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Aside from increasing contractor availability this has the bonus of increasing the access to these capabilities for actual operations (both ours and our allies'

Aside from increasing contractor availability this has the bonus of increasing the access to these capabilities for actual operations (both ours and our allies'). If your magic satellite that can tell who in a crowd is running a fever is SAPed then you might not be able to use it to help your troops or your allies hunt down artillery launches (as an example). So then you need to either do some parallel construction to mask the actual source of the information or just sit by and not help at all. So hopefully this means that we'll see some previously exotic space capabilities trickle down into more pedestrian use cases.

nonameiguess 3y ago
Source redaction has been possible and mostly automated for a long time. Getting information to the front line or "tactical edge" as they call it these days is more about file size, as collections and the initial processed products carry quite a bit of metadata and resolution that isn't needed, in formats not commonly read by tablets and regular software. As it stands, I recall seeing at least a few images of objects in space in the news attributed to sources I know for an absolute fact were not the real sources and no one I'm aware of ever questioned it. So at least some of this stuff is already getting disseminated to the public. It's pretty rare for the content of an image to be classified. More often, it's specifics of the collection capability, i.e. collection angles, occlusion, weather conditions, or in many cases the fact that something can be collected from space at all, but if you tell the viewer it came from a ground telescope, or a collection of the ground was from aircraft rather than satellite, they'll believe it. They have no way of telling otherwise without collection metadata. Hopefully, this effort can further enhance the way files get portion-marked to make it easier to release content when metadata has been redacted, though. My still favorite anecdote is analying test data in which the file was literally just plain ASCII text of the preamble to the US Constitution but it was marked TS/TK/NF because the collection capability was sensitive enough that every file it generated automatically got marked as such even though it had no metadata at all. It was just text. The metadata was in a completely separate file.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Source redaction has been possible and mostly automated for a long time. Getting information to the front line or "tactical edge" as they call it these days is more about file size, as collections and the initial processed products carry quite a bit of metadata and resolution that isn't needed, in formats not commonly read by tablets and regular software. As it stands, I recall seeing at least a few images of objects in space in the news attributed to sources I know for an absolute fact were not the real sources and no one I'm aware of ever questioned it. So at least some of this stuff is already getting disseminated to the public. It's pretty rare for the content of an image to be classified. More often, it's specifics of the collection capability, i.e. collection angles, occlusion, weather conditions, or in many cases the fact that something can be collected from space at all, but if you tell the viewer it came from a ground telescope, or a collection of the ground was from aircraft rather than satellite, they'll believe it. They have no way of telling otherwise without collection metadata. Hopefully, this effort can further enhance the way files get portion-marked to make it easier to release content when metadata has been redacted, though. My still favorite anecdote is analying test data in which the file was literally just plain ASCII text of the preamble to the US Constitution but it was marked TS/TK/NF because the collection capability was sensitive enough that every file it generated automatically got marked as such even though it had no metadata at all. It was just text. The metadata was in a completely separate file.