Vice President Al Gore led an effort to make available hundreds of thousands of reconnaissance satellite images. Some 800,000 declassified images processed by the National Reconnaissance Office between 1960 and 1972, released in February 1995, are available on the Internet. Similarly, both France and Russia are offering satellite imagery for sale to commercial and other customers, a practice likely to spread. Environmental targets are becoming part of the tasking of imagery satellites. But intelligence personnel who interpret such images may find that expertise in identifying the signatures of Soviet military forces does not necessarily translate into a facility for addressing environmental issues.
Some new targets seem to fit a traditional mold yet actually differ drastically.
For example, the intelligence community traditionally supported U.S. intervention operations by providing early warning of volatile situations. But this role is greatly complicated to the extent that the issues driving U.S. foreign policy are unclear. Another example is the use of satellite photos to detect a new kind of suspicious military activity, namely, war crimes, as in Bosnia. Such use creates great pressure to reveal photo data, which the U.S. has traditionally been extremely reluctant to do. Indeed, after revealing evidence of mass graves dug by Bosnian Serb forces, the U.S. was not willing to provide all of its intelligence on the subject to the international tribunal judging war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.