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On March 2, two days into the United States and Israel’s air campaign against Iran, CNN published imagery showing a still-smoking operations center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, where six American service members had just been killed by an Iranian drone—before the Pentagon had provided details of the strike, including the full death toll. A day later, the New York Times offered a preliminary rundown of damage to US military sites across the Gulf. In the following days, multiple outlets showed that a strike on an elementary school that killed 175 people had likely been carried out by the US—an apparent mistake, which the Pentagon initially disputed. Amid a cascade of restrictions and conflicting narratives, all of these reports relied on a cornerstone of open-source intelligence: commercial satellite imagery, much of it from a single vendor called Planet Labs. 

Then, on March 6, the flow of pictures began slowing to a crawl. Planet Labs, a San Francisco–based company that operates more than two hundred satellites capable of photographing most of Earth’s landmass once per day—an unparalleled frequency among commercial satellites—announced a four-day hold on “all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones.” On March 11, Planet, as the firm is known, told customers the delay would be extended to fourteen days and expanded to include “all of Iran and nearby allied bases, in addition to the Gulf States and existing conflict zones.” Planet said it had made the decision through discussions with experts inside and outside of the government about preventing images from being “tactically leveraged by adversarial actors to target allied and NATO-partner personnel and civilians”—in other words, out of fear that Iran might use them to target the US and its allies in the Middle East.

On April 4, Planet’s stop in service became indefinite—imagery feeds would be halted, retroactive to March 8, local time. (Many outlets reported that the last available images would be from March 9.) “Due to the conflict in the Middle East, the U.S. government has requested all satellite imagery providers voluntarily implement an indefinite withhold of imagery in the designated Area of Interest,” the company told customers in an email, the text of which was provided to CJR by a spokesperson. Going forward, Planet said, it would release imagery on a case-by-case basis and for “urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest.” A spokesperson told me that “this model is in line with the media policies of other remote-sensing companies.”

Planet now counts defense and intelligence work as the fastest-growing part of its business, expanding more than 50 percent last year, though the firm has long prided itself on civilian and humanitarian applications and counts a number of media organizations as well as commodity traders, insurers, and researchers among its customers. Its near-daily feeds of high- and medium-resolution images have made it critical for verifying videos of air strikes, tracking military movements, and discovering events that might otherwise go unseen. Emily Tripp, the director at Airwars, a London-based conflict watchdog organization, told me that Planet’s imagery has been useful in a number of its investigations, including to document harm from US actions in Yemen last year and, in 2023, to identify the Israeli military vehicles likely responsible for a targeted attack at the southern Lebanon border that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah. Analyses of images from Planet satellites “certainly can contradict official narratives by adding another layer of information to push back against certain claims around patterns of attack,” she said. 

Like other vendors, Planet has delayed the release of images before, including over Gaza in 2023. But for journalists and investigators documenting the physical and human toll of the conflict in Iran, going dark indefinitely made it especially hard to see through an already thick fog of war. After a civil uprising broke out, in December, Iran responded in the new year by blocking most Western media and imposing a near-total communications blackout—now the longest in history. Across the Gulf, authoritarian governments have worked to suppress images of Iranian drone attacks, detaining dozens of locals and foreigners in the process. “Planet is doing everything it can to restore access to as many customers as possible while reducing risk of misuse of data and abiding by the US government’s request,” a company spokesperson said.  

There is no evidence that Iranian forces have, in fact, used imagery from any US satellite vendor. It’s also unclear why they would, since Tehran has its own sources of satellite data, including imagery that the Washington Post drew upon for a recent investigation into physical damage to US bases in the region, verified with help from a lower-resolution European science satellite. Evan Hill, a reporter at the Post who worked on the story, told me that his team would typically have used up-to-date images from US vendors. “Luckily, we’ve got these Iranian images that can kind of make up the gap,” he said.

As the war has unfolded, Planet’s US competitors have also begun curtailing access. Vantor, a firm that works closely with the US government, announced that, during times of conflict, it “may implement enhanced access controls to prevent the misuse of sensitive geospatial intelligence and to help protect allied forces and civilians,” a spokesperson, Tomi Maxted, said in a statement. But he said the company did not receive any explicit requests from Washington, and added: “Unlike some of our competitors, our policies have remained consistent for many years.” 

