Autonomous Ukraine: The Rise of Civilian Intelligence

Anthony VINCI: One of the greatest uses of this decentralized democratized intelligence is that it can be used to hold people accountable because now we can track what’s going on. We have all of those drone images. We can see what happens in commercial satellite images. It’s not just something classified that the government has. We can all watch it and we can analyze it in a way that a government realistically is not typically able to do. And so I think the future will be one where we may be able to see most of the war crimes that have happened.

Sam VIGERSKY: The cataloging of what’s taking place in any war zone still matters. Even if there’s no follow up, for the people who live there to know what happened to their relatives, if they weren’t present, is still some form of closure. And it may be that the prosecution of the person responsible for that never comes to be, but it still matters to civilians to have some sort of collective story to understand and tell and to not be forgotten.

Today we are wrapping up our mini-season looking at the war in Ukraine - what it has revealed about the future of warfare, and how those battlefield changes are already spreading into other regions. Even as we’ve been making these episodes, we’ve watched new tactics and technologies introduced in Ukraine show up in real time in other conflicts, including the war in Iran.

But one of the biggest shifts we’ve seen isn’t just about new weapons, it’s about a new set of devices providing a lens through which modern-day battlefields can be watched from almost anywhere.

Drones, satellites, smartphones, and other widely accessible intelligence gathering tools have transformed who can document war. Civilians are not only recording attacks as they happen but building digital evidence libraries online and launching full-scale intelligence operations. Aid workers are using these tools to map damage and track displacement in places too dangerous for a human to go. And investigators and human rights organizations are sifting through loads of digital evidence that could one day be used in war crimes prosecutions.

This is a massive democratization of intelligence.

To work through all of this and what it could mean for the future of intelligence gathering and humanitarian work, I sat down with two experts: Anthony Vinci and Sam Vigersky. 

I’m Gabrielle Sierra, and this is Why It Matters. Let’s get into it. 

SIERRA: We’re going to start out with the easiest question first, which is, what is your name and what do you do?

VINCI: Yeah. My name’s Anthony Vinci. I am the CEO of an AI company called Vico. We forecast events and quantify event risk for people in finance and for the government. But before that, I was an intelligence officer, a case officer and the CTO of one of the agencies and where I was responsible for bringing artificial intelligence into the agency, and I wrote about that in a book that I published last year, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution: The Future of Espionage and the Battle to Save America.

SIERRA: Woo. That’s a big title. That’s exciting. Congratulations.

VINCI: Thanks.

SIERRA: So when I think of old school intelligence gathering, and I’m going way back, I think of a spy with a mustache in a room that they’re not supposed to be in and then taking that information and going back and reporting on it, diabolical plan, that whole thing. But I know my imagination is clearly years behind reality. I’m asking the right person. What does intelligence gathering look like now?

VINCI: Yeah, the mustaches are generally gone. We moved over, I would say, 15, 20 years ago to beards, and that’s what we like to have now in the business. Yeah. I mean, look, it wasn’t that long ago that that was basically it. When I became an intelligence officer, I went to the farm, which is kind of the training course for people who want to collect intelligence in the field. And it was pretty low tech. And it was me learning how to securely meet with somebody, debriefing them on the intelligence that they had and coming back and writing it up in a report. And that’s kind of how human intelligence was done. We used obviously satellites and other forms of intelligence gathering. But the thing that has happened in the last five to 10 years is that artificial intelligence is changing everything about intelligence, just like it is for the rest of the world. Just like lawyers are having contracts written by AI and doctors are referencing AI for diagnosis, the same thing is happening in intelligence, where every step in what we call the intelligence cycle can now incorporate AI into it, and that’s changing a lot. The other thing that I think is happening is intelligence is democratizing. And whereas intelligence used to be, like you said, it was a professional intelligence officer. It was meeting a source in a room or a professional intelligence officer building and then collecting from some super secret classified satellite. Now, there’s a lot of open source intelligence, so you can use commercial tools to gather intelligence, but also regular people are becoming the target of intelligence and are getting the tools to use to protect themselves from this intelligence gathering. This is very new in the world of intelligence.

