Trump says his is bigger
Somewhat breathtaking – Trump appears to have tweeted classified intelligence again.
President Trump has tweeted what experts say is almost certainly an image from a classified satellite or drone, showing the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.
Along with text that someone wrote for him, because he’s not literate enough to have written it himself.
The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One.
NPR goes on:
NPR broke the news of the launch failure on Thursday, using images from commercial satellites that flew over Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center. Those images showed smoke billowing from the pad. Iran has since acknowledged an accident occurred at the site.
Some of the highest-resolution imagery available commercially comes from the company Maxar, whose WorldView-2 satellite sports 46-centimeter resolution.
But the image shown in the president’s tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. “The resolution is amazingly high,” says Panda. “I would think it’s probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”
And some genius puts it on Twitter. What are they doing up in there?
The DNI office referred questions to the White House; the White House said it was too busy tweeting secret intel to answer any damn fool questions.
Panda notes that a small redaction in the upper left-hand corner suggests the intelligence community had cleared the image for release by the president.
But both he and Hanham question whether releasing it was a good idea. “You really risk giving away the way you know things,” Hanham says. “That allows people to adapt and hide how they carry out illicit activity.”
“These are closely held national secrets,” Panda adds. “We don’t even share a lot of this kind of imagery with our closest allies.” In tweeting it out to the world, Trump is letting Iran know exactly what the U.S. is capable of. He’s also letting others know as well, Panda says. “The Russians and the Chinese, you’re letting them know that these are the kind of things that the United States has the capability of seeing,” he says.
Secrets shmecrets, right? Let’s spill all our beans and then make hummus!
But her emails! Lock her up because the server wasn’t secure!
Says the biggest national security risk ever. Blabbermouth leaker should never have a security clearance. He can’t keep a secret if our lives depended on it!
So all Putin has to do to find out US capabilities is to show Donnie some crappy-ass low-res photos of secret facilities andf Trump will counter by whipping out the BIGGEST and BEST PHOTOS EVER!
If it’s from a satellite, that gives away its abilities, as it will be dead simple using math and geometry to figure out from how far and what altitude the shot was taken. If it’s from a drone, that has implications for overflight and incursion along its flight path.
What an idiot.