David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…You basically would need a larger format film with a wider angle lens if you don't want to increase your number of satellites. Yeah. I'm fuzziest on Hexagon. Then in 1977, they launch Kennen, which is still very classified. Some of it is out, so we can know a little bit about this. There actually was an incident in 2019 when Trump was president. He tweeted an intelligence photo that was this incredible photo of incredible resolution of something that happened somewhere maybe in Iran. He tweeted like, oh, see, it isn't what you thought. People went nuts. People believe. It's never been confirmed that this photo was from a future version of the Kennen program. What was Kennen? Kennen was see it now. It's the first real-time space-based surveillance system, I guess maybe the first real-time surveillance system, period. I don't know. By 1977, there were enough communication satellites up in the sky. Digital photography had come along far enough. The Kennen satellites are like what we think about, like Google Maps, it's real time, digital photography beamed down via ground link to stations in real time. Lockheed has to build their own digital workstations to process these photos to display them, to manipulate them. I think these might have been the first or really early digital photo processing manipulation workstations that were sold to the CIA. I didn't know about any of this.…

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