Angry Brazilian Whacks NASA To Put a Stop To ... Er, the NSA
90
An anonymous reader writes "From the Register, "Multiple NASA websites were defaced last week by a Brazilian hacktivist who may have misread the sites' URLs, because he wasn't protesting about the US space agency giving joyrides to inhuman stowaways – he was protesting against NSA spying. 'BMPoC' hit kepler.arc.nasa.gov and 13 other sites with messages protesting against US spying on Brazil, as well as a possible US military intervention in Syria. It's hard to believe anyone would confuse the NSA spy agency with NASA, the space agency, except for satirical purposes or to mock script kiddies in some way, so we can only guess that the hackers behind the attack hit NASA because it's a US government agency whose systems are noted for being insecure.""
Re:Not that far off the mark (Score:5, Informative)
Most satellites have vaguely the same dimensions. A shuttle that "carries satellites" carries most kinds of satellites. Also, most of them are put into orbit by conventional rockets, rather than the shuttle.
The NRO runs the US intelligence sats, not the NSA (Score:5, Informative)
The US intelligence community is fairly compartmentalized in to a bunch of agencies that do different things. For satellites, it's the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office. The NSA is signals intelligence, intercepting phone calls, radio communications, e-mail, that kind of thing. Hence all the stuff that has leaked about what they've been doing.
Also NASA (in tandem with NOAA and the USGS) operates a number of Earth facing sats like the Landsat series. They aren't all that high resolution, lower resolution than the stuff you see on Google Earth, since they are for monitoring things like vegetation index and so on. The newest one, Landsat 8, has some pretty badass multi-spectral sensors.