 could never get than a couple of hundred kilometres across foreign borders to take pictures of places of interest (usually ports and naval airbases) using small cameras from 20km up, assuming the weather co-operated, before they had to turn around and head back out to sea again. They were fuel hogs, a typical 12-hour mission involving several recon penetrations of the Bad Guys borders required as many as eight specialist air-to-air refuelling tankers orbiting safely in international airspace to keep the SR-71 flying. Eventually the Bad Guys developed SAMs that could in fact knock down an SR-71 even at altitude and speed and they stopped being viable aircraft for reconnaissance in enemy airspace except in the minds of starstruck nerds and military geeks.
As for the satellite images of sea debris we've seen being released, they're probably not degraded much if at all for public consumption. Image quality from satellites depends critically on the camera mirror size but it takes a big satellite like the KH-11 to get decent pictures and commercial observation satellites just aren't in that class.
I don't believe materials are a significant element of the cost of these craft, its the R&D and supporting infrastructure (maintenance, fuelling, air crew training, etc...) which make them expensive.
People often quote a cost of £XX per air craft, but that drops rapidly as you increase the production run and spread the R&D budget more widely.
Russian nuke bases are bigger than a 777 and have lots of clues pointing to their presence in any given area.
High res spy sats are only any good if you know exactly where to look. Osama could have been sunbathing naked on the roof of his Pakistani hideout, waving at passing spysats and they still wouldn't have seen him until local intel gave some pointers.
It's a pity Australia's Jindalee system doesn't look in the general direction the 777 might have flown, although there's a good chance it could have picked up part of the suthern flight track, if it did go that way. Over Horizon Radar is about the only way to track aircraft over wide expanses of ocean and the owners of such systems tend not to want to advertise their capabilities.
It's still entirely possible that they're looking in the wrong locations. The "range" indicated from pings is absolute maximum possible. There are a number of reasons why the aircraft might have been closer than indicated.
High res spy sats are only any good if you know exactly where to look. Osama could have been sunbathing naked on the roof of his Pakistani hideout, waving at passing spysats and they still wouldn't have seen him until local intel gave some pointers.
Ah yes, about that...
New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who spent more than a decade reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan has pretty well confirmed that Pakistan not only knew of bin Laden’s presence, but actively protected him. More than that, the U.S. government knows they knew, and the Pakistanis know they know they knew.
"If only somebody had a plane that could have been scrambled to the area..."
They did. Lots of people did. They are called maritime surveillance aircraft. And they are designed for finding stuff on and under the sea's surface. They operate in all weather and are the right tool for the job.
"If only said plane was really fast with a large range..."
Sadly, there is no such thing, what with the SR-71 requiring a shit-load of tankers wherever it goes.
If you want long range though, Global Hawk is perfect. And of course... maritime surveillance aircraft, with their 8+ hour flight times.
Or do you honestly believe than an SR-71 could have got there from wherever it might have been based faster than a Western Australian-based maritime surveillance aircraft, despite having to slow down for refuelling a bunch of times?
"If only it was (mostly) declassified because it was made in the 60's..."
Oh, you mean the U-2?
Well it's a good job America still has those, because it appears to be what you mean.
Or isn't it cool enough because it's not fast?
"If only someone hadn't been short sighted enough to think that there was no place for a true spy plane anymore...even in an civilian oh sh"t we need to see what happened there role."
There is shit-loads of room for spy planes, which is why we have things like the RC-130, RC-135, JSTARS, U2. All of them are excellent. And then there's those maritime surveillance aircraft...
"Maybe I'm just too optimistic but it would help to have one in a global SaR scenario."
You want Blackbird back. So you leap to a conclusion without any logical chain of reasoning.
I miss Blackbird too, but in this case (and 99% of other cases) there are half a dozen other planes that are simply better for the job.
Oh, and in case you didn't read the news, the weather has been shocking, so the maritime surveillance craft have been doing their searches from 500 feet up.
