Sex, Bombs and Burgers (22 page)

The computer link finally allowed users to easily transfer photos from their cameras to their computers, where the images could be printed or sent over the internet. Memorychip capacities grew and image sizes shrank further through new compression techniques, which created a perfect inflection point in size and performance. Throughout the nineties, as the costs of charge-coupled devices plummeted and disc storage capacity rose steadily, digital cameras edged further toward the mainstream. Tokyo-based Nikon kicked the market into high gear in 1999 with the release of the D1, the first single lens reflex digital camera that was affordable to professional photographers. By the mid-2000s, the digital revolution was in full swing thanks to falling prices and continuing improvements in photo quality. In 2002 about 27.5 million digital cameras were
sold, accounting for about 30 percent of the total still cameras shipped that year.
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By 2007 digital cameras had all but killed off their film-based predecessors and essentially made up the entire market, with more than 122 million units sold.
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The key to the whole revolution was the ever-decreasing size of the photo files themselves, an advance that reached a high point with the JPEG and MPEG standards established in 1988. Like the internet, all still cameras used JPEG as their standard file format by the mid-2000s, while video cameras relied on MPEG.

Eyes in the Sky

The U.S. military’s return on its original investment in SIPI also bore fruit in the form of improved satellite surveillance. Before SIPI, the CIA had relied on spy photos delivered through its top-secret Corona project, an initiative launched in 1960 to spy on the Soviet Union, China and other regions of concern. Corona’s satellites were equipped with high-altitude cameras that ejected spent film canisters, which parachuted to Earth only to be intercepted in mid-air by specially equipped aircraft. The canisters were designed to float in the ocean for a short time if they were missed in mid-air pickup, and then sink.
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Amid the tensions of the Cold War, Corona was a necessary but hugely inefficient project—only about 70 percent of the 144 satellites launched during the project’s twelve years returned usable imagery. There was also the constant risk that the parachuting film would literally fall into the wrong hands. The axe finally fell on Corona in May 1972, shortly before SIPI was founded, when a Soviet submarine was detected waiting below a mid-air retrieval zone.

The Landsat satellite program, which used sensors and cameras built by RCA and General Electric as well as an electronic transmission system that incorporated image compression started by SIPI, largely replaced Corona. Much of the Landsat project is still classified, so we can only guess at its military uses. Its commercial applications, however, have been widely publicized. Satellite imagery from the program has been purchased by agricultural, geological and forestry companies, and used by governments to predict and prevent natural disasters through the monitoring of weather patterns.

One of the program’s first major commercial customers was McDonald’s, which in its early days had scouted new locations by helicopter.
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In the eighties, the fast-food chain converted to using satellite photos to predict urban sprawl. McDonald’s later developed a software program called Quintillion that automated its site-selection process by combining satellite images with demographic data and sales projections. The software allowed the chain to spy on customers with the same equipment once used to fight the Cold War.
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Satellite photography was made broadly available in 1992, when Congress decided to sacrifice some of Landsat’s secrecy in order to offset the project’s cost. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act declassified some of the data being produced and established that while “full commercialization of the Landsat program cannot be achieved within the foreseeable future ...commercialization of land remote sensing should remain a longterm goal of United States policy.”
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Landsat added a major new customer in the mid-2000s in the form of internet search engine provider Google, itself no stranger to the military. Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page
designed the algorithms that resulted in their ground-breaking search engine in the mid-nineties while they were students at Stanford University, right next door to Silicon Valley. The duo were the archetypal poor students, eating macaroni and cheese and begging for charity wherever they could get it. Among the handouts they received were computers from Stanford’s Digital Library project, which was funded by the government’s National Science Foundation, NASA and DARPA.

Google became the most successful company to emerge from the dot-com boom of the nineties by revolutionizing the internet with its innovative search engine. After striking it rich by tying search results to online advertisements, the company moved to diversify its business in 2004 by acquiring Silicon Valley–based start-up Keyhole. The smaller company’s main product was its EarthViewer 3D software, which used satellite imagery bought from Landsat and other commercial sources to create three-dimensional maps of the world. Keyhole was initially funded by Sony in 2001 and then backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm started in 1999 by the CIA to provide the intelligence agency with state-of-the-art spy technology.

The company was headed by John Hanke, who prior to receiving his MBA from Berkeley in 1996 worked in a nondescript “foreign affairs” capacity for the American government in Washington and Indonesia. When I asked Hanke what he did in foreign affairs during a visit to Google’s headquarters, he wasn’t exactly forthcoming. “Pretty much that. That’s really the extent of what I’ve said publicly, so let’s leave it at that,” he told me with a grin.
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The company’s main customers when it was acquired were the U.S. Army’s Communications Electronic Command and the
Department of Defense. Keyhole, not coincidentally, was also the name of the satellites used in the Corona project. The company’s software was renamed and relaunched in 2005 as Google Earth, a program that wowed internet users with its lightning-fast rendering of satellite imagery. The pictures, benefiting from new super-fast computer processors, rapid internet speeds, and of course, better image compression, loaded so quickly that they looked like full-motion video. Google Earth users also enjoyed the unprecedented novelty of zooming in on any location on the planet and viewing it in extraordinary detail.

