Sparks: US military gives Elon Musk’s SpaceX access to sensitive tracking data

Watch how quickly the guardians of the public trust discover the virtue of private hands once their own eyes can no longer see what those hands are doing.

The military calls it a partnership with private industry, which is the phrase gentlemen use when they mean they have found someone else to pay for the telescope.

The creature is given sight of every object in orbit, and the creator calls this efficiency, never once asking what it will do with such knowledge once the door is locked behind it.

If the data is too sensitive for the public to see, then it is too sensitive to hand to a man whose other business is launching the objects it describes.

How long, I ask, will the Senate pretend that a contract signed in private is the same as a policy debated in public?

In the lands I have travelled, the ruler who grants a single merchant the map of all caravans soon finds that merchant decides which roads remain open.

As the river reveals every stone it has moved, so the tracking data reveals every object in orbit, and the man who holds the map of the current will soon decide where the water flows.