SATELLITE SPIES: The Frightening Impact of a New Technology

The poet and a ""Third World"" friend try to engage in a dialogue with the scientists, bureaucrats, and businessmen who control the thousands of orbiting machines that do everything from relaying TV programs to locating a man on earth, in the dark, from his body heat. (We did the latter in Vietnam, not that it helped much.) Three of them in synchronized, synchronous (so that they appear stationary) rotation several hundred miles above the earth are enough to encircle the globe, transmit messages directly into every home (without messy, costly cables), and, of course, completely revolutionize spying. Such a system could also revolutionize other things (Hughes Aircraft says it could send a telephone call to any part of the earth for a dime and still make money), but it's almost certain not to--for it's run by the same honchos who gave the TV air waves to the corporations and the telephone to Ma Bell. The big irony is that we, as taxpayers, subsidized corporations to make these billion-dollar toys--which they now charge us (and foreign governments) an arm and a leg to use. This book, in New Journalese, is a report on reporting--the hopeless quest to worm truth out of faceless figures all of whose information seems classified. Interesting, but one yearns for more solid facts and figures.