NRO Declassifies KH-9 Satellite

As such revealing that the US has a sat that could do 6 meters isn't revealing anything sensitive.

That's not necessarily true.

It's true that revealing our capabilities 40 years ago doesn't provide our adversaries with any technical advantage to use against us today. "Film! How quaint!"

But it might reveal things from 40 years ago that do have impact on present-day policy. Somewhere in the KGB/FSB, someone might have made a decision about whether or we knew about $FOO in the 70s because we had a highly-detailed pictures of it from space, because we had a mole onsite working on the $FOO project, or because we just made a lucky guess.

Suppose they believed that we had half-meter resolution on Specific Date, 1971 and ascribed the leak to spy satellites. But today, they know that our 1971 satellites couldn't have compromised $FOO to the degree that they did because they just weren't good enough. Time to dig open those dusty file folders and re-evaluate who had access to $FOO, because if any of those people are working on the brand-new super-secret $BAR project, and after a 40-year career, probably have access to $BAR today than they did to $FOO in the 70s.

Also consider the answer to "Why did country X do something 35 years ago" might be very useful if you knew what we might have been sharing with country X's leaders. The people running country X might still be in power, and the answer to those sorts of questions has diplomatic repercussions today.

Those are just two of the reasons why declassification takes decades.

Anyhow, thanks, grey-haired spy nerds (and grey-haired balls-out crazy pilots!), for showing us some really cool stuff, like trying to catch a parachuting capsule in mid-air, which was something I hadn't heard of until Genesis [wikipedia.org] and Stardust [wikipedia.org] projects. Now we know where the science teams got the idea (and after the crash of Genesis, we also know which direction to install the accelerometer, and the importance of never skipping testing procedures...)

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/X6oMMeufxiQ/NRO-Declassifies-KH-9-Satellite

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