By Jordan G. Teicher, The New Republic, 3/31/22 (excerpts)

….While the satellite images of other companies have also made their way into the press coverage of Ukraine, none have been as ubiquitous as Maxar’s. The same photos that appeared on CNN on February 20 appeared in dozens of other outlets, including The New York Post, The New York Times, and Reuters. Since then, hardly a day has gone by without a national outlet featuring Maxar images, most prominently of the bombing of Mariupol (NPR, USA Today, The Guardian) and the destruction of a theater where civilians allegedly were sheltering (NBC News, Business Insider, The Washington Post). Axios has frequently featured Maxar images in its coverage of Ukraine, with stories often bearing the headline “Satellite images show.…” “If you’ve seen high-resolution satellite imagery published in connection with an important story, that image was more than likely taken by a Maxar satellite,” Maxar president and CEO Dan Jablonsky said recently.

….Maxar’s defense capabilities—including satellite imagery, mobile access terminals, precision 3D registration technology, and artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities—were developed with the needs of the U.S. government and its allies in mind. Today, the U.S. government remains a critical Maxar customer. According to Maxar, the company provides 90 percent of the “foundational geospatial intelligence used by the U.S. government for national security.” For nearly a decade, Maxar was the sole supplier of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery for the Defense Department’s National Reconnaissance Office, which paid Maxar $300 million per year for access to its satellites as well as its behemoth image archive.

As a Maxar customer, the Department of Defense isn’t just a passive consumer of Maxar images; it is, in a way, a co-producer of those images. “These satellites don’t just go around and around the world taking pictures and adding them to their archive,” said Laura Kurgan, the director of the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. Maxar’s satellites often take photos when—and where—they are tasked by the company’s customers to do so. “Once tasked, those images are archived, and anyone can purchase them,” Kurgan said. Maxar can also share those images with the press. But crucially, Kurgan says, the media organizations in Maxar’s News Bureau network will “never know who tasked the image,” including when the tasking customer is the U.S. government. In other words, media outlets can unwittingly funnel images to the public that were specifically ordered by the U.S. government, without those outlets, or the public, knowing it for certain.

According to industry experts, this is not an accidental by-product of the U.S. government’s need for geospatial intelligence but a key benefit of working with commercial providers, since the images the government takes with its own satellites are classified. “What they love about commercial providers is that the images are freely shareable,” Chris Quilty of the market research firm Quilty Analytics told SpaceNews. That’s especially useful in times of war. For instance, Quilty said, “if commercial imagery didn’t exist, you would have had the U.S. administration waving their hands about the Russians massing troops around Ukraine,” and they would have been unable to provide the visual evidence to back up the claim.

But just as the U.S. government can work through commercial satellite imagery companies to reveal information strategically to the public, it can also use its power over those companies to conceal information. One way it can do that is through “checkbook shutter control.” In the fall of 2001, after reports of heavy civilian casualties from American bombing in Afghanistan, the federal government spent millions to buy the rights to all Ikonos image data over the country for two months. Since Ikonos had the only high-resolution photographs of the area on the U.S. market, according to Wired, the government’s purchase made it “functionally impossible for anyone else to use commercial US imagery [to] surveil the area.” The media, like everyone else outside the U.S. intelligence community looking to get a high-resolution satellite view of the war, was largely out of luck. (The Pentagon allowed select Ikonos images to be sold to the media.)

Maxar’s images don’t need to be censored, necessarily, for the company to provide an incomplete view of global conflict to the press. While Maxar’s status as a defense contractor lends its content a certain legitimacy, the images it provides to the media are not, in fact, “as precise or as timely” as the images the U.S. military itself collects, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis told the Associated Press. When U.S. military and intelligence agencies do turn to Maxar images, they corroborate them with intelligence from human sources, real-time video, and information collected by spy planes. With Maxar images alone, you can “see something on a base that looks like a base that has a lot of activity,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told the AP. “But in terms of what’s being done there, and what the units are—that takes a lot more intel.” News audiences looking to Maxar’s images to understand war will likely never view them in the fuller context to which military analysts are privy.

Those viewers will also never see a complete picture of global military activity. Maxar does not show U.S. troop movements to the public but often releases images of U.S. adversaries like China and Iran. The result is an asymmetrical view of geopolitics—one that, according to Cory Wimberly, an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who wrote a book about corporate propaganda, is a kind of manufactured siege mentality. In this scenario, news consumers are led to believe that the U.S. is constantly under threat and in need of military solutions—which, not incidentally, requires the military to use more of Maxar’s services. Jablonsky has said that the company is “hopeful for a peaceful resolution” in Ukraine. But it is also positioning its offerings to support the Defense Department’s pivot “from anti-terror missions” to confrontations with “large, near-peer adversaries”—namely, Russia and China. “If the way that you make your money is through conflict and war, then you’re going to be looking for opportunities to become involved in conflict and war,” Wimberly said….

Read full article here.