SIERRA: So you’re saying we’re all spies now.

VINCI: We’re all spies. We’re becoming civilian spies.

SIERRA: All right. That’s kind of exciting. So we’re looking at Ukraine this season. Can you zero in, what does the new era of intelligence look like in Ukraine?

VINCI: In Ukraine, what we’re seeing is this revolution in warfare in general, where they’re using drones, many of which are autonomous. But the bigger revolution I see happening there is the second part, which is the democratization of intelligence because for the Ukrainians, they’re in a total war, which we in America haven’t been in since World War II, really. And everyone in their society is becoming a target of intelligence and of military strikes, but are also figuring out ways to be part of the fight. And that includes intelligence, and they’re doing that across the board, in helping to acquire and use the sensors of intelligence, cyber operations, information operations, and even intelligence analysis.

SIERRA: When you talk about civilians becoming part of the intelligence process, what does that mean in practical terms?

VINCI: So in Ukraine, they have an app called DIA, which is their kind of government interaction app. You do your taxes on it, you make requests, you file forms, it’s how you get your passport. I kind of wish we had this here. Yeah, that sounds great. Imagine a single app. But one of the things you can do on that app is you can report Russian soldiers on it. Wow. It’s called E Enemy. So you as just a regular person using this app can now be a intelligence collector, do what somebody like I used to do and actually report intelligence.

SIERRA: That’s wild. That’s

VINCI: Just a completely new world. Yeah. And there’s a lot more that people can do. So they can take part in the analytical process of intelligence. So one tool that’s actually available everywhere, but it’s been used heavily in ... Ukraine is called Bellingcat, which is a nonprofit site. It’s run out of Holland where anybody can access data and tools and expertise to learn how to do intelligence analysis about what’s going on in Ukraine and actually perform that analysis and write reports. And they’ve done wonderful work where they’re actually reporting on things that are happening there, human rights abuses by the Russians or even troop movements and so forth. This is doing intelligence analysis in the way that historically you needed to be somebody who’s a trained analyst at an intelligence agency to do. 

SIERRA: Are there any civilian use cases that have sort of piqued your interest?

VINCI: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many insane things that they’re doing.

SIERRA: All right. Tell me. 

VINCI: I mean, one is they started crowdsourcing the acquisition of drones and literally doing the equivalent of a GoFundMe campaign to buy drones. And that went so far, they actually crowdsourced the acquisition of a whole satellite, which they bought from ISI, which is a SARS satellite company, Synthetic Aperture Radar Company. People chipped in and bought this satellite. They call it the people satellite, which is wonderful.

SIERRA: That’s amazing.

VINCI: And this is like completely groundbreaking stuff. We used to take out war bonds and things like this, but this is going to the next level. Other things going on in information operations, for example, which is a huge component of the war in Ukraine. The Russians are mounting disinformation and misinformation attacks against the Ukrainian population and against the whole world, I believe, and vice versa. The Ukrainians are doing it as well, and they’re getting really creative with how to do these disinformation campaigns. They’re using apps like Telegram, for example, pushing information directly to soldiers, even laying traps. So there’s reporting in one instance where a woman in Ukraine put her profile on Tinder, and then in an area where there were Russian troops, and then those Russian troops would match with this profile, and they put the profile in different locations, and by doing that, we’re able to triangulate where these troops were, and then use that for targeting.

SIERRA: Wow. Okay. So really innovative stuff. But things that you think will now carry on to the future of warfare or intelligence gathering in war.

