Along with the features of daily life that few of us could have anticipated a generation ago —smartphones, rent-a-scooters, Greek yogurt in every grocery store — something new has come to the world of think tanks and NGOs: the budding democratization of imagery intelligence.

Multiple companies now take photographs from space of effectively anywhere on the earth’s surface.

Their levels of resolution vary, but some could be compared to the best available to the superpowers during the late Cold War—or even better. DigitalGlobenow offers images as sharp as 30 cm in resolution, meaning that each pixel measures about one