Do you seriously want to fly backwards and forwards at 500' and mach 3 looking for debris?
This has nothing to do with the missing flight.
I often wondered why the Google Earth imagery of Holland went from fanstatic to barely useable a few years ago. and also why several other high-res pictures siddenly became similarly bad.
The example I would quote is of the prison in Scheveningen in Den Haag.
Originally the view was so fanstastic you could see the schadow (sorry) of the tennis net on the court and actually see the netting (true - not making it up for effect). It was also possible to clearly identify individual items in the exercise yard. I'm sure that if any of the tennis-playing inmates had access to the pictures they could easily have identified themselves too - particularly the guy doing press-ups (and his guard).
A short distance from the prison is Madurodam, Holland's world-famous model village. The images there of the model jumbos at Schipol and the ships in Rotterdam were as good as the images we now see of real life ships and planes now.
It's all gone - the Holland imagery is now rubbish - as is Paris and London.
Presumably the authorities realized that the high-res images were of more use to terrorists, jailbreakers and plain old burglars, than to the rest of us?
They're still good enough for me to work out the final stages of driving to a rural location where the postcode is several miles wide. (Fifth house on the left, about two miles from the right turn ... it worked first time).
I'm almost certain that the Jindalee OTHR would have tracked that plane considering the following;
#1: The suspected distance off Perth is easily within range of Jindalee (JORN). Some say it could even detect movements as far north as Singapore so there is a very good chance the plane has left a radar trail for a large chunk of its journey as the system was designed to detect aircraft as small as a Hawk.
#2: The Australian Government sold the electorate on being able to secure the approaches from the NW of Australia from illegal immigration. If they can detect much smaller wooden vessels coming down from Indonesia with remarkable accuracy then how is a Boeing 777 missed? Multiple assets are deployed and are well drilled as this type of surveillance has been going on a long time.
I'm betting that the JORN tracked it for a long part of the journey until it left the southern arc of it's coverage from the Laverton radar and the final area has been decided using other calculations like distance/fuel/headings. The UK has sent HMS Echo into the southern Indian Ocean which is something you don't just do on a hunch. This southern search is only being conducted by the nations that can be trusted to not to elaborate too much on defence capabilities this far south to which I am guessing are not as good as it would be looking north-west from Perth.
The real story here is that even with trillions of dollars in aggregate spending by major players, both government and private, over the last couple of decades, that surveillance capability is just not that good. There are enormous gaps in coverage, and significant inconsistencies in quality over time. The capabilities of these systems have been oversold by those with an interest in keeping their highest bidders paying. One former intelligence analyst once remarked that the reason many top secret assessments were kept classified was to hide the poor quality of the product from the public that paid for it.
The problem is that of a needle in a haystack. Mostly, spysats are used to look for stationary things that have a fairly guessable appearance and location. Undefined drifting wreckage in millions of square miles of ocean isn't what it was intended for. A lot of eyeballs (crowd-sourced searching) might help, but that gives away the clasified capability of the system.
"The problem is that of a needle in a haystack."
And that of looking through a drinking straw.
The problem with an enormously high resolution spy-sat is that its field of view is effectively sweet FA. You fly them over places where you know there is stuff, rather than sweeping oceans hoping to find something in a strip a mile wide.
"The problem is that of a needle in a haystack. "
No.
The real problem is like that of finding a particular tiny bit of twig in a rainforest. "Needle in haystack" problems are easy, just drop the thing through a dense magnetic field. The needle is rapidly separated out. This has been a solved problem for so long that I can't understand why anyone would use it as an example of something that is difficult. It hasn't been difficult for at least two centuries.
Using the appropriate technology is most of the solution to any issue.
