The longest amount of time any area in the continental United States has gone without an update on Google Earth has been 8 years . From 2008 to 2016, a series of dry lake beds in Southwestern Nevada located in the Tonopah Test Range was a blind spot from the all-seeing corporate monolith continuously mapping the Earth.

On Thursday, Brendan Byrne and Dhruv Mehrotra are hosting INTERNAL USE ONLY in Brooklyn, where they will be displaying the satellite image they bought, as well as artwork by Sebastian Gladstone.

Tonopah is a subsection of the Nellis Test and Training Range, which is jointly operated by the Department of Energy and Air Force. Since the early 1950s, the Nellis Range has been the site of extensive government aerospace and weapons testing. Many such dry lake beds on the site were historically used for aerial target practice. There are many such experimental weapons testing facilities around the US, but, strangely, none of the others have had such a long stretch of time without an update. We immediately assumed censorship at a federal level and began to wonder what, exactly, made this patch of Tonopah different .

As we learned more about commercial satellite imagery, experimental military test sites, and the mechanics of Google Earth, we realized the only way to answer these questions was to find and purchase a satellite image of the “Tonopah Gap” ourselves.

That this gap occurred for eight years without any acknowledgement from Google, Alphabet, or the federal government suggests that it can happen again with no warning or oversight. This is Google’s Earth, not ours.

After stumbling onto this strange piece of information, we, as researchers critical of the National Security State wanted to know how and why this happened. While the area has since been updated (the current image you see in Google Earth/Maps was taken on October 1st, 2017 ), the gap in Google Earth’s historical data set remains. (Since we began our investigation, Google Earth updated its historical dataset to include images from both 2014 and 2015, making the total gap remaining 6 years.)

We were interested in the mechanism used in the censorship. Was it a physical component of the satellite itself that prevented it from taking a photo? A direct order from the federal government to the satellite company that we could FOIA? Or something quieter, harder to track? So we began to research the history of commercial satellite imaging. In 1992, 32 years after the first classified US reconnaissance satellite was placed in orbit, the US Land Remote Sensing Policy Act made it legal for commercial satellite imagery vendors to sell to civilian entities. The politics of this were, and remain, a compromise between the two predominant neoliberal concerns of national security and capital. If anyone could purchase satellite images, a certain tactical advantage would be lost by US military/security forces.

However, as former CIA Senior Executive Intelligence Officer Michele Brunngraber wrote in a paper for the National War College [pdf], "the argument was that it would be better to have U.S. contractors dominate the industry," where the industry-standard resolution and other points of concern could be regulated by federal law. Still, the tension between the concerns of capital and national security continues to the present day. In 2016 Walter Scott, the founder of DigitalGlobe, an industry-leading commercial satellite imagery vendor, pleaded for the unleashing of the “power of the U.S. commercial remote sensing industry.”

We were able to acquire one of the images of the dry lakebed from Apollo for the academic price of $1,984.50. Our initial intention was to obtain an exclusive copyright of the image, then sell it to Google Earth at the price of $1.

This close relationship between the private sector and the government allows the federal government to censor satellite imagery officially and unofficially. The official censorship method is known as "Formal Interruption of Normal Commercial Operations," also known as "Modified Operations" or "Shutter Control” [pdf]. This occurs when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Department of the Navy, the Department of Commerce, or another government agency invokes national security and declares the sale of certain imagery as off-limits for the commercial satellite imagery market or demands commercial satellite image resellers/providers reduce the image resolution of said imagery. Shutter control proved highly controversial as a concept, at least until 9/11 occurred and First Amendment rights began to be routinely sacrificed en masse for nebulous security gains.