Based on paperwork lately declassified by the Nationwide Geospatial-Intelligence Company (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a categorized satellite tv for pc picture of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR experiences: Now, three years after Trump’s tweet, the Nationwide Geospatial-Intelligence Company (NGA) has formally declassified the unique picture. The declassification, which got here as the results of a Freedom of Info Act request by NPR, adopted a grueling Pentagon-wide evaluation to find out whether or not the briefing slide it got here from may very well be shared with the general public. Many particulars on the unique picture stay redacted — a transparent signal that Trump was sharing a few of the U.S. authorities’s most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification on the Federation of American Scientists. “He was getting actually a chook’s eye view of a few of the most delicate US intelligence on Iran,” he says. “And the very first thing he appeared to need to do was to blurt it out over Twitter.” “[A]erospace consultants decided the picture was taken by a categorized spacecraft known as USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance plane,” provides Gizmodo. “The spacecraft is just like the Hubble Telescope, however as an alternative of getting a more in-depth take a look at the celebrities, it views the Earth’s floor.”
