Europe Moves Ahead With Weather Satellite Blacklist

[Uncle Joe]

http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_060109.html

European government officials may resent the fact that the U.S. government is forcing them to create a blacklist of organizations that will not be granted access to weather-satellite data from Europe's future polar-orbiting satellites, which will include U.S. government-supplied instruments. But they have nonetheless agreed to create such a list this year.

The list to be provided by the 18-nation Eumetsat organization will have the effect of determining what organizations may be denied data from Eumetsat's Metop satellites following a U.S. request during an emergency.

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"What we have to agree to is a list of organizations, agencies and institutions that will be refused data following a U.S. request," one government official said. "The U.S. has some very specific ideas about who these people are. We don't like the idea. It's not something we're comfortable with. But if the question is: Will we resist it? The answer is: No. We will get this resolved this year."
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"The way the data denial process will work is that the U.S. will make a request to Eumetsat, and then Eumetsat will implement the request," Rattenborg said. "This is a very important step: The U.S. is delegating control of its instruments to Eumetsat. The second step is establishing a list of agencies that will not be subject to data denial, and that is taking a little more time. But I am optimistic we can get this done before the Metop launch."


I wonder if any environmental organizations will be on this list?