Aerial photos of Fed. buildings doctored...

Here's the story: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7671

Here's the comparison:
http://cryptome.org/seats-uneyeball.htm

I use a lot of aerials at work...thought this was interesting.

What a waste of my homeland security dollars. The resolution of those photos showed you there was stuff on the roof, now you can't see that there are dark specs on the roof. How is knowing that there is a dish or something on the roof of the white house a security risk for them?

Just one more in a long series of, "well, if we can't do anything useful, lets do anything else we can think of"

Do I sound cynical? If this is what they call adding to the security of the nation then yes, that makes me cynical.

Just because it sounds useless to you doesn't necessarily mean it is. I agree this is strange but it's not like we know the whole story here.

[ QUOTE ]
James S said:
What a waste of my homeland security dollars. The resolution of those photos showed you there was stuff on the roof, now you can't see that there are dark specs on the roof. How is knowing that there is a dish or something on the roof of the white house a security risk for them?

Just one more in a long series of, "well, if we can't do anything useful, lets do anything else we can think of"

Do I sound cynical? If this is what they call adding to the security of the nation then yes, that makes me cynical.

[/ QUOTE ]

I dont know if you know this or not, but as far ask i know there are snipers and surface to air missles mounted on the roof of the white house. Maybe it would be an advantage to those trying to attack the white house if they knew where exactly those units were.

You're all of course right, there are certainly things at work that we don't know anything about. However, if you actually LOOK at the before and after photos you'll see that there are black and grey dots on the roof. These pictures are generally several years old, they don't take a new one for you when you open the website.

The resolution these pictures are taken at is already considered harmless because you cannot see the difference between an anit-aircraft installation and a skylight into the oval office bathroom.

They removed detail, and in detail there is certainly information. It is certainly possible that someone could look at that and say "ah ha, see that pixel? That is a sniper! Or at least it was 18 months ago..."

It's funny that in some of them they removed only roof detail, while in others they fudged up the whole area. I think the information about the various paths through the wooded areas and gardens is probably more sensitive than the black dot on the roof. And, they have made no apparent effort to get the info removed from anywhere else. So It just doesn't make sense to me. Thats why I will never be offered the job of national security advisor /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif OK, well, one of the reasons anyway...

It is wierd that that little swimming pool was removed from the pictures. They must be worried about mad swimmers attacking the whitehouse. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Heh James I see what you mean. Though with technology these days it wouldn't be very hard to blow up those pictures and clean 'em up. I guess they (they being the Gov) takes on the philosophy that the less prying eyes can see, the better.

Oh and bwcaw -- they don't want people sneaking up and peeing in the pool. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

They must have Dr. Mallin (NASA - JPL) doing the retouching. LOL

There are various ways to increase the visibility of the information in the image. You can tweak the contrast so that pixels with almost, but not exactly the same value can be more easily distinguished. You can infer more pixels form the shading between 2 other ones which sometimes makes more outlines apparent to the human eye. There are lots of good things you can do with video or sequences of stills to remove noise and increase resolution as it moves around. But there is no way to actually add in more information than was there in the first place. As far as I know the idea of scanning an image and bringing out detail that just isn't there is strictly confined to the movies /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Still, they can do very good things with the image they have got, but if you're talking about 2 or 3 pixels in a dot, you can't resolve that to read the serial number on the sniper rifle, no matter how much time on the NSA super computer you can get /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Charles, is that the Malin who had something to do with the face on mars pictures? (or lack thereof?)

Keep in mind that anyone really wanting the highest quality overheads won't get them from MapQuest, anyway. Those are fairly miserable shots at their best.

Here's the best quality MapQuest/GlobeXplorer shot of where I live:



Here's an example of a decent overhead of the same building (greatly reduced in size and detail from the print I have):



And here's a small portion of that same overhead at best resolution:



These are just civilian-grade overheads - the mil-spec shots can be much better ...

Maybe the real weapons at the white house are hidden in/under the pool. Ever see goldeneye (james bond)?

!!!

I would think it is so you can't reference a before and after shots. Even looking at the detail Tom has above you could certainly tell if they have added a anti aircraft battery or anti missile defense system, or even added 20 feet of cement over the entire roof as protection. I can understand why they would do this, the terrorist that hijacked those planes used Microsoft flight simulator to find the correct path visually over NY, why would anyone think they wouldn't pay and order some shots from GlobeXplorer of the white house to see what was there or any other hi profile location?

For every instace like this where it looks inane, there's other examples of things that are shockingly unsecured.

Just a few years back, I was surprised to find an airfield in the middle of the desert some 70 miles north of Las Vegas, where no airfield was supposed to be....