Blind Spots

A satellite company popular among journalists issued an indefinite blackout in the Middle East. Open-source investigators got to work—and challenged official narratives.

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.