Submitted 8 hours ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to technology@lemmy.world
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.
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.
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.
“Oops, the observable truth! Our bad.”
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.
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.”
kescusay@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
avg@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
To be fair, wars have never started smartly, there is usually stupidity involved.
aquovie@lemmy.cafe 6 hours ago
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.
sbv@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Satellite services are pretty amenable to hiding sensitive parts of the world: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_satellite_map_images_w…
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.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
Yeah it’s normal to ask for a warzone - but this isn’t a war of course.
Akh@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yep, it is funny how many images of this shitshow are not showing up on like reddit. Full on censorship
0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Expect to see uptick in posts/comments critical of lemmy/fediverse because it’s critical of the USA.
Generally it’s framed as something else like UI, grammar, content, or people but with the goal of trying to dissuade people from using it.
The imperialists censorship works in multiple ways, by censoring content in their own platforms and also sowing distrust and reservation in platforms they don’t control.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Still better than the sandwich from WWI