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Pictures from space are being used along with other intelligence to pinpoint Mexican narcotics operations and anticipate smuggling attempts into the United States, said R. Scott Zikmanis, a deputy director of operations with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Federal officials say an eye in space adds one more tool in an ever-expanding technological arsenal aimed at defending the border from narcotics traffickers, human smugglers and terrorists.

If a satellite picks up on activities by drug runners, U.S. authorities could then transmit information to agents along the border.

In turn American authorities could notify their Mexican counterparts to a stash-house location or use the intelligence to calculate when and where loads of drugs may be coming across the border, Zikmanis said. “Is it possible? Of course it is,” Zikmanis said. “Is it practical? Yes.”

During a Phoenix conference on border security last week, Zikmanis said his agency already has supplied some data to the El Paso Intelligence Center, a federal clearinghouse for the investigation of drug cartels.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency uses satellite surveillance on foreign soil for the Pentagon, though it also has assisted emergency responders in domestic disasters such as wildfires and Hurricane Katrina.

The use of satellite imagery for border security has been limited because of concerns about a military agency assisting domestic law enforcement, Zikmanis said.

Federal law strictly limits U.S. military operations on American soil unless such operations are authorized by Congress.

Any border-security surveillance will be done over Mexico, not the United States, Zikmanis said.

His agency uses both military and commercial satellites for its work.

Because the military photographs may be classified, he said, the agency is wrestling with legal questions about what can be shared with law enforcement.

Civil rights attorneys question the use of satellite technology in law enforcement.

“We are in the midst of a really dangerous time in terms of technology,” said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the Technology and Legal Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Though the ratings agency reaffirmed the country’s actual long-term credit rating at “AAA” and its short-term rating at “A-1+,” it said the outlook had deteriorated because of massive borrowing to deal with the recession and the banking crisis.

The outlook revision does not trigger a formal re-evaluation of Britain’s rating — unlike being put on credit watch — but does mean that policy makers have to be aware that a downgrade may happen if public finances do not improve.

The pound slumped by over 2 U.S. cents to just below $1.56 after the news, but recovered some ground to trade around $1.5670. Meanwhile the FTSE share index fell more than 120 points, or around 2.7 percent, though like other markets around the world it was facing heavy selling pressure after the U.S. Federal Reserve warned that the U.S. economy would shrink by more than anticipated this year.

A lower credit rating would make the government pay higher interest rates to borrow money on bond markets. An S&P study found that 37 percent of its negative outlooks were followed by a downgrade.

“Pressure on the rating will raise concerns regarding the ability to issue the record amount of gilts (British government bonds) required over the coming year to fund the deteriorating fiscal position in the U.K.,” said Hans Redeker, an analyst at BNP Paribas.

The 2,600-page report painted the most detailed and damning portrait yet of church-administered abuse in a country grown weary of revelations about child molestation by priests.

The investigation of the tax-supported schools uncovered previously secret Vatican records that demonstrated church knowledge of pedophiles in their ranks all the way back to the 1930s.

Wednesday’s five-volume report on the probe — which was resisted by Catholic religious orders — concluded that church officials shielded their orders’ pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse concluded.

Victims of the abuse, who are now in their 50s to 80s, lobbied long and hard for an official investigation. They say that for all its incredible detail, the report doesn’t nail down what really matters — the names of their abusers.

“I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed,” said Christine Buckley, 62, who spent the first 18 years of her life in a Dublin orphanage where children were forced to manufacture rosaries — and were humiliated, beaten and raped whether they achieved their quota or not.

The Catholic religious orders that ran more than 50 workhouse-style reform schools from the late 19th century until the mid-1990s offered public words of apology, shame and regret Wednesday. But when questioned, their leaders indicated they would continue to protect the identities of clergy accused of abuse — men and women who were never reported to police, and were instead permitted to change jobs and keep harming children.

Ashraf Laidi, chief market strategist at CMC Markets, said Wednesday a “serious case of dollar damage” was underway.

“We long warned about the day of reckoning for the dollar emerging at the next economic recovery,” Mr. Laidi said in a note.

Mr. Laidi said economic recovery would weigh on the greenback as real demand for commodities, coupled with improved risk appetite, caused investors to seek higher yields in emerging markets and commodity currencies. This would draw investment away from the U.S. dollar, which was dragged down by growing debt and the risk quantitative easing would eventually spark a surge in inflation.

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Concern has been mounting that the increasing U.S. debt load, as well as a potential inflation time bomb in the form of the quantitative easing, could drag down the greenback. Garnering attention is the risk the United States could lose its triple-A sovereign credit rating, which reflects the chance of the borrower defaulting on its debt.

The discussion, in a 90-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room that included Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and other top administration officials, came on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Mr. Obama is to give Thursday on a number of thorny national security matters, including his promise to close the detention center at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Human rights advocates are growing deeply uneasy with Mr. Obama’s stance on these issues, especially his recent move to block the release of photographs showing abuse of detainees, and his announcement that he is willing to try terrorism suspects in military commissions — a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.

The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed.

They said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about “the long game” — how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents. He raised the issue of preventive detention himself, but made clear that he had not made a decision on it. Several senior White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on the outsiders’ accounts.

“He was almost ruminating over the need for statutory change to the laws so that we can deal with individuals who we can’t charge and detain,” one participant said. “We’ve known this is on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.”

In a new report from Alexandria, Va.-based Center for Naval Analyses, a bevy of high-ranking former Army and Navy officials stress that the country’s reliance on oil poses a threat to national security and undermines the country’s ability to wage war. That’s because the hegemony of oil empowers plenty of dodgy nations, and because it imposes huge (and expensive) logistics strains on the U.S. military, as made clear in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Crude oil futures had already risen on a weaker dollar, Nigerian unrest, strength in equities and Tuesday’s bullish oil inventory report from the American Petroleum Institute.

This week’s U.S. refinery fires also helped lift the oil complex, keeping RBOB gasoline futures climbing.