VINCI: I think that the democratization of intelligence gathering and analysis is something that’s going to take hold, particularly in the area of information operations. Because think about it this way, you have adversaries putting out disinformation and misinformation here in America, for example, in other free societies, and you have to ask yourself a question, how do we stop that? And if you’re China, for example, if you’re an authoritarian nation, you just censor everything. That’s easy. Here, we don’t necessarily want to do that, right? We had a counter foreign malign influence center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the ODNI, the Trump administration shut that down. And I think that was the right thing to do because here’s the kind of crazy thing about disinformation. Even if we know for a fact it’s disinformation, even if we know for a fact it came from this colonel in the GRU, Russia’s Military Intelligence Agency, and it was sent directly from there to here. I still, as an American, have a right to see that information. The First Amendment protects my right to see that. So we are sort of stuck between this rock and a hard place where we want to protect ourselves against those threats, but we don’t want to censor information or control it in any way. And there’s all sorts of bad things that could happen in terms of the politicalization of that, for example. So what do we do? Well, I believe one of the things that we can do is make the population in general more resilient to misinformation and disinformation by training people, giving them the tools, literally in some cases, to spot misinformation and disinformation.

SIERRA: Yeah. I mean, that’s something we need overall.

VINCI: Exactly. And it’s sort of similar to what we did for cybersecurity, where we have effectively trained more or less every American, most people in the world at this point, to protect their computers. We all know to change our password, we know to ignore that phishing email and so forth. We can do the same thing for misinformation and disinformation. And I think by watching what’s happening in Ukraine, we can learn how to actually do this in practice.

SIERRA: So what role is cyber playing in all of this?

VINCI: Cyber is decentralizing as well in Ukraine. And the Ukrainian government actually formed something called the IT Army of Ukraine, where they enlisted volunteer hackers. They kind of put out a call to hackers in Ukraine and everywhere in the world and said, join the fight with us and help defend Ukraine from these Russian attacks, but also in some cases actually do offensive attacks against Russia and it’s worked. They’ve gotten out attacks on the Russian stock exchange, on Russian banks, on infrastructure, including the Russian version of GPS and Russian internet providers. This is almost the ultimate example of the democratization of a form of warfare that used to be done and is still done primarily by governments.

SIERRA: So I wonder, I mean, I just think of the amount of information that is thrown at us every day, the amount of information that must be thrown at you as an intelligence officer. So a more decentralized system makes information gathering faster, which is great, but as you said, there is disinformation. So does that make it harder to vet? And who is sifting through all this information?

VINCI: Great question. It absolutely makes it harder to vet. You would have to decentralize the vetting as well. So if you look at a Bellingcat, for example, they are running into that very issue and they have to be able to do this, but they can enlist so many people to help sort through the information. But I also think technology itself is going to help. And our problem in intelligence used to be that we were overwhelmed with the amount of data in the world. This was the problem during the war on terror, for example. The US government was collecting mass amounts of information globally from the internet and so forth to find terrorists and so forth. And our analytical tools couldn’t keep up with it and people definitely couldn’t keep up with it. AI is kind of changing that game and generative AI, GPT style systems, LLMs are very, very good at sorting through and summarizing massive, massive amounts of information. So I think when these two things converge, the sort of democratization and decentralization of intelligence and AI is how we’re going to find that solution.

SIERRA: So this season we talked a lot about drones, and especially drones as a useful tool in warfare, a tool of destruction. A strange visual grammar has sort of emerged, the top down perspective, right? It’s that thermal glow, it’s that pixelated explosion. We’re seeing it a lot from our own administration posting these sorts of images almost as a recruit, not almost as a recruitment tool. I wonder about the flattening of the horror. If something looks like a video game, if people are used to these images now, how does that sort of change how we’re looking at war and now looking at another war, the war in Iran?

