This post is from December 2004. Facts and links may have changed since. See more from that month

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SpySat Follow-up

The program is not some space weapon. Rockefeller has backed off the “dangerous” comment. “He was referring to the fact that it was a misallocation of funds,” his spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told AP.

That still leaves the question of its identity open. There is a pretty strong school of though suggesting the satellite program in question is a signals intelligence program, not FIA.

Wyden argued that “the original justification for developing this technology has eroded in importance due to the changed practices and capabilities of our adversaries”—which could be a reference to a mode of terrorist communications.

The New York Times has a nice article quoting “current and former government officials [who] said they did not believe that the Boeing [FIA] program was the subject of the new dispute.”

I am still learning toward FIA, but that is “best guess”.

Jeffrey Lewis

Writing on ACW 2004–2026

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His also a non-resident affiliate at Stanford's Center for Security and International Cooperation and a Contributing Editor to Survival.

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