HOUSTON -- The U.S. government's decision in late 2001 to purchase every high-resolution satellite image of Afghanistan produced by Space Imaging Corp. was a purely commercial deal that should not be confused with a government-ordered denial of access, according to a U.S. government official involved in that decision.

"This was a commercial contract between NIMA (the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency) and Space Imaging," said Rick Shimon, special agent in charge of the national security division at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Shimon was speaking at an Earth observation forum at the World Space Congress Oct. 15.

"NOAA had no role, or reason to get involved. To date we have never implemented shutter control," Shimon said.

Shutter control, meaning the ability to shut down high-resolution satellite imagery sales from areas deemed sensitive, is an option granted to NOAA by U.S. law. The law also requires that before being exercised, the U.S. secretaries of defense, commerce and state sign off on the decision to demand that a commercial company stop, or modify, the way it does business.

Shimon said the law also permits NOAA's national security division to raid commercial remote-sensing offices without notice if a violation is suspected.

U.S. government shutter control, Shimon said, is foreseen as taking one of three forms:

• A government order not to collect imagery from a given area.
• An order to delay, for a specific period of time, distribution of imagery of a given area.
• A decision by government officials to purchase all available imagery of a given area-- "the most likely scenario," Shimon said.

In the case of Space Imaging pictures of Afghanistan during the start of military operations by U.S. and allied troops there in October 2001, NIMA purchased all of Space Imaging's capacity on an exclusive basis. "We saw that as a creative response to what could have been a far bigger problem," Shimon said.

He compared it to an energy company purchasing data, on an exclusive basis, of an area being considered for exploration.

Whether NIMA will be able to perform the same trick again, for example in the event of a war in Iraq, remains uncertain. Since mid-2001, several high-resolution satellites have been placed into operations. "It remains to be seen whether NIMA has pockets deep enough to purchase all the images from all the satellites," one U.S. official said. "We have three high-resolution

U.S. spacecraft, plus satellites owned by other nations, all capable of taking sharp pictures."

A U.S. industry official said "It would be almost impossible for them to do the same thing again" with several companies no in the commercial imaging business.