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A new video offers a fun introduction to a free activity that anyone can do: spy on countries and their armed forces from space.
Keith Masback, the former director of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance integration for the U.S. Army and a veteran of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, recently showed WIRED how to use satellite imagery to peer down on any—yes, any—location on the planet. Here’s the video:
Here are a few tricks for identifying military bases and other seemingly secretive stuff in satellite imagery, which is available for free on sites like Google Maps and the U.S. Geologic Survey.
Nature rarely, if ever, produces a straight line, Masback says, so if you see one in satellite imagery, that’s a good sign of human activity in the area.