For decades, privacy experts have been wary of spying from space.
They feared satellites powerful enough to get close to people and capture close-ups that could differentiate adults from children or sunbathers from those out in nature.
Now, suddenly, analysts say, a new company is building a
new type of satellite
whose cameras could, for the first time, do just that.
"We are very aware of the privacy implications," Topher Haddad, director of Albedo Space, the company that manufactures the new satellites, said in an interview.
Topher Haddad (left) and Winston Tri, co-founders of Albedo Space.
Mr. Haddad said the company is taking steps to address privacy concerns.
Photo Dimitri Staszewski for The New York Times
Your company's technology will take images of people, but it won't be able to identify them.
However, Haddad added that Albedo is taking administrative steps to address a wide range of privacy issues.
Anyone living in the modern world is familiar with the decline in privacy amid the rise of security cameras, trackers built into smartphones, facial recognition systems, drones and other forms of digital surveillance.
But what makes aerial surveillance potentially terrifying, experts say, is its ability to invade areas previously considered inherently
off-limits
.
"This is a giant camera in the sky for any government to use at any time without our knowledge," said Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
, who in 2019 urged civil satellite regulators to address this issue.
Albedo engineers working in an electronics lab at Albedo's offices outside Denver.
Photo Kevin Mohatt for The New York Times
"We should definitely be worried."
Faced with that concern, Haddad and other supporters of Albedo's technology say the real benefits must be weighed, especially when it comes to combating disasters and saving lives.
"You'll know which house is burning and where people are fleeing," says D. James Baker, former director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which licenses the country's civilian imaging satellites.
Denver-based Albedo Space has 50 employees and has raised about $100 million.
According to Haddad, it plans to launch its first satellite in early 2025.
In the long term, it envisions a fleet of
24 spacecraft.
Aerial view of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on April 22, 1986, taken from a Landsat satellite.
Photo United States Geological Survey
Albedo's investors include
Breakthrough Energy Ventures
, Bill Gates' investment company
.
Albedo's strategic advisory board includes former directors of the CIA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, dependent on the Pentagon.
Representation of crops, provided by the company.
Albedo claims it will have applications in agriculture, urban planning, conservation and national defense.Photo Albedo
The company's website does not mention the people taking the images or privacy issues.
Still, reconnaissance experts say regulators should wake up before their spacecraft start taking their first close-ups.
"It's a big deal," said Linda Zall, a former CIA official whose decades-long career included some of the country's most powerful spy satellites.
He predicted that people will realize that things they try to hide in their yards can now be seen more clearly.
"Privacy is a real issue," Zall said.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University who publishes a monthly report on civil and military space advances, added:
"It brings us one step closer to a world where Big Brother watches."
Although spacecraft in orbit have long studied the planet, the possibility of civilian life being monitored by satellites became clear with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Moscow had denied any serious problems.
But a non-military U.S. satellite took a photograph on April 29, 1986, showing that
the reactor core had ruptured
into a fiery breach, spewing deadly radioactive debris into the atmosphere.
AyJay Lasater, co-founder of Albedo Space, at the company's offices outside Denver.
Photo Kevin Mohatt for The New York Times
The American media spread the image.
It confirmed the catastrophe, helped pioneer the field of satellite journalism, and - almost immediately - stoked fears of espionage from space.
"The quality of the images is expected to improve rapidly," warned Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter published in Washington, shortly after the atomic disaster.
Television news directors now wanted unfettered access to space imagery, which could ultimately track everything from troop movements to backyard hot tubs.
The visual power of a space camera is usually expressed as the length, in meters, of the smallest feature it can resolve.
Meters were used in the first cameras.
Now it's centimeters.
Overall, according to experts, this improvement makes the new images hundreds of times more detailed and revealing.
The satellite that took images of Chernobyl in 1986 was known as Landsat.
NASA built it to monitor crops, forests and other resources on the ground.
The spacecraft's orbit was about 650 kilometers high and its camera could distinguish terrestrial objects up to 30 meters.
In contrast, the Chernobyl complex was almost a kilometer long.
So analysts could easily see it, as well as the reactor that had exploded.
Evolution
After the Cold War, in 1994, the Clinton administration approved the commercial use of American spy technology.
In 1999, Space Imaging, a subsidiary of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, launched its first satellite.
It had a resolving power of 1 meter.
The New York Times published the first image of the satellite on its front page.
The Washington Monument stood out clearly, its shadow long in the morning light.
As expected, the quality of images taken from orbit has continued to
improve
, helping to report on wars, refugees, secret bases, human rights violations, environmental destruction, natural disasters and military concentrations.
In 2016,
The Associated Press
won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering labor abuses in the seafood industry that amounted to slavery.
Its journalists used satellite images to track industry vessels.
Many news organizations, including the Times, now employ specialists skilled in satellite image analysis.
Mark Brender, a pioneer of satellite journalism, noted that reporters on the ground can be harassed and blocked.
