Satellite imagery in its ever-increasing accuracy and reach provides total visibility, a God-like uberveillance view of the world and all that resides within. We are entering an age where surveillance from space, our skies, buildings and vehicles, and even on-person body worn cameras or smartphones proliferate the gathering and recording and sharing of imagery (and corresponding digital information). At the same rate with the improvement in these capture technologies (i.e. image sensors) and an even greater number of commercial satellites being launched into space we have the ever improving capabilities to detect patterns of behaviour linked to locational activities. There are real social implications to the availability of this data, the ability to automatically use image and video analytics tools to infer what might be happening in a given situational context. Our once powerful military technologies, now in the hands of governments and commercial suppliers, can reveal a great deal about our every day practices. We might not be living the desert scene out of Patriot Games just yet, but we are not that far off.

Structured and unstructured data in all its forms, are made the richer for an overlay that explicitly reveals patterns of behaviour among the populace. We should caution however, that because we might be able to infer particular scenarios from visual raster images, it is still speculative inference unless it is determined to have the corresponding identity and conditional information for evaluative purposes. Location data no matter how convincing is also subject to misinformation, misrepresentation and information manipulation, just like statistics. But together with secondary sources of evidence, the case for a particular line of argumentation can become convincing. What we need to think about deeply here is space governance. Who has the right? Who has the technology up there in space to do things like determine an early onset of COVID-19? Who has the know-how? Were the images used publicly available? What are the processes and procedures by which researchers or non-allied states can raise the alarm bells? Will this data be admissible in an international court? And so much more.