Who ordered it?
On Sunday Planet Labs confirmed that it has indefinitely suspended distribution of satellite imagery covering Iran and the wider conflict zone. The suspension is retroactive to 9 March. It replaces a previous arrangement under which such imagery was released on a fourteen day delay, and substitutes a managed access model: high resolution SkySat and medium resolution PlanetScope data are withheld from public platforms, and released case by case where a requirement is judged mission critical or of specific public interest.
The company has said the change follows a request from the United States government.
The power that exists
American commercial remote sensing is a licensed activity, and has been since the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. A company operating an imaging satellite needs a license, administered through the Commerce Department and in practice through NOAA, and the license carries conditions.
One of those conditions is known as shutter control. It permits the government, on national security or foreign policy grounds, to limit or suspend a licensee’s collection or distribution. The authority is real, it is written down, and it has been part of every license in the industry for three decades.
It is also, famously, a power that has essentially never been exercised. Through several wars in which commercial imagery was plainly inconvenient, including episodes where the government simply bought exclusive rights to the relevant pictures instead, the formal instrument stayed in its box.
Why the box stayed shut
Not restraint. Consequences.
Invoking shutter control is an administrative act, and administrative acts attach to things. There would be a decision, taken by a named official, on a stated basis, at a stated time, with a defined scope. It would be an order to a licensee, which means the licensee could challenge it. It would raise a First Amendment question about a prior restraint on the distribution of information, which the government would rather not have answered. And it would apply to one company under one license, which means every competitor not so ordered continues publishing, and the order accomplishes very little at considerable cost.
That last point is the practical one. Shutter control was designed for a market with two or three American operators. It does not fit a market with many, several of them foreign.
The third tool, which is the one usually reached for
Between the formal order and the informal request sits a commercial option, and it has the longest service record of the three.
In the opening weeks of the Afghanistan campaign in 2001, the American government wanted commercial imagery of the theater kept out of circulation. It did not invoke shutter control. It bought exclusive rights to the relevant satellite’s output, paying the operator for everything it collected over the region.
That arrangement has obvious attractions. The company is made whole, nobody is ordered to do anything, no constitutional question arises because the government is a customer rather than a censor, and the imagery genuinely does not reach anyone else.
It also has a cost, in money, and that cost is a discipline. Somebody has to appropriate it, justify it and account for it. A purchase leaves a ledger entry even when it leaves no order.
A request leaves neither.
What a request does instead
A request has none of those properties, and that is its entire advantage.
There is no order, so there is nothing to appeal. There is no named decision maker on a document, so there is nobody to question about the basis. There is no defined scope, so the boundary is wherever the recipient draws it, and a recipient with a license to renew and government contracts to win will draw it generously. There is no legal test applied, so no precedent is set and no future case is constrained.
And there is no record. The formal instrument produces a file. This produces a corporate announcement describing a change of policy.
The outcome is the outcome shutter control was created to achieve. The accountability the statute attached to that outcome has been separated from it.
What is actually lost
It is worth being concrete about what the public loses, because the abstract version of this argument is easy to wave away.
Commercial satellite imagery has become the main independent check on claims made about wars by the people fighting them. Damage assessments, the presence or absence of equipment, whether a facility is operating, whether a place that was said to be untouched is untouched. It is how journalists and researchers verify. It is frequently the only source that is not a belligerent.
Planet’s own imagery has been used in exactly that way during this conflict, including in reporting on a strike on a school. Managed access does not restore that function. A case by case release decided by the company, in consultation with the government that asked for the restriction, is not an independent check; it is a permissioned one.
The counter argument is serious and should be stated. Imagery published on a fourteen day delay still has tactical value, and an adversary reading a commercial feed for battle damage assessment is getting free reconnaissance. That is true. It is a reason for a narrow, reasoned, temporary restriction, which is what the statute contemplates. It is not obviously a reason for an indefinite blackout applied retroactively by a company.
What to watch
Three things, in order of how much they would tell you.
Whether the other operators follow. If competitors adopt comparable policies within weeks, without any of them having received an order, the request model has demonstrated it works at industry scale and will be used again. If they do not, Planet has taken a commercial position and the market corrects it.
Whether the non American operators fill the gap. There are European, Japanese and Chinese providers who are not licensed by the Commerce Department and are not subject to any of this. If the imagery simply arrives from somewhere else, the restriction has cost an American company revenue and an American public its independent check, while accomplishing nothing at all against the adversary it was aimed at.
And whether anybody is told when it ends. An indefinite suspension has no expiry, so the only way the public learns that imagery is available again is if somebody announces it. A formal order would have had a term.
The question
So: who decided?
Nobody, in the sense the word usually carries. There is no decision document, no signature, no official of record. A government asked, and a company agreed, and the arrangement has all the effect of an order and none of the attributes of one.
That is not a loophole somebody found. It is what happens whenever a formal power is expensive to use and an informal one is free, and it will keep happening in this direction until the informal route costs something too.
