There are satellites watching various important events all over the world right now. Satellites that we the public have no access to.
So instead of seeing the events for ourselves we get news from various totally untrustworthy and manipulative news things.
If we could access the satellites then we could see for ourselves, or at least seriously fact check the news things.
I think this would make things better, how about you?
I’m all for whatever lets us see things for ourselves instead of having some talking heads decide the framing.
Public access panopticon?
Every single piece of surveillance apparatus, everything that the Spooks and cops have. Every satellite and camera. Except it’s public access.
I’m serious. It would level the playing field. Surveillance is arguably more important than money. And it can be shared without diminishing it.
I think we could dip our toes in this water with a few seasons of the Big Brother TV show.
Instead of waiting for episodes, we have every camera livestreaming at all times for anyone in the world to watch.
Secretly host a competition between a bunch of similarly large appropriate-themed youtube creators to push a certain narrative.
At the end of the season hand out surveys to the public ranking perception of contestants/events.
I think we will all learn a lot and it will be an excellent experience for us all and im honestly quite annoyed that nobody has done this yet.
Controversial take, I know, but I disagree.
I have a few reasons…
- Information overload, the really important stuff will be far easier to hide among the random stuff that people are focusing on.
- People are not rational, if social media plattforms have shown us anything, it is that people will latch onto just about anything and form conspiracies, they will laugh in the face of proof and reject rational explanations. A random box building in a forrest? That is the secret temple to Bob, Jesus’ drinking buddy, it can’t just be an old storage shed! A military exercise? LOL, sheep! It is an invasion! And so on.
I am all for a public entity that would own and operate independent satellites with their own experts interpreting the data to verify claims by the governments, but to give everyone unrestricted access just sounds like a terrible idea
Wouldn’t higher resolution make it much easier to verify and discard conspiracy theories, for those willing?
Blurry photos and imagery works much better for fantasizing. And is harder to sight and assess.
these are nonsense reasons
If you or I can see them, so can our enemies.
But what if my enemies are the ones that have access and control of these satellites?
I think that’s a smaller threat than the threat of being showered in lies by professional liars.
Really?
And how do you know this without access to that data currently?
“Professional liars” have been with us from the beginning, there’s nothing new about that.
Having access to all sorts of surveillance data wouldn’t help - you’d still have no way of knowing what’s meaningful, what isn’t. It’s why analysts have a job.
Even with AI tools the scale of data is staggering.
Via the obvious avenues of course.
Maybe? It sounds reasonable, and you framed it positively, but I feel like it might be a trap.
Like, if there are trail cams on the moon, let us watch them, but a public network of footage from every doorbell in the world is a very bad idea.
" footage from every doorbell in the world" has nothing to do with satelite images.
That is indeed terrible but I’m sure the 3LA’s already have that.
What you need to realize about those satellites is that the image sensors are nowhere near large enough to cover everything below them. The have lenses that need to be pointed at things to take useful images. Just having access to those images their only gives you half of what you need. And control c can not be made public. There are so many conflicting interests that they’d never do anything useful that way anymore.
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I think best in class satellites are now producing images at resolution of 0.35…0.50m per pixel. You can go to Planet Labs website and check their image samples to understand what it means and the extent of verification you can get with that.
There’s already multiple satellite networks the public can hire. You can pay a company like Planet Labs or Spire Global and get access to thousands of satellites right now if that’s what you want to do. It would be great if the public had access for free but it costs a lot of money to keep satellites in orbit. I think having free access would save some NGOs money but otherwise not much would change.
The biggest satellite networks are state owned, no? They’re already paid for by the governments, by the people.
