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Related, I'm rewatching "Enemy of the State" a 1998 film about government surveillance and assassinations and the deep state.

Underrated in my opinion.

Has Gene Hackman (also topical, which is why I am rewatching) and Will Smith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)




Pretty cool is that they mention Keyhole a few times. Keyhole (later Google Earth) was created a year later, in 1999.


As willvarfar points out, there's a satellite system from the 1960s and quite a gap from there until Keyhole Inc.

  Keyhole Inc. specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972. 
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History

Many companies operated in the gap, one in public was ERMapper (Earth Resources Mapping) which had Google Map like displays in the early 1990s and was mainly focussed on geospatial computing - stitching and correcting air and sat images, multispectral data with nonstandard nonlinear geocords, magnetic and radiometric displays and corrections, etc. Other such suites existed at that time.

Keyhole|Google Earth was not the first, it was the one that went very widely public.


The US camera surveillance satellites are called Key Hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole




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