Satellite intelligence

Another post here regarding an article I read in the magazine Imaging Notes. This magazine's target audience is the remote sensing professional, or the GIS professional, but some of the articles are quite interesting in their own right.
There was one in the latest issue (which still isn't on the website, so no link) that talked about how the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and environmental group in DC, did a project to create a database of imagery of North Korea.
They used cheap SPOT imagery (15 meter pixel size) to locate suspect areas, and then got IKONOS and QuickBird (sub meter resolution) of the areas. They created an inventory of Uranium processing sites, military bases and airfields, underground hangers and underground caves hiding planes and submarines, and political prison camps.
The intelligence community might know more than what the NRDC makes public, but the information that can be obtained privately, like the NRDC has, isn't much worse that what the government gets. The extra information that the government intelligence has, it gets through experience and on the ground spy work, not better satellite information.
If you think otherwise, then you've been watching too many movies.

In the 1998 movie Enemy of the State, Will Smith plays a Washington lawyer pursued by rogue agents of the National Security Agency (NSA). Shouting realistic-sounding phrases ("requesting keyhole satellite visual tasking!"), a bunch of unshaven, twenty-something techno-nerds use a satellite high above the nation'’s capital to follow Smith's character through the streets of Washington. On full-color video screens, government agents see him running and jumping along rooftops.

The people who build and operate America'’s satellites would love it if satellites could do that. But they can'’t. Such satellites exist only in the movies, where the laws of physics don't apply, and satellite technology owes more to Star Trek than to Silicon Valley and Lockheed Martin. Satellites have appeared in numerous American movies, but they'’re always portrayed as possessing capabilities far beyond anything that current satellites can do. Only rarely has Hollywood gotten close to portraying satellites as they actually operate or how the intelligence community really uses them.

If you want more info, read the article, but generally, the best government satellites can probably pick out a basketball, but reading the license plates on a car or identifying people is, at this stage, not possible.
Photogrametrists are highly skilled folk, who with training and experience can identify cars, types of buildings, and all kinds of things from slightly blurry overhead pictures. It can even then be quite challenging.