Hacker News Reader

Comment by matkoniecz | Hacker News Reader

What if US government bans US-based companies from selling pictures within area where carrier operates?

(of all "national security" reasons these is one of more reasonable ones)

The problem then is the black out zones themselves reveal a lot as well if adversaries can find their bounds. That narrows the search area for their own observation satellites immensely even if it's too large to respond to IRL.

Well in that case congratulations. You've just made it easier. Now you don't even have to track them. You just have to look for the blacked out box, the "error we can't show you this", reused imagery from their long running historical imagery dataset, or improperly fused/healed imagery after alteration.

So now you don't have to do the tracking, just find the hole.

And then you can use a non-US provider to get direct imagery now that you know exactly where to look.

If the restricted area is large, a carrier is regionally disabling for an imagery provider. If it's smaller (and therefore must move over time to follow the carrier group) as soon as the imagery provider starts refusing sales in an area, any customer can test and learn its perimeter with trial purchases, find a coarse center, and learn its course and speed. You don't care about anything else until there's actual hostilities.

It would make tracking impossible, as no other country operates satellites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com