> images were locked away from the public as they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras
Whenever I read about 50-year-old government secrets being revealed, I wonder about all the things happening today we're not being told about -- that we'll learn about 50 years from today.
Looking at the Earthrise image, as another commenter pointed out, they didn't simply degrade the image, but they deliberately added vertical lines with differing brightness and gain, so it would appear that the film scanners on the Lunar Orbiter could scan only at a very low resolution.
To use an analogy: Suppose you request a secret document from the government under the Freedom of Information Act. They decide to give it to you, but they redact 99% of the material with black markers. Oh, but they also retype the entire document, without the blacked-out portions, so you think you received the whole thing. They even add staples, 3-hole punches, coffee cup stains, and creases to the paper before photocopying it. You get 1% of material, but you are convinced that you got the complete unaltered original.
I recently visited the FBI Museum/Tour at the FBI HQ in DC. There's a section where they talk about tech the FBI had in the 80s, including a camera they used for an undercover operation where they recorded some illegal shit going on in a hotel room.
You walk into a mock hotel room and even knowing the general vicinity of where the camera should be, struggle to find it. I flat out couldn't until a friend who works at the FBI told me - it was in the period on the artists signature of a piece of artwork in the room. A literal pinhole camera recording everything in the room more than 3 decades ago with pretty great quality.
I can't even fathom the technology they have today - there's no chance that'd be on the tour.
We've gone backwards from the 60's in some areas. For example, there are no planes as good as the SR-71 any more due to their incredible costs, cheaper to use satellites over the long run.
Commitment to manned space exploration is another.
Messenger pigeons were superseded by better ways of delivering messages, covering all the use cases and then some. With SR-71 and the space program, we've lost capabilities we had before. In the latter space, it's slowly getting fixed thanks to Musk & co., but we're still behind the 1970s, capability-wise.
The dividends of surviving WWII and will to achieve have waned into near atrophy in the US. Mere construction of an apartment building has become a herculean task.
Everyone has known for decades about the test planes that can partially leave the atmosphere. They aren't economically viable and have few military applications that can't be done more cheaply already. i.e. stagnation.
Your link is a level-headed explanation of why there isn't clear video showing the plane hitting the Pentagon. But I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
If you're saying that some people believe in crazy grand conspiracies, well of course some people do.
If you're saying that the government does not withhold information and doesn't manipulate or massage the information given out, then the link above doesn't support that point at all. People had to fight to get those grainy Pentagon videos from outdoor cameras mounted in a public place. Although some bits were leaked, the government didn't formally release them for 5 years!
And there is an enormous mass of data and documents that they still haven't released. It doesn't mean that there is any kind of conspiracy -- it could be the usual incompetence/bureaucracy/laziness, but some of it could be due to covering up capabilities or technologies like with those cameras on the Lunar Orbiters.
> I wonder about all the things happening today we're not being told about
Considering the usefulness of quantum computing for cracking ciphers, I wonder how far along development of that is and when we'll see it.
Whenever I read about 50-year-old government secrets being revealed, I wonder about all the things happening today we're not being told about -- that we'll learn about 50 years from today.
Looking at the Earthrise image, as another commenter pointed out, they didn't simply degrade the image, but they deliberately added vertical lines with differing brightness and gain, so it would appear that the film scanners on the Lunar Orbiter could scan only at a very low resolution.
To use an analogy: Suppose you request a secret document from the government under the Freedom of Information Act. They decide to give it to you, but they redact 99% of the material with black markers. Oh, but they also retype the entire document, without the blacked-out portions, so you think you received the whole thing. They even add staples, 3-hole punches, coffee cup stains, and creases to the paper before photocopying it. You get 1% of material, but you are convinced that you got the complete unaltered original.