VINCI: It kind of cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Where you’re right, it can seem very distant to look at it through a camera. Although what’s interesting there is the drone pilots in America during Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them would get PTSD from the operations because yes, it was distant and they were here, maybe at a US base flying aircraft thousands of miles away, just looking at it through screen, but they’re still seeing these traumatic. Things and that was happening at the same time is hard for a person to process. But you’re right, there’s sort of that flattening, but at the same time, we’re also seeing war all the time up close and personal in a non-edited way that Americans and I would say people in general really haven’t seen before. We had embedded camera crews in World War II and Vietnam, but that information was controlled. We only got to see some of it. And when you did see it, it would be pretty uncommon. Maybe you saw it on the eight o’clock news and that was sort of it or a photograph on a newspaper. Now you can see all sorts of images all the time, as much as you want, and really see what’s going on, and again, become kind of part of - it’s almost like you’re there. So it has this reverse effect where I feel like we’re witnessing war in a way we’ve never been able to witness it.

SIERRA: So you think instead of it sort of desensitizing people, or maybe it’s doing both at the same time, it’s desensitizing some, and for others, it’s showing us the horror of war for the first time. 

VINCI: Kind of both at the same time, and we’ll see how we all process that.

SIERRA: Yeah. How do you think this could change the way that people understand war crimes and accountability in this new intelligence era?

VINCI: One of the greatest uses of this decentralized democratized intelligence is that it can be used to hold people accountable because now we can track what’s going on. We have all of those drone images. We can see what happens in commercial satellite images. It’s not just something classified that the government has. We can all watch it and we can analyze it in a way that a government realistically is not typically able to do. And so I think the future will be one where we may be able to see most of the war crimes that have happened. Think about going back in history. We would really only be able to assess war crimes from the most senior people. The Nazis who were in charge of the concentration camps or those in the wars and the Balkans who were leading ethnic cleansing. We really weren’t able to comprehend what people were doing, more junior officers and so forth. Now we may be able to do that and to hold them accountable going forward. And that’s going to lead to a lot of questions of then what do we do when we can see war crimes all the way down to a junior officer or maybe even a private?

SIERRA: Okay. Well, it’s a lot. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about it.

VINCI: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

As Anthony points out, one of the most consequential shifts in modern war is that democratized intelligence could make war crimes far harder to hide. In Ukraine, that is already happening. Civilians using phones, drones, and open-source tools have helped build a record of violence in real time. 

In Mariupol, researchers used geolocated drone footage, social media videos, and high-resolution satellite imagery to identify and estimate the number of graves in burial sites, even when ground access was blocked or too dangerous. In Kherson, UN investigators were able to corroborate many drone attacks by combining geolocated videos with witness interviews, official documents, and other open-source material. Based on that evidence, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian armed forces committed murder of civilians as crimes against humanity using drones.

It’s exactly the kind of accountability Anthony is talking about, a world in which not just senior commanders, but perpetrators further down the chain, may become visible - and later held accountable. 

And yet, as Sam Vigersky makes clear, that visibility comes with a cost. Civilians are increasingly helping document war without any guarantee that the law will protect them while they do it.

VIGERSKY: My name’s Sam Vigersky. I’m an International Affairs Fellow here at the council. I was at the UN for five years. I was a political advisor to our ambassador and mostly in the UN Security Council where a lot of humanitarian topics come up, whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria or Ethiopia. And there are really two functions. One is to think holistically about how the world is paying attention to these issues, how we get some sort of intervention when there’s dire humanitarian need growing. And the other is the nuts and bolts of what makes security council important, and that’s that it has a binding authority to intervene on behalf of people in conflict mostly and get aid to them. So negotiating resolutions with Russia, China, and then friendly countries as well.

SIERRA: So we’ve talked a lot this season on why it matters about how drone usage in the military has reshaped the way strikes and offensives happen. It’s blurred the front line, right? And even changed the future of warfare at large because civilians now have greater access to technology that used to be reserved for the military. But advances in technology have also opened up tons of new avenues for information gathering and sharing. What changes when civilians are not just witnesses, but documentarians of the war? 

VIGERSKY: To them?

SIERRA: Yeah, what does it mean to be a civilian if you’re not really a civilian anymore?

