> “Turns out, it is Congress. In 1997, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, one section of which is titled, “Prohibition on collection and release of detailed satellite imagery relating to Israel.”

They don't go into rationale as to why, but my guess would maybe be nuclear weapons deniability? Even if other countries have higher res imagery and it becomes common knowledge, we can officially deny it to ourselves and keep demanding others join the non-proliferation treaty in order to build nuclear power plants, etc.

If we had commercial services showing video of nuclear weapons manufacturing transport etc. they could be used in congressional hearings, if it is illegal maybe that is less likely.

However if there were a law requiring low resolution imagery of Iraq I could see someone could make the opposite argument: it was done so we can hallucinate in aluminum tubes that could surely only be for centrifuges, blurry yellow shipments of imagined urania, etc.

"Israel is widely believed to possess weapons of mass destruction, and to be one of four nuclear-armed countries not recognized as a Nuclear Weapons State by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_weapons_of_mass_des...