I think the concept is a bit misunderstood. The government does not have plans to collect classified high resolution imagery over the US. While it is popular to believe that the "evil government" is out to get us all, please remember that folks in the intel community live here too, and are quite the same as most average folks. Just because they have access to the classified data does not mean they are any less worried than the rest of us of government out of control. In general, unless of a huge emergency where thousands of lives are in the balance (like Katrina) the folks who control the imagery birds do not even open the shutter of the USA. Those are the rules and it literally takes authorization from the highest levels of government to do otherwise.

What the policy is really trying to do is make sure that the huge holdings of unclassified imagery that the government buys from companies like Digital Globe and Ikonos every year are easily available to first responders in the case of an emergency. Again during Katrina the walls of classification kept data out of the hands of people who needed it to save lives. What they are doing here is trying to fix that so that the next time the response better