how spy/military satellites find things?

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When a military satellite finds a base being set up or personnel/vehicles being moved in large numbers in a foreign country, how do they know where to look?

Presumably they don’t have people who scan every square yard of the earth until something changes, and I’m guessing there is an element of other intelligence gathering to use as a guide – but do computers do the rest with something like a before/after comparison every so often and flag up differences? The follow on question from that would be what stops them flagging every car that moves?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I mean originally, yea, it was just actual humans back in the day pouring over a whole lot of pictures looking for things/changes.

Nowadays they almost certainly have algorithms that will pick out/flag changes they are trained to find. Like how Google maps cars are able to automatically blur human faces.

Tho also, it’s not like they’re looking across the whole world. There are “regions of interest” that they will focus on. Plus no surveillance happens in a vacuum. They’ll use other intelligence sources to make educated guesses about where they should be looking

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