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‘The cat’s out of the bag. It’s a new world.’
— JOHN PIKE Federation of American Scientists |
THE MICROSOFT TERRASERVER project, offering almost 180 million overhead images taken from airplanes and satellites, was formally unveiled Wednesday at a computer trade event for governmental agencies in Washington. But the Web site was active even before its official debut, and John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists cruised around the site looking for overhead pictures of sensitive areas. Aerial intelligence imagery is one of Pike’s specialties, and he was amazed at what he found. He said there were aerial photos of Raven Rock, Md., the Pentagon bunker north of the Camp David presidential retreat; and Mount Weather, Va., the underground complex operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those two facilities are thought to be designed to house government leaders in the event of an emergency. Another photographic subject was Camp Perry, Va., which houses a training complex for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. “I was able to find each of those in about 10 minutes or so,” he said. Pike said the photos are publicly accessible by other means — after all, they originally came from the U.S. Geological Survey. But in the past, the red tape was a formidable hurdle for image-hunters. “You’re putting in one place the one-stop access to a large chunk of what’s available instead of having to go through all these channels,” said Jeffrey Richelson, author of “The U.S. Intelligence Community.” NBC producer Robert Windrem, an expert on U.S. intelligence, said the database also includes photos of sensitive communications facilities near Sugar Grove, W.Va.; Remington, Va.; and Warren Grove, N.J. Images of Nevada’s Area 51, the focus of UFO lore, are not included in the database ... yet. The current database covers an estimated 45 percent of the contiguous United States plus a smattering of areas around the rest of the world. But the partners behind TerraServer say more images will be added to the database, with the entire United States likely to be covered next year. The partners behind TerraServer say they came under no government pressure to block out the images, which come from a USGS aerial survey as well as Russian satellite photos. The software is set up to block access from nations such as Iraq, Cuba or North Korea, but Pike said “I don’t know that it’s going to do any good.” “You’re going to block out the North Korea domain, but there’s no way you’re going to block out North Koreans living in Japan,” Pike said. “The cat’s out of the bag. It’s a new world.” CONNECTION REFUSED You didn’t have to be from North Korea to encounter problems with TerraServer on Wednesday. The site showed all the symptoms of overwhelming traffic, including missing graphics and messages reading “connection refused” and “too many users are connected.” What’s more, users who made their way through the site often found that the actual database of images was unavailable. Pike said it seemed to him that the site was “not ready for prime time.” Microsoft’s Jim Ewel acknowledged that the traffic outpaced server capacity — not in the database system itself, but in the front-end computers that handle the distribution of information over the World Wide Web. (Microsoft is a partner in the joint venture that operates MSNBC.) “It’s been much busier than we anticipated,” said Ewel, group product manager for Microsoft SQL Server. The site recorded 4 million hits Monday, 8 million hits Tuesday, and was on track to exceed 8 million Wednesday, he said. Ewel said more computers were being added to the system to cope with the traffic. “We have the technology, we know how to do it,” he said. “It’s just a question of getting machines in there fast enough to handle the unexpected load.” Microsoft and Compaq are involved in the TerraServer project primarily to demonstrate the scalability of their software and hardware. The other partners are USGS and SPIN-2, a satellite imaging venture involving the Russian company Sovinformsputnik as well as two American companies, Aerial Images and Central Trading Systems. Sovinformsputnik is providing images from Russian archives as well as a series of recent and future satellite missions. HOW IT WORKS |
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Users can click their way down from a global view to black-and-white photographs with a resolution ranging from about 3 to 6 feet — good enough to show houses and cars, but not people. In comparison, intelligence experts estimate that the best spy satellite photos have a resolution of about 6 inches. You can use a map or a place name search to navigate your way through the database. The age of the photos range from 3 months to about a decade. New satellite images will be added — eventually in color — so users can track how a particular location has changed over time. Once a photo is selected, you can click to download the image (it’s free for USGS photos, while the charges for Sovinformsputnik photos are $7.95 to $24.95). SPIN-2 gives you the option of ordering hard-copy Kodak prints (for $12.95 to $39.95). And for a fee, USGS can send you images on CD-ROM. Splashing satellite images over the Internet may sound like a potential privacy nightmare, but the partners emphasized that the images weren’t real-time and that they didn’t show people. “We think that this does satisfy any concerns the people might have,” Ewel said. John Hoffman, president and chief executive officer of Aerial Images, said the images have been put to “an extraordinary range of uses” during the testing phase: Families had pictures of old homesteads printed up as gifts. Landscapers, architects and businesses studied the photos as a basis for their building plans. One citizen even ordered a poster of his neighborhood to take to a contentious zoning hearing. What do TerraServer’s partners hope to gain from the site? The SPIN-2 partners are looking for income from downloads as well as prints, as well as bigger-scale custom projects that spin off the main database. For USGS and other governmental agencies, the project is an experiment in secure electronic commerce. And if TerraServer is successful, Microsoft and Compaq hope to gain more business in big databases. “It goes a long way toward demonstrating that we’re scalable for these kinds of multimedia databases,” Ewel said. The current TerraServer database has about 180 million records, but he said Microsoft was working on an even bigger database for 4.9 billion records. TerraServer isn’t the only Web venture dealing in aerial images: City Scenes, for example, lets Internet surfers take “virtual flights” over a dozen U.S. cities. City Scenes is seeking to derive income through Web advertising sales. |