Since the start of the war, Vantor—which maintains contracts with a smaller number of news organizations—has released some high-resolution images of the region to the media at large, mostly of damage to Iranian sites. In a blog post in early March, the company claimed that its imagery had been capturing reconstruction at several Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. “When imagery is widely available, it becomes much harder to obscure what is actually happening,” Susanne Hake, the executive vice president and general manager of US government at Vantor, said in the post. Within days, its one-off releases from the Gulf also stopped. Smaller US imagery providers—BlackSky, Iceye, Satelllogic, and Capella Space—did not respond to requests for comment. 

Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, welcomed Planet’s forthrightness. “You don’t want adversaries using commercial imagery for targeting,” he told me. But the reasoning behind indefinite restriction was weak, he said. “My guess is that it’s probably driven by embarrassing things that open-source information revealed about the conflict,” he told me, including images of dead schoolgirls or American service members. “A two-week delay solves the targeting problem. I’m not sure that the indefinite hold does.”

Some are unconvinced that Planet’s cutoff is simply about military opsec. “I would like to think it’s just to protect our troops,” said Bill Greer, a cofounder of Common Space, a nonprofit satellite initiative, and a former project manager at Maxar Technologies, which is now Vantor. “But everything that our administration has done has shown me that that’s not what it’s about. It’s more about restricting our own view of what’s going on.”

The National Security Council, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Defense Intelligence Agency did not respond to requests for comment. The assistant secretary of defense, the Department of Commerce, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declined to comment. The National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency also declined to comment.

Since emerging from the shadowy domain of spy satellites in the 1990s, US Earth-observation companies have operated under a legal framework that allows the government to restrict what the public sees while sidestepping constitutional questions about press freedom and prior restraint. Starting in 1992, every US-based commercial satellite operator has been required to obtain a license from NOAA. Those licenses include a provision known as “shutter control,” which allows the government to order a company to withhold imagery in the name of national security—an instruction directed at a corporation rather than a news publisher, and therefore largely insulated from First Amendment challenge. 

The government has never formally invoked that authority, though it has reached in that direction. (In October of 2001, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon simply bought up all available tasking on the only commercial satellite that was capable of imaging the country at high resolution.) In 2020, an update to the law narrowed the levers of control and acknowledged that foreign satellites can generate much of the same data, effectively rendering imagery restrictions moot. It also provided assurances that restrictions must be limited to the “smallest area and for the shortest period necessary.” 

The scope and duration of the current imagery restrictions are unprecedented. And yet the limits themselves are “business as usual,” according to Nathaniel Raymond, the director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab. After the war in Gaza started, in October of 2023, Planet and Maxar—now Vantor—both began limiting or delaying the release of imagery over the region. In May of 2024, Ukraine announced it had signed a memorandum of understanding with unnamed satellite companies to limit distribution of imagery over its territory, citing concerns that Russia could exploit it. Last year, the US also temporarily suspended Ukraine’s access to US-government-purchased unclassified imagery after President Trump decided to “pause” the flow of intelligence and aid to the country. “The only difference now,” Raymond told me, “is that the public knows about it.”

A number of reporters who use Planet’s imagery told me about stories they would have done if access hadn’t been curtailed—reports on armaments and force posture, on damage to US assets that haven’t been thoroughly reported, or reported at all. For Logan Williams, at Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence research and reporting group, the coverage and frequency of Planet helped his team find new stories to investigate, and enabled them to track moving targets, like ships smuggling stolen grain, which often conceal or spoof their location on vessel-tracking systems. 

For Benjamin Strick, an open-source investigator, “the blackout collapses the independent verification window exactly when it matters most: the first twenty-four to seventy-two hours after a strike, when narratives are still contested,” he said, of Planet. “We’re effectively being asked to trust state claims at the moment we should be testing them.” The school strike—which covered front pages in the days after Planet’s initial imagery delay—is a clear example. “Planet imagery was central to documenting ground disturbance and structural damage at a site where access was impossible,” he said. “Without that early imagery, it risks becoming a contested claim rather than a documented event. That’s the gap we’re now seeing more often.” (Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, told Congress that the attack on the school is still under investigation.) 

Absent Planet, researchers turned to imagery from a range of European, South American, and Asian satellites, available for purchase from reseller websites such as Australia’s Soar, South Korea’s SI Imaging Services, and Berlin-based Up42. Others sought high-resolution imagery from France’s Airbus, which charges in the low hundreds of dollars for a single image. (An Airbus spokesperson declined to discuss its stance on imagery releases for the region, saying only: “We strictly comply with all applicable sanctions, export controls, and international regulatory frameworks.”) The New York Times recently used Copernicus, the European Space Agency’s satellite constellation, to show the scope of Israel’s campaign to destroy towns in Southern Lebanon. With help from Copernicus, Bloomberg and others revealed tankers likely filling up off Iran’s main oil hub of Kharg Island. On May 8, reporters at Reuters used pictures from Copernicus’s ​Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-3 satellites to identify a suspected oil spill covering dozens of square kilometers near Kharg, potentially the largest such spill since the war started.

