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.”