VIGERSKY: Yeah. I mean, there’s no protections, right? So the laws that we set up in the post World War II order and the Geneva Conventions, I mean, those do not feel sacred anymore. And there was a moment, I think, particularly in the 90s when you look at a lot of the conflicts that were happening and the prosecutions that followed, where there was a standard that the world looked to the UN and others in the ICC to follow and to make sure people were held accountable. I think for civilians today, you’re just totally on your own. That’s the terrifying part is if you’re caught in the crosshairs of all of these conflicts, whether it’s in Tigray a few years ago, whether it’s in Ukraine now or whether it’s in Iran, there’s just very little feeling to me that there will be any justice done to those who are attacking you, harming your family members, committing war crimes.

SIERRA: How have you seen the frontlines change from a humanitarian perspective?

VIGERSKY: Well, for the aid workers there, it’s getting much more dangerous and that’s coming as a result of state actors. In the past, we’d see Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab attacking aid workers potentially getting into dangerous and hairy situations. That’s still happening, but really since the Ukraine context, when Russia was really unsparing in the way that they were using warfare, aid workers were in the crosshairs of a lot of the line of fire. And we’ve just seen a spike in the danger that they’re facing in areas they should be protected in.

SIERRA: What about for journalists?

VIGERSKY: The challenge for journalists is they’re trying to get access to some of these contacts and they have a lot of information that they can pull from people who are in war zones themselves. And when they’re out there, they’re not only collecting and telling these stories, but they may be actually collecting information for what could be a prosecution of a war crime. And that makes them extremely vulnerable because if people are aware of this and they see that cell phone video of some atrocity that’s committed or drone footage is being stitched together to tell a story that implicates somebody who might ultimately be indicted, that’s very dangerous for them and just puts them in a risky situation.

SIERRA: So you mentioned cell phone video, which we’ve seen change things domestically as well as internationally. What other tools do you see that are changing the scope of intelligence on the international level? Maybe even what you’ve seen over the past five years?

VIGERSKY: Well, the speed that we’re getting that kind of information back is changing how quickly we can respond to it. But the question to me is always, what is the recourse for that? Or what are the consequences for the people who are committing crimes and perpetrating atrocities? Are we getting there faster to intervene? And my experience at the UN was actually, that’s not so much the case. We had more information than we’ve ever had before, more firsthand documentation. We had more people coming into the security council telling firsthand accounts of some just unbelievable horrors they lived through, whether that was in Syria or Ukraine or Ethiopia. And the default was really in action more than action. So it’s not as if there’s been a lack of evidence that we’re seeing, it’s just been the lack of political will to do something about it. And that’s particularly worrisome because the institution itself at the UN, not just security council, but other parts of the house may be willing to talk about it, but the reaction from the public and those demanding accountability doesn’t seem to follow.

SIERRA: So I know that it’s notoriously hard to prove a war crime. You’re saying that this hasn’t helped make strides towards that or not really?

VIGERSKY: I think what’s happened is that there’s a lot of protections that people who are being accused of committing these crimes are taking. So whether that’s staying in their country, whether that’s visiting another country where in the past they might get picked up and arrested, finding protection from governments that are on their side, and that’s the most direct way you’re seeing that. But then if you look at institutions like the UN, where in the security council, friendly governments who have vetoes like Russia protecting others who might be committing war crimes like in Syria for the Assad regime, we’re seeing inaction there as well because they do not want these investigations to get going and so they stop it and they’re just obstructionists.

SIERRA: It’s interesting because over the season we’ve spoken to a lot of people, but we spoke to this amazing woman in our last episode who’s on the ground in Ukraine and Kyiv, and she works in this organization speaking for the military, connecting them with organizations and all sorts of things like that. But she sort of described this democratization as this good thing, right? Like everyone could be involved, a civilian, you don’t need the same processes, the same organization of military that you used to have, but the way you’re saying it is actually the other side of that makes it a lot more dangerous for them.

