KOLLER NAMED THE GEOINT SINGULARITY
the way you might name an unbuilt city for which
you hadn’t drawn blueprints yet. While the future
it represents still seems far off, the technology to
achieve it has been developing for decades. The
US government launched its first picture-taking
satellites in the 1960s, and followed with ones ded-
icated to military and intelligence needs. Entities
like NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, and the United States Geological
Survey sent up craft for scientific use. Their data is
largely public, giving access to decades-old records
that anyone can compare with today’s.
In the 1990s, business joined in, largely so it could
sell pictures to spooky agencies. WorldView Imaging
Corporation, now called Maxar, deployed the first
privately owned cameras to peer down at Earth.
Today the company also sells data to oil and gas
companies to monitor pipelines, to mega-retailers
to keep an eye on store traffic, and to developers to
survey potential construction zones.
In the meantime, a virtual panopticon has
emerged, one that no longer just takes pictures.
Satellites also nab radio transmissions, weather in-
formation, infrared images, and radar data. Drones
overfly the planet, street cameras keep watch
closer to the ground, smart devices broadcast loca-
tions, and governmental datasets—from curb cuts
to county lines—live online. With each uptick in
detail, the singularity draws closer.
It can only happen, though, if data reaches the
public—not exactly the strong suit of private com-
panies. Still, they do sometimes share. Maxar, for
instance, ran the first major effort to involve lay-
people in image analysis and mapmaking. Called
Tomnod, the nine-year program enlisted amateurs
during disasters, like the Malaysia Airlines crash
in 2014, or for scientific research, such as count-
ing Weddell seals in Antarctica for a 2016 census.
During crises, Maxar also makes imagery available
to groups like Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, which
sponsors crowdsourced efforts to plot crisis-plagued
regions—say, after earthquakes, or to chart vaccine
distribution, or understand refugee migration.
Companies also occasionally give their data to
scientists who are studying climate change, journal-
ists reporting on hard-to-reach places, and analysts
trying to suss out global tensions. One of those is Da-
vid Schmerler, who researches nuclear-weapon and
missile developments at the Middlebury Institute of
International Studies at Monterey in California.
Schmerler doesn’t really have formal training in
satellite-image analysis, but with his morning coffee
in hand, he logs on to the website of a company called
Planet, which operates around 140 satellites that
take pictures of all the land on Earth every day. Some
groups use the data to track deforestation, or calcu-
late how many cargo ships reached a given port on
Tuesday. But, as the caffeine hits, Schmerler zooms
in on a few sites in North Korea. “If I see a lot of road
activity, or if a building blows up, or they changed the
roof, something is happening there,” he says. In the
old days, you would learn of such things only days
or months later, when an overscheduled satellite got
around to taking a look. Today, you can see it today.
Schmerler sees all this geospatial data as a path
to truth in a twisty world. “You can verify all sorts
of claims using satellite imagery,” he points out. And
when he says “you,” he means it. “When someone says
something is changing in the world, we don’t have to
rely on that statement. If someone says the ice caps
are melting, you can log on and see that happen.”POPSCI.COM / SPRING 2020 65