For example, if any large piece of the wreckage could be magnetic, using ship and submarine detection gear might be useful - for small areas. If anything in the plane or cargo is likely to bleed, tracking the movements of sharks could be helpful. [Some sharks are tagged for scientific purposes, looking at the records might tell us something.] And if anything on the aircraft was transmitting perhaps amateur radio fans or even radio telescopes might have caught it. These are all unlikely to be successful and probably futile but they make the point that if you use the right detector you can differentiate aluminium from ocean and people from metal.
But the best technology for this task is probably human eyeballs. Attracting hordes of rubber-neckers might seem a little ghoulish and unconventional, but it could be the best way of finding any debris, assuming there is some.
If the plane has been stolen and landed intact rubber-neckers may even be useful there but it would mean allowing many tourists into places they generally don't got to go.
Humans can be quite dim at times but there are very few who would miss a 777 were they to stumble onto one.
That's right. Clearly we need to increase, by an order of magnitude or so, the budgets given to spy agencies in our respective countries, to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.
Or we could, y'know, ask why the Malaysian (and Indonesian, if the flight paths speculated so far are anything to go by) militaries weren't doing their jobs and investigating an unexplained radar contact crossing their territories. A couple of scrambled fighters doing a fly-by and looking in through the cockpit and windows (there's always a few portholes left open) - could have answered many of the most perplexing questions we have right now. But it didn't happen, because... why exactly?
If we can't even ask, much less answer, that question, then what good would any amount of extra kit do us?
"Or we could, y'know, ask why the Malaysian (and Indonesian, if the flight paths speculated so far are anything to go by) militaries weren't doing their jobs and investigating an unexplained radar contact crossing their territories."
OTOH, it's their military and their business, not for us to tell us how they should defend their nation's airspace. Malaysia doesn't quite have the budget we have, and maybe doesn't have the jets sat on the runway ready to roll in the same way we might.
That said, I imagine someone will be getting a kicking, but as it is a private military matter, it'll be behind closed doors.
The human brain evolved to pattern match, and the cost of a false positive was usually far less than the cost of missing a match. The latter tended to involve being eaten shortly afterwards, thereby removing the less hair-triggered pattern matchers from the gene pool.
So we all spot patterns in random noise. Especially faces and straight lines. Get tired enough, drink enough coffee so you are still awake, and you'll end up hallucinating in a small way. For me it was small creatures running around in my peripheral vision, that weren't really there. (The programming part of my brain was still perfectly "in the flow". Odd things, brains. )
I guess that can be turned off as well!? Or they're lying about its analysis effectiveness.
"A critical aspect of the EHM system is the transfer of data from aircraft to ground. Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) digital data-link systems are used as the primary method of communication. This transmits the Aircraft Condition Monitoring System (ACMS ) reports via a VHF radio or satellite link whilst the aircraft is in-flight."
Link:-
http://www.rolls-royce.com/about/technology/systems_tech/monitoring_systems.jsp
I guess that can be turned off as well!? Yes, or at least the transmitter part can.
Just about every electrical component on an aircraft can be isolated, it's almost as if they're worried about fire. This is a requirement of the certification regulations which for a Boeing 777 is probably FAR part 25.
Mate - I hope the passengers were not too aware for the duration of flight when fuel was running out - if that was indeed the case.
But! I am sure someone on tv mentioned that there is a top secret, hush-hush classified US of A island base down there that the plane was tracking on to.
Maybe they (the top secret, hush-hush base) shot the liner down?
> Capture plane for reasons unknown, possibly having to do with religion and/or a ragequit attitude
> Divert into vast desert off nothingness to make it disappear
> By coincidence hit the hush-hush Amurrican Superbase hidden within vast desert of nothingness
> Hush-hush Amurrican Superbase fires at you as your fuel runs out
> THEY ARE EVERYWHERE!
"But mistakes like the ones recorded here are particularly unhelpful if they heighten public paranoia." IMO, the public's paranoia is intolerably low and needs a bit of prodding with a sharp stick. There have been stories about being able to read license plates from satellites for years and you can pretty much assume tha there is a large degree of accuracy in them if commercial satellites are "allowed" to operate at 0.25m.
