Posted on 11/13/2026 6:30:09 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The U.S. government is trying to censor your view from space.
Ollie Ballinger, an open-source researcher and lecturer, uses satellite imagery to monitor conflicts around the world. But he says pressure from the government has prompted private companies to restrict access to images of places it may not want the public to see.
Why would companies listen to these requests? “Any pressure from the U.S. government carries a lot of weight for these companies,” Mr. Ballinger says, “because the American government is their biggest customer.”
In the Opinion video above, he reveals how these restrictions are limiting a vital tool for accountability and public safety and warns of a future in which governments have the power to control what the public can see and, ultimately, what it can know.
Below is an edited transcript of this video. We recommend watching it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the video player above.
Ollie Ballinger: Let me show you something the U.S. government doesn’t want you to see. The aftermath of American missile strikes on schools and homes, revealed by satellite imagery.
This view from space has been used to uncover destruction in Gaza, mass graves in Ukraine, internment camps in China and the Minab school strike in Iran. Journalists, humanitarian groups and researchers like me rely on satellite imagery to monitor conflicts, natural disasters and atrocities around the world.
Several months ago, I could go to multiple companies based in the U.S. and buy high quality images of the Middle East. But for much of this year, here’s what we’ve seen: a blackout. The U.S. government is pressuring private companies...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Yes, the shadow government wants to control you.
The shadow U.S. government is the Senior Executive Service. The intelligence agency you’ve never heard of.
The S.E.S. is the enemy of the American people.
I’d have loved to have seen a satellite view of Bagram airbase in August 2021 with all the armaments the Taliban collected. I’d have loved to have seen it again and again througout the 2026 campaign, captioned , “This is what it looked like last time Democrats ran foreign policy.”
I don’t trust people like this. They tend to be anti-American, and generally working for our enemies.
Of course your information from satellite technology will be controlled by the government/media story tellers.
The last thing they want is bunch of amateurs “poking holes” in the information/propaganda provided to you by the experts. Experts that just coincidentally are on the payroll of the government/media complex.
“School and homes….”
where the terrorists keep their weapons.
Past, present and future.
That makes sense, if you are a Deep State sycophant who defines "America" only as the ruling institutional elites who treat the rest of the US as a slave plantation to be plundered in pursuit of a leftist agenda.
Let information flow freely and we can argue about what it all means. The alternative is an "official story" that nobody believes on the one side, and then a morass of rumors, fears and prejudice-based fantasies on the other.
Agree 100%. Of course, it depends on the intentions and integrity of those harvesting the data.
Piles of dead Muslims? Smells like winning, unless you’re West hating, TDS infected virtue signaling cucks.
For the children?
I just give the long version of this for context-but it does bear on the subject, and was the first time I had directly seen this kind of thing)
I went back to visit it about 20 years later when I was back in that area in a rented car, and decided to pay a visit. The base was not in use, the main gate was gone, and there was just one of those barrier arms across that road that was stuck in an upright position, so...I just drove onto the old base.
It was deserted, but largely looked like it had when I left it. I was even able to go to our old family quarters and go inside the house, the door was open and the front yard was dug up.
It was neat.
Then, when I went to another part of the base where a gigantic parabola about 100 feet across (that they used to bounce military messages to the other side of the world off the moon) used to be, it was gone. I was about to go down and check out the place on the base my Boy Scout Troop used to camp at, but I noticed a camera on a pole pointed right at me, and decided I had seen enough, and left.
Some years after that, when Google Earth became a thing, my brother and I would go on Google Earth and look up all the places we had lived, and this old Naval communication station in Maryland was one of them. It was fun, we could see our old house and the fields near the parabola we use to play games at, though that giant dish was gone. At the lower right corner, I could even see the swampy area I had gone swimming in a nasty creek and got leeches on me!
What was odd though, that even though much had not changed on the base since we lived there, you could even see the shadow from the large water tower at about the 10 O'Clock position of the yellow push pin, where the fields were we used to play in near Ammon Drive near the bottom, there was now what looked like a runway. We looked at it and didn't think it was a real runway with taxiways, it was a bit of a puzzle.
Anyway, I lost those images I had taken of my family's old house, and maybe 5-10 years later, I thought I might go back and re-take those images. When you look at the image I posted above, you can still see the long road straight road coming into the upper left corner of the image diagonally which is lined by trees, leading to where the main gate was, but as I drove up this time, that little barrier arm where the main gate used to be was gone.
It was a long, straight, clear road with no vegetation, and I saw a sign that said "DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY COUNTERTERRORISM UNIT" and as I drove down that long straight road, there was now a huge glass and concrete complex that stretched across the road which appeared to go right through the center of it.
I had the very real feeling that, like Frodo going on the road into Mordor, there were a lot of lidless, sleepless eyes, an automated system that had run my plate number, with my personal information being displayed on many screens!
As I drove up the the gate which looked like extremely thick bulletproof glass, a guard came over and looked at me expectantly. I stammered something like "Er, I used to live on this base, and was driving by to visit it, but...I guess that isn't going to happen now?" He didn't say a word, but nodded his head side to side slowly in the negative, and when I asked if I could turn around, he pointed to how I could do it, and I did.
When I got home, I went on Google Earth, and when I looked at the satellite image, it was an image taken BEFORE the image above. Those old structures like the fields we played in and the old parabola antenna were again there.
I then figured out that what we thought might have been an airstrip, was more likely a defensive driving training course where agents train how to handle various traffic elements if there were hostiles attacking.
At the time after I saw the image above, Google must have been handed an image by the government and told to display that old image instead. I just went back and looked at it now, and it seems like a more current picture, so someone must have decided it wasn't worth the effort to conceal what was going on there anymore.
This article is a joke. Everything in government tells us is a lie. 9/11 was a lie, walk on the moon was a lie. The
true will take way their power.
I live out western MD where all the big microwave towers far the Cold War comms longlines still stand, supposedly defunct
I’ll never waste time or effort on a Bomb shelter though.
Pointless.
😆
Is it that easy to decide? Jim Robinson added “loose lips sink ships” to FR masthead on 9/11/2001. It seems to me anybody with any agenda is going to be as selective about the information they present as the government.
NYT bs as always.
This guy looks like he has a sandperson background so that would explain his bias to terrorists organizations like hamas. Yeah, those gazans were real victims when they went in and murdered 1700 people in Israel on Oct. 17.
You kill 1700 Americans and I would be fine taking out a few million of yours. I wouldn’t play to break even. I would make it to where you would never ever think about doing that again.
Quit playing victim when you continually commit terrorist acts about the world.
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