CIA Invests in ImageTree’s Forest-Tracking Technology

ImageTree, a company that tracks individual trees in forests, has signed a technology development agreement and received an undisclosed investment from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm founded by the Central Intelligence Agency. ImageTree’s ForestSense technology can calculate height, basal area, volume, species–every visible detail about a tree–of every tree crown in a forest. According to ImageTree chief executive Mark Redlus, ForestSense can also track topographical tree images down to a tenth of a meter.

The CIA remains mum on its interest in foresting technology, which is primarily used by logging companies. But ForestSense could potentially be used to comply with carbon-credit markets, or to track the growth of illegal crops like marijuana. The technology could also be used to monitor illegal logging practices.

In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio spans a variety of industries, including nanotechnology, digital identity and security, power systems, and medical technology. And ImageTree isn’t the firm’s first foray into mapping: Last month, the firm invested in Geosemble, a geospatial technology developer working on products that automatically extract maps, aerial imagery, and more.

Don’t you think if federal or state law enforcement could use this to spy for pot plants in the back yards of American citizens, they would? Of course they would. Laws, like the Supreme Court ruling which prohibits the use of infrared electronic devices to spy into people’s homes, hasn’t stopped law enforcement from breaking the law and doing it anyway. If this technology were available to law enforcement, they would use it.

When debating how much of our privacy we have given up to the government, I can’t fathom how much more they are going to take from us.

Perhaps someday we will be told it is a privilege, not a right, to walk on a sidewalk or plant a garden in our yard.

Oh… wait… It’s already against the law to plant a garden. Well, we can grow beets, but we can’t grow a plant from which we can make paper for writing on, fiber for sewing, making rope, fuel for my car, material to build onto my home and make furniture, seeds with a high source of complex proteins and fiber, and life saving medicine.

If we can find the law on a computer in Congress, I can edit it using Microsoft Word and we can use the copy & replace function to change the words from “Marijuana and Marihuana” to Beet. I hate beets.

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“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963

Today our nation honors what would’ve been this week the eightieth birthday of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., on the eve of the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th president of these United States.  I was sixty-four days old when an assassin’s bullet cut down Dr. King in the prime of his life.  Today I am six-hundred forty days older than Dr. King when he was killed.  Tomorrow I will see something few people my age and older thought we’d ever see, yet something Dr. King had dreamed from the start.

There remains a grave injustice to be battled, the most unjust of laws to be disobeyed, a law that by its definition is not rooted in eternal law and natural law: the man made code that declares nature itself to be illegal, the prohibition on cannabis.  Yet when I mention marijuana law reform in the context of the great civil rights struggles in America, so many are quick to dismiss me with snickers of derision.  ”You just want pot legal so you can get high!” is a common refrain.

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