President Donald Trump’s war on facts has reached the final frontier. Having already undermined federal data sources on everything from hunger to weather for its own self-interested ends, the administration has spent much of this year trying to squelch information about the Iran War by clamping down on the public’s access to data and images shot from space.
Congress looks ready to respond to this blatant censorship effort as part of an upcoming intelligence bill. But while it’s encouraging that lawmakers want to curb this administration’s abuses of power, the solution they are contemplating allows defense and intelligence agencies, organizations with cultures of information sharing on a “need-to-know” basis, to further clamp down on data availability — albeit for less politically charged reasons — without having anyone at the table arguing for the benefits of public access.
Back in March, the government reportedly asked commercial remote sensing companies like Planet Labs to delay release of the data and pictures they gather from space of much of the Middle East, in light of the Iran War. At the time, embarrassing photos of burning oil infrastructure and damaged American bases running in the press had undercut White House claims to have defeated Tehran’s military. The request was framed as voluntary, but as one geospatial analyst put it: “When your largest customer is also the government that regulates you, the line between voluntary and involuntary gets very thin.”
These restrictions were originally slated to last two weeks. Instead, they have lingered for the better part of six months, limiting information about the region to the subset of customers who comply with the companies’ restrictive managed access policies. Publications like the New York Times and The Washington Post, which frequently purchase images for their reporting, have used them to identify evidence of potential war crimes. Their access has been turned off indefinitely.
All of this has deprived everyday Americans of crucial news on the conflict — much to the alarm of some soldiers sent to fight it. Just last month, active service members anonymously sent photos to the press of the destruction of American bases out of concern that, in their words, “this is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public…we’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”
Trump’s decisions have also had business consequences for America’s satellite imagery and data sector as international customers are shifting their spending to companies outside of the United States to get the data they rely on. In a global industry worth nearly $28 billion, that shifts real money out of the American economy, in some cases to a strategic competitor: China.
While these restrictions aren’t technically what defense experts refer to as “shutter control,” they have a similar effect: blacking out access for a healthy subset of customers and the public. There are times and places where restrictions of this nature are an appropriate tool to protect national security. But such restrictions should only be applied in narrow contexts where their use genuinely benefits military operational security. Foreign adversaries’ access to sophisticated remote sensing systems has made these circumstances rare. Notably, while U.S. media outlets have been cut off from satellite imagery and data, Iran is still obtaining it from China and Russia, whose remote sensing capabilities rival and in some cases surpass America’s. In this case, the administration appears to be focused on saving face rather than protecting the troops.
Thankfully, Congress appears to recognize the need for additional oversight of this issue; lawmakers have included language in the Intelligence Authorization Act that would direct the DoD and IC to develop an orderly process for these requests. A standard process by which the government can evaluate operational security requirements and then make requests to industry — and whose use is accountable to congressional oversight — would provide much-needed clarity and stability to a situation where none currently exists.
But while the legislation could address Trump’s censorship tactics, it risks going backward on a longstanding problem: national security officials, in the words of Breaking Defense, have “traditionally been leery about allowing such imagery to be sold on the market.” During the Afghanistan War in 2001, for instance, the military purchased all domestic high-resolution imagery of the conflict zone to keep it off the market, a feat it was able to pull off because the entire American industry consisted of two providers. In 2020, after a process led by the Department of Commerce, the government loosened restrictions on commercial remote sensing companies for national security reasons. The updated regulations have helped unleash the commercial remote sensing industry’s growth and should have been accompanied by a shift in the national security community’s concept of operational security in a data-rich era.
However, there are indications this shift has not materialized. Just over a year after this regulatory update, new restrictions were placed on certain commercial remote sensing systems in the name of national security. Most of these only lasted two years, but the incident shows that there is still significant tension between the national security enterprise and this industry. At the end of the day, operational security is a process that needs to constantly adapt in light of technological progress to ensure it remains effective. An evolution that acknowledges the widespread availability of commercial remote sensing data is crucial because it isn’t possible to wish away technological progress: doing so simply makes the nation less safe, not more. In its proposed language, Congress runs the risk of giving the national security community the opportunity to stay in its comfort zone and overutilize managed access requests — unless voices pushing for evolution and balance are also at the table.
However much Donald Trump might try to pretend otherwise, there is no putting the genie of widely accessible commercial data back into the bottle. Just as with restrictions on healthcare or educational statistics, removing access to remote sensing data does not magically make the problems it illustrates go away. Congress is right to push for the adoption of a new process around temporary remote sensing restriction requests based on clear national security grounds, but it must ensure that its solution both empowers a booming domestic industry to continue leading on the global stage and pushes modern military approaches to operational security forward rather than backward.
