How often have you used your smart phone to look up directions to an unknown location? How often have you GONE for a run and used some kind of app or electronic map to determine the distance of your exercise? Chances are at some point you have used imagery taken by satellites orbiting the earth, to get a better idea of location, distance, or a general understanding of what something looks like. Today, unclassified imagery is utilized by millions of people across the world. The accuracy, availability, clarity, and large area of coverage creates a database of imagery that is at the world’s disposal, and it’s unclassified. The difference between unclassified and classified imagery is the means in which the image is captured. How an image is captured determines the level of classification. The intelligence community is known to utilize imagery of the classified variety; however, unclassified imagery can be just as helpful to those in the Intelligence community. One of the biggest advantages is the ability to create Imagery Derived Products (IDPs) to share with everyone, regardless of their respective military or civilian affiliations. DigitalGlobe is an organization that distributes imagery of geospatial content, and operates several remote sensing assets. DigitalGlobe is more than likely the one responsible for the majority of the imagery you see on a regular basis. The imagery collected through DigitalGlobe’s assets are unclassified, so they can be used by anyone. This includes the imagery used on …show more content…
When creating IDPs for Commanders in our unit, often times we needed imagery that was collected from a certain look angle, rather than a straight down look angle collected by GeoEye-1. For the purpose of raid mission planning and the like, we would use mostly classified imagery. In addition, the overall clarity of the image would determine the choice as