Ponca City, We Love You writes "When government officials announced last month that a top-secret spy satellite would come falling out of the sky they said little about the satellite itself but spotters equipped with little more than a pair of binoculars, a stop watch and star charts, had already uncovered some of the deepest of the government's expensive secrets and shared them on the Internet. Thousands of people form the spotter community. Many look for historical relics of the early space age, working from publicly available orbital information. Still others are drawn to the secretive world of spy satellites, with about a dozen hobbyists doing most of the observing. When a new spy satellite is launched, the hobbyists will collaborate on sightings around the world to determine its orbit, and even guess at its function, sharing their information on their web site, satobs.org, Officials would prefer that hobbyists not publish their information, and suggest that foreign countries try to hide their activities when they know an eye in the sky will be passing overhead but John E. Pike, director of a group that tracks military and space activities, says the hobbyists exemplify fundamental principles of openness and of the power of technology to change the game. "It has been an important demystification of these things because I think there is a tendency on the part of these agencies just to try to pretend that they don't exist, and that nothing can be known about them.""
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