Some developed their own solutions. Bellingcat used a tool that takes synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, data from the Sentinel-1 satellite to identify and visualize damage across Iran and the Gulf region. For an investigation for New Lines Magazine into Israeli air strikes on oil depots in Tehran, a journalist named Chris Osieck and his colleagues modeled smoke plumes and wind patterns using data from Meteosat, Sentinel-3, and NASA’s Worldview, combined with geolocated and triangulated social media footage. When New Lines needed higher-resolution imagery, the magazine bought it from Airbus. “All roads lead to Rome,” Osieck said. 

In an effort to tally the full impact of Iranian strikes on US bases, the Post’s Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, and Dan Lamothe turned to Iranian imagery to spot alleged damage. Iran had just released satellite images documenting more than a hundred successful strikes on infrastructure under the control of the US and its partners in the region, many of which had not appeared in any public tally. To verify the accuracy of Iran’s images, the Post reporters overlaid them with the most recently available high-resolution Planet imagery, along with lower-resolution images from Copernicus.

Before-and-after comparisons suggested the Iranian imagery was legitimate, and helped reporters identify damage to individual structures, including multiple radar systems that help warn of incoming attacks. In a separate search of older Planet imagery, the reporters also found ten damaged or destroyed structures that were not captured in the imagery released by Iran. In all, the Post found two hundred and seventeen structures and eleven pieces of equipment that were damaged or destroyed across fifteen US military sites, revealing that scores more targets were struck than has been publicly acknowledged. Separate analyses by reporters at BBC Persian, The Daily Mail’s Photo Evidence, and the Times used a similar approach to estimate damage to US facilities.

Multiple outlets have reported that Iran received targeting data from Russia and imagery from China. On Friday, the US imposed sanctions on three Chinese firms for providing satellite imagery to Iran. One company, the Financial Times found, built and launched a satellite that Iran acquired in 2024; another, known as MizarVision, has published open-source images detailing US military activity during the conflict. 

If Hill and his colleagues had access to Planet’s more recent imagery, they could have analyzed the damage with more precision and with full confidence the images were legitimate. But now he has a fuller appreciation for Iran’s capabilities. “We now see what they have access to,” he told me. “They’ve got actually quite good targeting of their own.”

For now, the lack of imagery is offering lessons in the scrappy but rigorous art of open-source intelligence reporting. “Open-source work is used to having to dip and weave around changes in access and changes in technology,” Jake Godin, a Bellingcat researcher, said. What is being lost in the gaps—the stories that won’t be found, the damage that won’t be confirmed—may not be known until the imagery, whenever it comes back, fills the picture in. 

After the US cut off Ukraine’s access to its unclassified satellite imagery platform in 2025, companies like Vantor saw increased interest from governments around the world interested in building their own “sovereign” space capabilities and data streams. The current blackout could have an analogous effect, some experts told me, shifting more commercial business to non-US imagery vendors at the long-term expense of US companies. 

Common Space, the nonprofit cofounded by Greer, is pursuing a different model: a satellite for humanitarian and journalistic use—and, in theory, insulated from the defense entanglements that have bent the industry’s larger players. To avoid following Planet’s trajectory, Common Space will need to find a jurisdiction outside US control, create safeguards to prevent abuse by bad actors, and raise the capital needed to build and launch a satellite. “We’re thinking from the systems level,” Greer told me, “about how we can avoid a financial entanglement with the US government or any government so that we can follow our mission.” 

The hard truth, though, is that the structural forces shaping the industry are moving in the other direction. The Trump administration has defunded the next NASA Landsat mission and directed NASA to study whether the mission can be handed off to commercial providers—a shift that researchers warn could expose it to the same pressures bearing down on Planet. 

Planet’s ban has also reinforced concerns about the open-source reliance on single vendors, especially those that depend on large defense contracts. “That model is clearly fragile,” Strick said.

For Tripp, at Airwars, the blackout points to the risks of leaning too heavily on satellite imagery in general—and what the authority of satellite imagery means for reporters who can’t get it. “Honestly, what this exposes to me is a much bigger problem,” she said. “That access to expensive commercial satellite imagery is becoming a prerequisite for open-source investigators to be able to tell a story of harm, and for those stories to be believed by those with the power to act.”

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