I'm not really worried about myself because I'm a nobody and really have no effect on government functions. But apply those same technologies (NSA, satellites, etc.) to the portion of the populace that DOES have responsibility for implementing laws and rules of government contrivance and I see real problems. That level of data can be used to influence everyone in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government at all levels - national, state, county, city, and school district. And not just the primary parties but their families and relatives. That is far, far more power in the hands of far, far too few people.
Yes, Mrs. Feinstein, you are a member of "all Americans" and so are your family members and you aides and their family members.
Without a level of paranoia commensurate to the degree of intrusion we are doing nothing more than skipping down the yellow brick road like the Straw Man singing, "If I Only had a Brain".
A bit more public paranoia could have prevented or, at the very least reduced, the impact of the events of 09/11/2001.
There are several down that way. Diego Garcia is simply the most well known. the french have one further south.
A: Sir we have an incoming plane that is not identified, does not respond to radio request.
Sir: Do we have eyes on?
A: Sir, yes sir. Eyes on by flight and by satellite.
Sir: And?
A: Sir, the plane is a scheduled flight from Malaysia to Beijing.
Sir: Strewth dude! We have a 9/11 situation here. Contact Washington, Arlington, Langley and Norfolk on red scramble group call at maximum security with maximum urgency.
(Discussion takes place)
Sir: Destroy it
???
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I was talking about land based over the horizon radar. Totally different than Satellite.
Wrote to Ministry of Defence
Dear Honorable Senator the Hon David Johnston, Minister for Defence I was reading about your military's radar capability at http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/jorn.html. It would be terrific if your military data from radars was evaluated. I am afraid that because there has not been any data released, that your radar program is defective or the military personnel are failing to do their job. I am afraid that this may show the Russian military that their is a weakness in your system that they can exploit. Sincerely William B. Higinbotham
The security aspects could be improved - don't sell aircraft to foreigners, have everyone carry a gps beacon, ban air travel and donkeys, twitter, whatever,....
But the main topic has been the unfortunate accident, and the security hardware isn't giving answers, because it is not set up to answer this useful set of questions, even when it has a security aspect.
I saw a depressing interview today where some parochial Washinton correspondent was discussing with top experts how to make all radar track to American standards and ensure that transponder switches be locked away from pilot's fingers. It made me feel not just that US security is an expensive irrelevance, but that if their view prevails, security may be incompatible with safety, or humanity.
As mentioned before I see much higher resolution on the Google Maps satellite image of my little hunk of property. But I clearly recall the most amazing image I ever saw. It was back in the late 80's. I think it was in Aviation "leak" and space technology. It was in an article on real time image processing. The caption declared that the image was of a helicopter 1500 METERS below the water taken from another helicopter hovering 50 meters above the surface THROUGH THE PROPWASH. The helicopter under the water was upside down... and you could clearly read the aircraft identification painted on the bottom. Rumor at the time suggested that spy satellite technology was such that if you had a pack of smokes laying in your outstretched hand that the brand could be identified. I KNOW of at least one image taken at that time that was good enough for facial recognition. That was in the 80's. I don't suppose satellite technology has gotten worse since then.
"1500 METERS below the water taken from another helicopter hovering 50 meters above the surface THROUGH THE PROPWASH. The helicopter under the water was upside down... and you could clearly read the aircraft identification painted on the bottom."
April issue by any chance? According to WP at a depth of "100 m (330 ft) the light present from the sun is normally about 0.5% of that at the surface." At 15 times that depth it is pitch black.
"a US-based outfit known to operate at least three imaging satellites and which last year boasted it can, on request, photograph anywhere on Earth every 12 hours"
Anyone able to put a smart phone camera in space will be able to claim the same thing: click, wait 6 hours, click, wait 6 hours, click, wait 6 hours, click. There, done and in only 18 hours. OK, you will not be able to *see* much in those images but the claim is honored. Now the real question is: at what resolution can those images be taken?