"But cameras in space are safe from those kinds of pressures," he said.
"They have become as indispensable to a free society as a handheld camera or a printing press."
Scope
Today, the most powerful civilian imaging satellites can distinguish objects on the ground as small as 30 centimeters, or about 30 centimeters in diameter.
The images allow analysts to distinguish road markings and even
aircraft tail numbers.
Albedo aims to take a leap forward by imaging objects as small as 10 centimeters, or 4 inches.
That became possible because the Trump administration in 2018 took steps to relax regulations governing the resolution of civil satellites.
"Soon," warned in 2019 Technology Review, a magazine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "satellites will be able to watch you
everywhere all the time
."
What inspired Albedo's keen clarity goals, Haddad said, was President
Donald Trump's
2019 sharing on his Twitter account of a U.S. spy image showing a badly damaged launch pad in Iran.
The resolution of the image was judged to be about 10 centimeters, and this led to extensive debate about the commercial possibilities.
Haddad grew up in Houston and studied engineering at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Texas.
He then worked for Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, California, which has long been building spy satellites.
Some can rival or exceed the size of a school bus and often cost billions of dollars.
Haddad founded Albedo with Winston Tri, a former Facebook software engineer, and AyJay Lasater, a former Lockheed Martin satellite engineer.
They saw a commercial market for 10-centimeter images, but not if the costs were astronomical.
Their solution was to place the satellites in very low orbits that were comparatively close to their terrestrial subjects.
Thus, the satellite fleet could use smaller cameras and telescopes, which would reduce costs.
Landsat was orbiting more than 400 miles high when it took images of Chernobyl.
Instead, Albedo's founders planned orbits as low as 160 kilometers.
At low altitudes, spacecraft pass through the planet's thin outer atmosphere, which can slow them down and shorten their orbital life.
The Albedo spacecraft, slightly larger than a normal-sized refrigerator, will use thrusters to counteract atmospheric resistance.
To charge the batteries, satellites usually have large solar panels that unfold like wings.
Albedo no.
To reduce drag, the founders planned a
cylindrical ship covered in solar cells
.
Albedo was founded in 2020, and Haddad faced privacy concerns from the beginning.
Addressing them in an online technology forum discussion, he wrote:
"We are aware that we have to properly address privacy and misuse prevention."
To reduce risks, Haddad added that the company would approve new clients on a case-by-case basis, develop ways to identify bad actors and ensure that the terms and conditions of its contracts established punitive measures for violations of company policy. company.
In December 2021, Albedo obtained regulatory approval to launch an imaging satellite with a resolution of 10 centimeters.
Its technology quickly caught the attention of the country's military and intelligence agencies.
In 2022, Albedo received a
$1.25 million
contract from the Air Force to test whether the company's equipment could meet a standard rating scale that measures the interpretability of images.
Tests included identifying hardware on electronic vans, fairings on fighter jets and missile tubes on warships.
In April 2023, the company received another $1.25 million contract, this time with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which assesses foreign threats.
Late last year, it also signed a contract to have its technology evaluated by the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the country's spy satellites.
Albedo's website claims its imagery can help governments "monitor hot spots, eliminate uncertainty, and mobilize quickly."
The company, in listing its core values, says it supports "data-driven investigative journalism" among other activities that "ensure we improve the world we live in."
Tri, co-founder of Albedo, highlighted the fleet's observation capabilities and said space cameras could detect vehicle details such as sunroofs, racing stripes and objects on a flatbed truck.
"In some cases," he says, "we will even be able to identify specific vehicles, which has not been possible until now."
The company expects its civilian clients to include city planners looking for potholes in the roads, conservation groups tracking wildlife, insurance companies inspecting roof damage and power lines companies trying to prevent wildfires.
Scope
John Pike, director of Global Security.org, a nonprofit research group based in Alexandria, Virginia, said Albedo was downplaying what could be significant.
"You're going to start seeing people," he said.
"You're going to see more than just points."
Satellite images of fleeing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Pike noted, illustrate the current limits of observation.
The images show either dense crowds in which no individuals can be distinguished or - in the case of smaller groups of people on the roads - small specks and dark spots.
Pike echoed Haddad in stating that the new technology would be unable to identify
specific individuals.
However, he said space cameras would likely be able to distinguish children from adults, as well as bathers from those in other states of undress.
"This is the epitome of first-order privacy concerns: someone seeing you sunbathing," says Pike.
Legal experts point out that drones are highly regulated by federal, state and local laws that make them subject to lawsuits for trespass and violation of privacy.
No-fly zones not only include airports, military bases and sporting events, but also individuals.
California law prohibits drone operators, unless they have permission, from taking images of people engaged in private, personal or family activities.
Lynch, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says his discouraging experience with satellite regulators a half-decade ago suggested there was little that could be done to enforce privacy protections from the eyes of the sky.
He added that Albedo and his supporters "act with blinders and do not see the consequences" for human rights.
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