The Satellite Service Contract on the defence and security area to develop satellite imagery capabilities and monitor the territory of the Republic of Albania was signed by Albania’s National Civil Protection Agency and Satellogic Inc., a leading U.S. sub-meter resolution Earth Observation (“EO”) data collection operator, during a ceremony at the Prime Minister’s office on Thursday.
In his remarks during the signing ceremony of the contract worth up to $6 million, Prime Minister Edi Rama stated that “with the launch of these satellites, Albania opens up a new chapter as part of its law enforcement efforts and the fight against corruption, the view of consolidating and strengthening the state and in view of the equality before the law, as well as in view of the equal right of everyone to benefit from state support.”
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In nowadays’ reality, among other things, I think that each and every one of you, the public opinion as a whole, are already following a debate that ensued a government extreme decision, if you will, as a result of the necessity to also write the last chapter of a long war for the control of the territory in a bid to completely ban the illegal constructions and unauthorized building of additional floors by violating the construction permits.
To return to the subject we are talking about, the government has made an extreme decision as an outcome of the dynamics of a war that I have personally waged since the day one when I joined politics, namely the fight against the land abuse and against the illegal constructions, a fight we have employed increasingly equally, without considering whether weak or strong ones, as the strongmen were the ones who once had occupied “the Rinia” park and Lana riverside for many years.
For all of those who have ridiculed and laughed at the government’s plan to launch Albanian satellites, the news today is that we will now have an “aerial and sky chief-inspector” that has no singular name, no relatives, no political party, but instead it has an eye to watch everything. I would like to highlight another detail that the Minister seemingly forgot to mention as part of the long list and problems this chief-inspector will tackle. The Minister had to bring to attention the fact that with the satellites launched, nobody would be able to build illegally without being noticed, as the satellites have the capacities to detect any volume of construction built on the land with an accuracy of a perimeter of 70 centimetres.
With the satellites launched we will be able to monitor all the cultivated lands and crops and it will definitely be much easier also for the Ministry of Agriculture to verify the farmers’ claims for tax-free oil subsidies and the amount of crops in the territory. So, nobody will be able to just show a land ownership certificate for a barren land area where nothing has been cultivated and claim for tax-free oil and such a task will no longer be up to the inspectors who supposedly inspect the situation on the ground to check whether this land are is cultivated or not, because what happens there is that the land is barren and the farmer can share the subsidies with the inspector to describe it as fertile land. This will no longer happen!
The same goes for the beaches, the same will apply to the forests and rivers across the country. All the potential law violations, ranging from illegal constructions, illegal logging, the illegal sand mining from riverbeds, or the forest fires and so on and so forth will be displayed on a screen in an updated way via the data sent from the aerial chief-inspector. It is then of course up to the people to properly read and interpret the data. However, the territory will be monitored and it will be impossible for the exclusive eyes of the local inspector to sell a fake reality by compiling false documents in exchange of a hefty bribe.
It is really a significant event, because with the launch of these satellites Albania opens up a new chapter as part of its law enforcement efforts and the fight against corruption, the view of consolidating and strengthening the state and in view of the equality before the law, as well as in view of the equal right of everyone to benefit from state support, namely the farmers, entrepreneurs etc.
The launch of these satellites will be followed by the purchase of unmanned drones that in the light of recent and fresh developments we have decided to purchase armed drones, which would certainly be used in extreme emergency cases against potential terrorist acts and potential enemy. However the unmanned aircraft carry out a whole set of operations in collaboration with satellites, providing continued updated information. Drones will soon be available.
Albania and the Albanian state will be stronger thanks to these tools, namely the satellites, the high-tech unmanned aircraft and the entire new state-of-the-art technology steadily being built, without forgetting for a single moment that we lack the capacities of the United States of America, Israel or Türkiye, because these countries started investing in such technologies much earlier than us and they have now developed incredible capacities. However, we keep fighting to make up for the lost time and we have done so much over the past few years that nobody would have imagined just a few years ago.
I would like to thank the company and I very much hope that we are now ushering in a new phase with the results being more satisfactory than signing this agreement.