VIGERSKY: Yeah. I love that episode, by the way. It was so interesting to hear what she’s up to and to understand fully the level of information and data that’s being collected. My sense is that is so important still and the cataloging of what’s taking place in any war zone still matters. Even if there’s no follow up, for the people who live there to know what happened to their relatives, if they weren’t present, is still some form of closure. And it may be that the prosecution of the person responsible for that never comes to be, but it still matters to civilians to have some sort of collective story to understand and tell and to not be forgotten. The people there remember that, right? I mean, if you are in a village and something awful happened there, if you’re in any of these areas in Ukraine we’re talking about where drones coming in and bombing somebody driving in their car, I mean, that family remembers that, the community remembers that person, where that was, and that they’re forever thinking about associating a place with person. But for those who may come in later generations, not having that record of history about what happened there means that it didn’t happen essentially. And I think that really does matter for the storytelling of those communities, but also for the world to not forget. And it may be that right now is not the moment where we’re seeing the level of accountability we would like to, but at some point we have to still retain those records and hope that something will come from it.

VIGERSKY: Speaking of young people doing amazing things, there was a physician in Syria, Dr. Amani Bellur, who was in Guta and running a hospital that ended up being underground because it was being bombed by Syria before the Russians really escalated in that war with the Syrians. And she told this story, we brought her to the UN Security Council in 2021 to tell about what she lived through in this hospital. And she said, “In 2013, I had this awful night, like the worst night you can imagine, all these children and people in my community came to the hospital. They’d all been gassed by Asad and it was a night full of death and just unimaginable suffering.” And shortly thereafter, the UN Security Council held a meeting and she described this feeling in the hospital of hope. “The security council cares about us. They’re about to take action and do something about this horrible, horrible atrocity that just happened. ”And what she said in the security council to us that day, seven, eight years later was we waited for years and nothing happened. And she truly shamed that organ that day in front of all those permanent members and elected members to say,“ Here I was delivering lifesaving help to some of these people. You had the evidence about what happened in real time, saw it on the news, saw the suffering of children being gassed to death, and yet what? What was the follow up to that?

SIERRA: I mean, do you think that the exposure of this sort of footage to the general public could be something that would sway the UN, other organizations to sort of change their systems to react to these things a little bit better?

VIGERSKY: So in theory, sure. I’ll tell you two of the challenges that I see from my experience there. One is collecting all this information and writing reports about it, it takes money. So the more of this data that exists, the more data centers you need to store it, the more cataloging it has to take place for evidence. And it’s not to say that that’s wrong, but it just means you have to have a budget. And right now, the UN is not running escalators. They don’t have three other five entrances open because they don’t have security guards to pay. So it’s like a very rough time over there to begin with. But the second part that I think is becoming in the United States and everywhere else, a reality is deep fakes, some types of evidence that are fabricated. And I think what that does in the UN setting and others is discredits thousands of pieces of information and evidence that might be there through one piece that’s not real. And countries like Russia and my experience on the security council love to take a completely credible testimony in the council or a report from the UN that people have spent six months writing and then discredit it because they find one thing that they think is not true. I mean, this could be totally made up by the way, but then if they do find some sort of deep fake, then it just throws into jeopardy all the other pieces of information. And I think that makes it a really tough environment right now to think about how you’re going to manage that.

SIERRA: Are there any examples of how drone footage has been put to use in Ukrainian humanitarian or war crimes cases so far?

VIGERSKY: On the humanitarian side, these are useful tools to get out into places that maybe have a string of landmines before you walk on them or to see the damage assessments in certain areas. So drones can be really helpful for the a community, also because they limit the amount of personnel that needs to be on the ground at any given time too. So you can really make an assessment of a damaged area overhead and then decide, okay, who are the people we’re going to send out there? How much is this going to cost us? What’s the plan of attack?

SIERRA: So a good pro is that drones can go where humans can’t safely go.

