From Popular Mechanics:
American spy satellites have captured an exhaustive array of images of the Earth. After all, they have been taking photographs since the early days of the space race. In the 1990s, when climate change and other earth science issues came to the forefront, researchers began to realize that the government's unparalleled data could be a huge boon—if scientists were allowed access to classified images. Jeff Dozier was one of the first permitted behind the veil of secrecy. In the early 1990s Dozier, then a prof at the University of California, Santa Barbara, briefed Al Gore, then a Senator from Tennessee, about the opportunities that intelligence satellite photos could present to science. Gore wrote a letter to then-CIA director Robert Gates (now the Secretary of Defense), and this effort gave birth to the Medea program. A few dozen scientists, Dozier included, gained clearance to view spy satellite photos for their research, and shortly thereafter Pres. Bill Clinton declassified all spy satellite photos taken before 1972. Here are five times spy photos contributed to science, even when the photos themselves remained classified.
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