got geoint?

WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks. Everywhere we turn it’s still all about WikiLeaks. Yes, the State Department is still dealing with the fall out of Julian Assange’s late-November dump of thousands of diplomatic cables. While most of these documents contained State Department-related issues, one caught our attention (well, via The Huffington Post that is). It seems that Germany’s aerospace center was allegedly working with the U.S. on a $270 million high-tech secret spy program that involved the development of a high-resolution optical satellite. Germany recently denied that this GEOINT-related program was for intelligence gathering purposes, but was for purely scientific and security uses.

According to The Huffington Post (via the Norwegian Daily Aftenposten), German Aerospace Center spokesman Andreas Schuetz said that such a project for a high-resolution optical satellite has been in discussion for the past two years under the name HIROS.

Here’s Scheutz’s quote in Huffington Post:

“HIROS is neither a spy satellite, nor a secret project,” Schuetz said. He insisted that the project was to be used only for government purposes, “for example crisis management during natural catastrophes and for scientific uses.”

According to the AFP, the program is “under the total control” of the German intelligence service BND and the German aerospace centre DLR, as the cables showed.

Tags: GEOINT, geospatial intelligence, got geoint?, HIRO German Spy Satellite, Optical Satellites, Spy Satellites, United States Geospatial Intelligencve Foundation, USGIF, WikiLeaks and German Spy Satellite Program, WikiLeaks and Spy Satellites