Government monopolies are breaking down. Where once supercomputers nestled only in ultrasecret military and espionage facilities, now anyone can buy a computer that's much more powerful than those room-filling dinosaurs for a thousand dollars.

Where once only intelligence agencies could encrypt data securely, now teenagers and ne'er-do-well hackers can encrypt data so thoroughly that law enforcement authorities are stymied for years.

And, where once only national governments could obtain spy satellite photos of areas that interest them, now individuals and organizations can secure such images for not much more than the cost of a typical home computer.

Spy satellite photos? Well, yes. The companies involved don't like it when you call them that, and in truth their markets run far more to cartography and crop yield estimates than to counts of bombers or missile silos. But the fact is, anyone with enough money to buy a used Hyundai -- and often even less than that -- can buy space images of a resolution previously available only to superpower intelligence agencies.

Was Monica Lewinsky's parking spot occupied on crucial evenings when Hillary was out of town? Fortunately, Space Imaging's satellite wasn't operational back then, sparing us at least one bit of data about presidential philandering. The next president, however, may not be so lucky.

More seriously, images with this kind of resolution have important national security implications. The one-meter (3-foot) resolution claimed by Space Imaging, for example, is far better than that of the government spy satellites that disproved the famous "missile gap" that dominated the 1960 Presidential election. Then, Vice President Nixon couldn't cite the satellite photos in response to JFK's claims that we were behind the Russians, because doing so would have given away important information about U.S. capabilities.

CNN suffers from no such constraints. This might not be so bad. The phantom "missile gap" created a lot of needless fear and expense. Also, with many more eyes watching, intelligence debacles like the surprise Indian nuclear tests might be less common. But such capabilities pose the risk of embarrassment or worse where military and intelligence agencies are concerned. The U.S. government may thus be tempted to censor private satellite imagery, in order to avoid these problems.

Sometimes, the First Amendment will pose no barrier to such censorship. Where the information concerned involves the position and deployment of military units in time of hostilities, the First Amendment clearly allows censorship. Such circumstances, however, are rare. And except when the circumstances are that urgent, the First Amendment prohibits the government from blocking publication.

Congress has made this point, too, in the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, which requires that the Secretary of Commerce, who oversees private remote sensing satellites, obtain a court order before censoring them or shutting them down. This makes sense. To the First Amendment, it makes no difference whether the reporter in question is Weegee with a 4" x 5" Speed Graphic and flashbulbs or a 21st century journalist whose camera orbits the Earth. It's all information.

Was Monica Lewinsky's parking spot occupied on crucial evenings when Hillary was out of town?
     

To their credit, the officials involved in regulating private remote sensing systems mostly recognize this, too. Although the Secretary of Commerce still hasn't gotten around to revising the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's regulations to reflect the free-speech changes made by Congress in 1992 (probably because of foot-dragging at State and Defense), in actual practice the Commerce Department appears to recognize that the First Amendment applies to satellite imaging.

Is this a good thing? Probably. As the world's most open society, the national security of the United States is better served making satellite imagery widely available. We, the nation that gave birth to Jerry Springer and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? are not especially good at keeping secrets anyway. And the wide availability of satellite imagery -- like a global free press generally -- ensures that our enemies, who are always closed societies of one variety or another, won't be very good at keeping secrets either.

With satellite imagery available to arms control groups, human rights activists, environmentalists, news media organizations and even curious individuals (as well, of course, to national governments who cannot afford to launch their own reconnaissance satellites), surprise attacks, massacres, famines and all sorts of other undesirable events are less likely to go unobserved, or unpredicted. In fact, the presence of many evaluators means that we are less likely to see good data buried under the sorts of bad analysis or institutional prejudice that, for example, caused the CIA to miss the imminent demise of the Soviet Union or India's surprise nuclear tests.

Private satellite imagery is thus a good example of what Arthur Kantrowitz once called "the weapon of openness." Open societies do best when information is free, and when problems can be tackled by many minds. Secrecy and government controls are for the other guys. Let's hope that we remember this, when -- as is sure to happen eventually -- some bureaucrat with an ax to grind decides that maybe private spy satellites aren't such a good idea after all.