VIGERSKY: For sure.

SIERRA: Do you find that drone footage actually makes us more or less connected to the human cost? Do you think this aesthetic sort of flattens the horror? It makes destruction look almost like a video game? And I ask this because that’s what we’ve seen even posted on social media from our own administration, use of this footage in that sort of context. So when everyone has seen thousands of strike videos, does a single one just not land the same way?

VIGERSKY: It does feel like we’re being desensitized, doesn’t it?

SIERRA: Yes.

VIGERSKY: Yeah. I look at the generation of kids that grew up first person shooter videos, right? I mean, this type of visual that we now see with real lethality, not a game, just bleeding into our lives. From my perspective, when I see those strikes that you’re talking about in the Caribbean that the Trump administration was doing on boats, I think there is a real detached human feeling to them. They’re different colors. They’re from a distance that doesn’t reveal any common humanity to those people. And those are the things ... I’m a humanitarian, okay? So what I’ve always found most inspiring is that even in the worst of times, the common human element that brings us all together to help someone in their greatest moment in need perseveres. And even as dysfunctional as the UN might be, as I just described it, I do think that the pressure politically and just from a human standpoint is so much in these situations that people do want to act. So then the question is, if you’re reducing people to pixels and that human feeling and connection is somehow degraded, does that translate into less of a humanitarian impulse? And we’re just going by me here, okay? My feeling is I do not feel as connected to those people in these grainy strike videos than I would have if somebody was screaming on the ground while they were being burned alive from munitions explosions. And I think that there’s a real danger in that.

SIERRA: Do you think in the future protections for aid workers, even trainings for aid workers are going to change in light of their new position and all of this, recording all of this on the front lines?

VIGERSKY: Yeah. This is a dangerous place for them, right? Yeah. Because okay, if you’re going in and you’re the first aid worker to get into Al Fashir after this siege for months and people are starving, and your priority is going to want to be getting help to those people who are hungry or protection, to people who are just traumatized. But if you’re also able to capture some terrible thing that happened that might lead to accountability, I don’t think you do that over getting lifesaving aid to somebody in the moment, but it does call into question, is there a role then to be the ones who are cataloging documents information or is that the independent monitoring mechanisms that are traditionally the ones doing that or the human rights council who might mandate an investigation or independent civil society? So they’re in a tougher place and for the people who are encountering them, the RSF in Sudan or whoever else, if they start seeing them as the ones who are the only difference between being prosecuted or tracked down or not, then it really makes them even more vulnerable.

SIERRA: Thank you for joining us.

VIGERSKY: Thanks for having me.

While we were in the midst of making this episode, the Trump administration asked Planet Labs, a major U.S. satellite company, to stop releasing high-resolution images of Iran and the wider Middle East conflict zone, including imagery of conflict-related damage to the region and the blocked Strait of Hormuz. Whether that request reflects a legitimate national security concern or a form of censorship is a question that remains open. 

As we discuss in the episode, commercial satellite imagery like this has made it far easier for civilians, journalists, and investigators to see and document war in real time. But who controls that view and who gets to limit it is quickly becoming its own battleground. 

In that sense, this story is much bigger than just Ukraine, and the lessons learned from this war will act as the playbook for future conflicts. What this season makes clear is that in this new era of warfare, the fight is not only over territory or determined by who has the latest weapons and technology but about information, innovation, and who gets to tell the story of what happened when it’s all said and done.

This episode was produced by Molly McAnany, and me, Gabrielle Sierra. Our audio producer and sound designer is Markus Zakaria. Our video editor is Grace Raver. Our recording engineers are Justin Schuster and Todd Yeager. Our intern this semester is Isabel McDermott. Robert McMahon is our Managing Editor. Our theme music is composed by Ceiri Torjussen.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your audio. And be sure to check out video clips from this episode on Youtube and CFR’s social platforms. 

For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. We’ll see you next time.