Topaz, Orion, Nemesis, Raven, Intruder. They sound like code names and they are. But the US spy satellites that they refer to – revealed as part of a leak by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden – were never much of a secret.
On 29 August The Washington Post published a redacted version of the US Director of National Intelligence's $52.6 billion budget justification for 2013, leaked by Snowden. It says such satellites were key in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden – and reveals the names for a bunch of them.
But Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says enthusiasts, who track satellites with ground telescopes, already knew these ones existed, just not their names. "If you put a bright thing in the night sky, you can declare that it's a secret all you like, but people can still look up and see it," says McDowell.
He thinks it's time the US acknowledged its spy satellite programme is no secret.
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