[ryanac]

I think the resolution and real-time power of government satellites and the commercial satellites they have access to is debatable unless you've actually seen it. I recently had to look into this and was pretty surprised at the level of sophistication that's commercially available.

GeoEye is one example of a commercial company with the capability of producing high res close up "real time" satellite information. http://www.geoeye.com/Industries/defense%26intelligence#defe...

These are low resolution (50cm res) sample photos that the public can gain access to, consider how close they can actually get for military application. http://www.geoeye.com/gallery#!/album/defense-solutions/exmo...

Papers on GeoEye's latest capabilities: http://www.digitalglobe.com/sites/default/files/DG-8SPECTRAL... http://www.digitalglobe.com/sites/default/files/MyDigitalGlo...

The 50cm res is (afaik) a commercial limitation; "Because of federal regulations, the publicly-available images are slightly lower resolution -- approximately 50 cm)" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090526183858.ht...

--

"And what kind of intelligence do you think they have?" With the massive amount of data gathering combined with information from satellites (that we know about) like these, who knows...