Taking a moment from the brutality here, this really makes me appreciate how much commercial satellite photography levels the playing field against state actors

Taking a moment from the brutality here, this really makes me appreciate how much commercial satellite photography levels the playing field against state actors. Nobody can realistically control the space over their country and space access is sufficiently cheap that we can affordably monitor the entire surface of the earth for these kinds of events. Such an undertaking would have been impossible without state level assets a few short decades ago. These satellites are also nice because they're not capable of tracking individual people effectively or otherwise providing a route for significant invasions of privacy. In short, satellites let us see over the hedge without the risk of retaliation and with a lower likelihood of abuse against private individuals.