During the Cold War, on the vast, barren flatland around Area 51's dried-up Groom Lake, the military developed a stealth spy plane code-named Project Oxcart. Project personnel were sworn to secrecy, but still, US officials worried that the Soviets would find out what they were up to. With good reason: Up above, USSR satellites were ready to spy with their on-board cameras. While Area 51 employees couldn't stop these satellites from swinging by, they did come up with a low-tech solution: moving the classified planes into sheds when they knew the satellites would pass over.

Today, that's not a feasible stealth solution. Earth orbit doesn’t just host a few Soviet spysats: More than a thousand working orbiters are out there, hundreds of those equipped with Earth-observing cameras. They are American, European, African, South American, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Russian. And nothing stops many of them from taking pictures of supersecret areas.

But the government has other ways of restricting information. The feds can limit how good commercially available images can be when taken by US companies. And it can issue a directive barring imaging over a given location. The law regulating that imaging, though, was first passed before satellite imaging really existed as an industry. And according to insiders, it’s been keeping satellites down—even as thousands more of them are set to launch in the next decade.

When the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act passed, the world was a younger, more naïve place. Aladdin was about to come out. George Sr. was president. Oh, and also the satellite-imaging industry was way different. “The biggest way that it was different was that there wasn’t really one,” says Walter Scott, the founder of DigitalGlobe and CTO of Maxar Technologies, which bought DigitalGlobe last year. The law allowed fully private companies to get a license to take data on Earth from space—and so, when it passed in 1992, Scott did.

The law—since added to, amended, and restated—still forms the legal basis for commercial remote sensing. But regulations have also accomplished the opposite, allowing the government to exercise so-called “shutter control”: If the government says to close your satellite’s eye, you have to do it.

The government has never put shutter control into effect—at least not exactly. It’s gotten around it, though. After 9/11, the feds didn't legislate the high-resolution Ikonos satellite out of taking or releasing images of Afghanistan. They simply bought exclusive rights to all of its images of the area, the only high-res ones available on the US market, making it functionally impossible for anyone else to use commercial US imagery surveil the area. Insiders call this “checkbook shutter control.”

That kind of limitation also happens on a smaller scale. “US government customers have the ability—as, actually, do some of our other customers—to say, ‘We would like you to take this image and not make this image available publicly,'” explains Scott. “It’s an exclusivity arrangement."

Then, there are the things that aren’t shutter control but do place cuffs around satellite operators. Take the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which bans US companies from releasing their high-resolution images of Israel and the Occupied Territories. In addition, "certain licensees have some area imaging restrictions," says Tahara Dawkins, the director of the NOAA Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs Office. "The details are proprietary."

So while the 1992 law let Scott found his company in the first place, it and further regulations are throttling the company—and any company that wants to take HD images from space.

That's not a theoretical problem. In 1999, DigitalGlobe wanted permission to sell images with 25-centimeter resolution—to turn, in other words, three men’s shoes into one pixel. That didn’t sit right with federal regulators, who, in 2000, gave DigitalGlobe permission to sell pictures half that precise: a large throw pillow could become a pixel. Even more, Scott says, “we had to impose a 24-hour delay on anything better than 82-centimeter resolution."