"It appears that NOAA has recently decided to start interpreting or enforcing a decades-old law: "
So yes, SpaceX approached NOAA, as they should. And NOAA did not give them the required license in time for whatever reason.
Keep in mind that these launches are doing more for American goodwill and image right now than anything else the administration is doing and from that perspective alone they are worth a bit of leniency.
120 days to approve something that has been going on for the better part of a decade might seem reasonable to you but it does not seem reasonable to me, there is a segment of the population that feels that yellow pieces of paper are more important than reality but I'm not a part of that segment. Paper should serve the people, not the other way around.
I don't think it's ever "trivial" for a license-stamping body to make up a new kind of permit, particularly not over a three day period and when it's bodies like the Department of Defense they're cutting out of the picture.
Ultimately, if SpaceX wished to take the view that the existing law was not well drafted, not relevant to their particular filming, something they may have already breached without consequence and not in the US government's interest to pursue, they were perfectly entitled to take the risk of leaving the cameras on and seeing if anyone did anything about it. Quite why you think it should be incumbent on NOAA to breach the law on their behalf I have no idea.
Because up to that point nobody had shown any good reason why the license was required in the first place and 10's of launches had been done without the license. This is too little, too late and doesn't serve anybody.
No harm was ever done by transmitting low resolution images from space.
Anyway, enough indents.
I definitely agree with you on that, and I agree that the government can be over burdensome and take too long. However, NOAA is the one charged with enforcing the law on it, they did not write the law. If you disagree with the law, I encourage you to write your congressman and see what it takes to change the law.
I think there is a fundamental disagreement on the intent on what NOAA is doing. I personally don't see it as hostile, nor do I think they are flexing their muscle.
If it was true that SpaceX only came to them 3 days before the launch, I think that is unfair to NOAA to ask for a license so quick. If they did follow the 120 day policy and NOAA didn't give them a license, then the fault is on NOAA.
What I find odd is NOAA's own statement says: "SpaceX applied and received a license from NOAA that included conditions on their capability to live-stream from space."
So is SpaceX violating their license? I think there is much more at play when just what the article says. Personally, I have a feeling another government agency saw what SpaceX was doing, saw they didn't have a license, and NOAA got in trouble because they weren't enforcing that law, and now NOAA is caught in the cross fire.
It's amazing how people can get from a description of that sequence of events to tinfoilhattery about bureaucrats "flexing their muscles" with "trumped up reasons". If anything, a logical explanation is probably the opposite: NOAA doesn't have enough control of the remote sensing licensing process to do a flagship government contractor the favour of forcing a license through, and certainly don't have the power to rewrite the law to accord to people's views that SpaceX's videos aren't sufficiently high resolution to matter.