Evidence from Earth Observation Satellites

Satellite technologies are rapidly improving, offering increased opportunities for monitoring laws, and using images as evidence in court. Evidence from Earth Observation Satellites analyses whether data from satellite technologies can be a legally reliable, effective evidential tool in contemporary legal systems. This unique interdisciplinary volume brings together leading experts from academia, government, international institutions, industry and judiciary to consider many emerging issues surrounding the use of these technologies in legal strategies. Issues examined include the opportunities arising from technological developments, existing regulatory applications and operational experiences, and admissibility in courts and tools for ensuring the integrity of evidence. It also examines privacy impacts under existing legislation and provides a new conceptual framework for debating the acceptability of such surveillance methods.

Review:

The text is not simply a formalistic treatment of the subject matter; it is rather a discussion on what is the state of the art and what could be the legal future for these applications. Therefore, the editors and the authors should be commended for their contribution to our collective understanding of the emerging legal issues surrounding the use of satellite data from earth observation. Sergio Marchisio, ECSL News No. 40, March 2014, p. 13. This is a superb book, written with exceptional clarity by a stellarcast of authors from diverse disciplines. It will be useful to graduatestudents of Earth Observation Science, Policy Science and Law andto advanced scholars in all these fields. I can only hope that a bookwith similar breadth, depth and multi-disciplinarity will be writtenfor the use of EO data in the other stages of the policy cycle. Yola Georgiadou, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 26 (2014) pp. 427-428.