Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.
Planet wants to prevent “adversarial actors” from using images for “Battle Damage Assessment” purposes.
It feels reeeeallll fucking weird to have just started watching Pluto this week, having previously had no idea what it was about
A rather pointless move, since Russia is providing Iran with satellite intelligence. Not to mention, I highly doubt the feeds are encrypted, and if not than anyone with the will to download them and a couple hundred dollars could build a receiver. There’s tutorials on how to do so on YouTube.
Not completely pointless until Russia starts providing the intel to news organizations.
This isn’t about keeping Iran from seeing the damage, it’s to keep the public from seeing it.
Honey pots. Highly monitored.
Stupid is as stupid does.
what are you implying? the youtube videos are honeypots? do you think Iran cares about that? I really don’t think Iran cares about that.
Probably because the New York times article that came out Thursday proved they bombed the school on purpose and refused to do more research and intelligence to confirm their targets.
The administration hates when evidence of their crimes come out, so they most likely threatened every GPS company they could to stop updated images.
The article says image over Iran are still available without delay. It’s the regions around around that are affected. I assume it is to hide the effectiveness of Iran retaliation to Iran or to to public opinion.
To me this translates to, “America’s military is being led incompetently and we don’t want anyone to see the real damage being done to it.”
Jesus fucking Christ, this is the stupidest possible way to start WWIII.
To be fair, wars have never started smartly, there is usually stupidity involved.
There are lots of ways to start a war but they all end the same: everyone sitting down to discuss peace. For some reason, no one thinks to try discussing peace first.
Oh I think it’s even standard practice to do just that. But when the bully swings their dick and says there’ll be war if the don’t get their will, what’s the target supposed to do? Just bend over without at least trying something first?
There’s no motivation for the bully to see any reason there, their stance is that if they wanted, they can just take all they want, they are more powerful. Any “peace talks” before actually testing the merits of that assessment in real battle consist entirely of them demanding whatever they want and only path to “peace” is the smaller one just accepting to get fucked.
So, then when the bully comes around, it’s only sensible the one in the right there defending their rights to exist and rights to sovereignty and all.
Just reflecting on Russia vs Ukraine here, but I suppose the same is true for Iran vs Israel/US too.
How are you supposed to make peace with a pedophile rapist who has staffed his office with racist Warhawk morons who are convinced they can do whatever they want with complete impunity, and they start bombing you while you are under diplomatic negotiations (twice!)?
Satellite services are pretty amenable to hiding sensitive parts of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_with_missing_or_unclear_data?wprov=sfla1
It seems totally on-brand for the US government to request that bits of the war zone be hidden, and it’s entirely on brand for satellite companies to hide them.
Yeah it’s normal to ask for a warzone - but this isn’t a war of course.
The US government: “It’s just a special military operation, absolutely not a war. Hmmm? Department of War, no no it’s always been Department of Defense”.
Meanwhile, Trump: “The war…”
Are they really using the same terminology as Putin?
“This is a limited operation”
😂
Congress voted it’s not war, doesn’t require war powers, so yeah anyone or private business treating this as a warzone is in the wrong. Except now that they have decided that, still seeing wartime excuses from gop behavior. Schrodinger’s conflict starting world war epstein, staying on brand for 2026.
Yep, it is funny how many images of this shitshow are not showing up on like reddit. Full on censorship
Still better than the sandwich from WWI
The incredibly selective quote makes it sound like the imagery is being held indefinitely, but according to the article it is only being held for 4 days before becoming publicly available as normal. Furthermore, the hold does not apply to imagery inside Iran.
To quote more from the article:
“In response to the conflict in the Middle East, Planet is implementing temporary restrictions on data access within specific areas of the affected region,” Planet said in a statement emailed to Ars. “Effective immediately, all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones will be subject to a mandatory 96-hour delay before it is made available in our archive.”
Imagery over Iran will remain available as soon as it is acquired, the company said. “This change applies to all users except authorized government users who maintain immediate access for mission-critical operations.”
Russia is sharing these images with Iran anyway.
Yes, the Russian government is probably happy to share these images with the Iranian government, but my understanding is that the military units who are firing missiles are acting independently after our decapitation strike took out the Supreme Leader, which was the one to whom they had pledged their allegiance. (There is a moral here: taking out the leader does not necessarily get rid of the organization, it just means you no longer have a single person you can negotiate with to in order to get it to back down.) Thus, the people firing missiles might not actually be able to benefit from images provided by the Russian government.
“Oops, the observable truth! Our bad.”
