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Karl Burkart

CIA to spy on the environment

CIA revives MEDEA, a partnership between the nation’s top spies and environmental scientists.

Tue, Jan 05 2010 at 8:27 PM EST

Photo: USGS
The latest target of the CIA? No, it’s not Bin Laden’s latest radical chrony or a secret North Korean missile site …
 
It’s polar ice sheets.
 
A project known as MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis) was recently revived on Capitol Hill and now has the full backing of the new CIA head Leon Panetta.
 
The program started up during the Clinton years but was shut down during by the Bush administration for fear (my guess) that it would have given credence to climate change as a significant threat to national security.
 
MEDEA makes available to a shortlist of the nation’s top environmental scientists access to classified “sensors” (aka intelligence satellites) for use as they pass over the polar regions of the Earth.
 
The high-resolution satellite imagery provided by these sensors gives scientists an unprecedented ability to understand and predict major changes on the surface of the Earth, in particular the melting of sea ice.
 
This intelligence will help two major, quite conflicting causes — (1) the desire to better understand and predict the impacts of climate change and (2) the ability to gain early access to the new oil and gas reserves locked beneath the polar caps.
 
The failure in thwarting the latest in a series of attempted terrorist attacks (14 attempts in 2009 according to an interview with Terry Gross, NPR) will make the CIA evermore prone to criticism for its pro-academia decision, prompting comments such as Sen. John Barrasso’s of Wyoming, who said we should be spying on terrorists “not spying on sea lions.”
 
But with the official statement from the Pentagon last month that climate change is now deemed a threat to national security, it is unlikely that MEDEA will be shelved any time soon.
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Related Topics: Climate Change, Environmental Research, Environmental Science, Global Warming, Melting Ice

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anonymous
Anonymous Today 00:10 AM

Karl-Great post about the CIAs efforts to help save our environment. You mentioned somethings about MEDEA and was wondering if you could expand on it a little more about what it does and when it got started. I'm doing some research on global warming and the effects it has on our planet and the current ways we're trying to fight it, and would like to site your website as a source if you don't mind. You really do have a great site here and am definitely going to tell other people about it. .... More

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