Like virtually every Google Earth user, the first thing I did with the software was navel-gaze. I zoomed in on my home and was astonished by the level of detail, like the garbage cans out on the sidewalk. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one who was amazed: “Since its debut on the internet three years ago, Keyhole has had a high gee-whiz factor,” wrote a technology reviewer for the
New York Times
. “When I first saw the site, I sat transfixed as it zoomed from an astronaut’s-eye view of our planet down to a detailed shot of my house, with individual shrubs visible in the yard.”
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Google expanded the software in 2007 to include Hubble Space Telescope photos of the moon, the constellations and Mars, and added the ocean floor in 2009. The company’s internet competitors, including Microsoft, Yahoo and MapQuest, were all forced to follow suit with their own three-dimensional mapping software, creating a boom in the commercial satellite photography market.

While the loosening of restrictions succeeded in creating a vibrant market for satellite photography, it also created headaches for governments and privacy advocates around the
world. Google Earth’s launch was immediately followed by media commentary on the software’s potential negative effects, from complaints about invasion of privacy to concerns over national security. “Terrorists don’t need to reconnoiter their target,” said Lieutenant General Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the KGB. “Now an American company is working for them.”
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Google deepened the criticism in 2007 when it launched Street View, a feature that provides 360-degree panoramic ground-level views of city streets. Communities and privacy watchdogs around the world, including those in Canada and the United Kingdom, have raised concerns about Street View or passed outright bans of the software. Google relented somewhat in 2008 when it agreed to blur people’s faces captured in Street View photos, but concerns about the company’s further intrusion into daily life continue to swirl.

Home Invasion

Playboy
’s effect on imaging technology was accidental and indirect, but by the eighties, new technologies meant that the larger sex industry was exerting a much greater and more purposeful influence on the emerging home entertainment business. While cable television systems began rolling out in the United States in 1948, primarily to serve mountainous areas that couldn’t get strong over-the-air reception, they only gained acceptance in the late sixties when competition emerged in the form of satellite TV providers. Cable penetration went from only 6.4 percent of American households in 1968 to 17.5 percent ten years later and 52.8 percent in 1988.
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Rolling all that cable out, however, was costly for the providers, who needed quick
revenue to justify the expense. Porn was just what the doctor ordered (or rather, what the companies’ shareholders ordered).

At first, cable companies launched adult-oriented channels that customers could subscribe to for an extra fee. This set-up proved problematic, as morality groups argued that the content could be accessed too easily by children. A compromise was reached in the late eighties when cable companies switched to offering the majority of their X-rated channels exclusively through a pay-per-view ordering system, which effectively filtered out minors. Pay-per-view allowed cable providers to beam compressed, scrambled signals to subscribers; when the customer ordered a showing of a movie or event over the phone, the signal was unscrambled.

The technology first showed up in the late seventies and took off after a 1981 boxing match between “Sugar” Ray Leonard and Thomas “Hitman” Hearns. In 1985 a number of cable providers banded together to service the burgeoning market by launching several channels devoted exclusively to pay-per-view, including Viewer’s Choice and Cable Video Store. Viewer’s Choice II was launched shortly afterward to cater to a more mature audience with R-rated and soft-core pornographic films. Viewer’s Choice II changed its name to Hot Choice in 1993 and, by 1996, was one of four adult channels, led by
Playboy
and Spice Networks, that controlled the business, collectively bringing in about onethird of the $600 million American pay-per-view market.
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The reason for their success was simple: for the first time, cable brought the product to the consumer, rather than the other way around. The porn buyer no longer had to sneak into a peep show in a shady part of town or sheepishly buy a magazine at the corner store, enduring the shopkeeper’s disapproving looks.
Now the consumer could simply order pornographic movies and enjoy them in the privacy of his or her own home. The trend was repeated in the late nineties, when cable providers spent hundreds of millions investing in new fibre-optic networks that enabled two-way digital television communication. With new digital technology allowing cable subscribers to order movies and watch them whenever they wanted, rather than at pre-defined times, cable providers continued to look to porn to help pay for their investments. In 2000 porn brought in an estimated $500 million, more than 15 percent of all pay-per-view revenue.
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The same principle—bringing the product to the consumer— was responsible for the massive success of the home video market, which began with a war of technologies. Sony was first to market in 1975 with a home video cassette recorder (VCR), its Betamax player, followed two years later by the Video Home System (VHS) from Victor Company of Japan, or JVC. Netherlandsbased Philips released a third format, the Video 2000, in Europe only. VCRs defied traditional rules of consumer electronics and flew off shelves despite the technology war, which carried with it the risk that buyers would be stuck with an obsolete product if one format lost the battle. The gadgets were also expensive; in 1979 VCRs sold for between $800 and $1,000, or about $2,300 to $2,900 in today’s terms.
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Still, more than 800,000 households had a unit before the seventies were through.
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Video players introduced several new experiences to the home. For the first time consumers could record television programs for repeated or later viewing, and buy and rent videotapes. At first, movie and television studios were apprehensive about licensing films to a format that could be either sold or rented, since this meant that their products could
easily be pirated. In 1983 Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony and claimed the VCR encouraged violations of their copyrights. In what became known as the “Betamax case,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that making copies of television shows for time-shifted viewing was fair use and did not constitute copyright infringement, clearing the way for the industry’s further development.

The studios later flip-flopped and came to see videotapes as a significant source of revenue, but in the early days they only grudgingly offered up their movies for transfer to videocassette. That left a void that was rapidly filled by porn. The June 1979 issue of television technology trade magazine
Videography
listed two porn titles,
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones
, among its top-ten-selling films (
MASH
led the list, followed by
The Sound
of Music
). According to rental store owners, there was little doubt that porn was driving the business: “We’re selling fifty times as many porno tapes as any of the other material,” one New York store owner said. “We have all ages, all types ... [most are men] but some women are buying the porno tapes too.”
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