By Chaitanya Giri
In 2020, the hand-to-hand combat reported between Indian and Chinese armed forces sparked significant media interest in pinpointing the exact location of the conflict—Galwan in Ladakh. This interest led to theIndian media, for the first time, engaging in conflict coverage using subscription-based commercial space imagery. Space imagery, once restricted solely to strategic government agencies, has become increasingly accessible to individuals and businesses through the democratisation of geospatial datasets. It has aided in planning and management across various civilian sectors. However, the same democratised access has opened these geospatial datasets to terrorist forces, non-state actors, and proxies, potentially enabling nefarious activities.
It has now come to light that the Pakistan Army-backed terrorists may have scouted Pahalgam’s Baisaran meadows using commercial geospatial images. These geospatial images were acquired by a Pakistani-American entity whose founder has criminal and nuclear-tech proliferation antecedents in the United States. The images were likely shared with on-ground terror groups through alternate communication channels.
Open-source reports indicate that this and other entities related to terror groups imaged Pahalgam’s coordinates from commercial American, European, and Chinese geospatial suppliers starting in January 2025 and continuing over the following months until the heinous event. Access to geospatial images by business fronts of transnational terror groups and supplying to the on-ground terrorists has likely helped in the killing of innocent people. If left unchecked, this event could set a dangerous precedent, making such ‘geospatial recce’ customary to every terror activity.
Large Earth-observation satellite constellations in low-Earth orbit deliver precise geospatial intelligence to business and strategic institution subscribers. The main distinction between the two primarily lies in the resolution of the images they receive; the former captures lower resolution, while the latter captures higher. However, if, irrespective of the resolution, datasets are misused for terrorist activities, then user tracking becomes highly crucial. Global policymakers within intergovernmental organisations should determine the mechanisms to restrict geospatial access for seemingly innocuous business fronts that aid and abet terrorism.
Two mechanisms deserve immediate attention: ‘geospatial shutter control’ and ‘geospatial user regulation’ at national, bilateral, and multilateral levels.
First is geospatial shutter control, where all international commercial space imagery providers must mask crucial geographies that could be military installations and important government buildings across all countries. The shutter control should be implemented for all private end users using lower-resolution images and remain accessible only to strategic users who utilise higher-resolution images. Such restrictions should also apply to strategic users, especially from countries that are listed on export-control lists and those that have ever been placed on the Financial Action Task Force grey or black lists.
A recent precedent of geospatial shutter control, used as a political measure, was when the US government restricted access to the Ukrainian government. Within weeks of beginning his second tenure, US President Donald Trump began his proclaimed attempts to push a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. To prod the Ukrainian government, the US National Geospatial Agency was asked to cease Ukraine’s access to commercial satellite imagery as part of its Global Enhanced Geoint Delivery System (GEGD).
The GEGD is hosted by the satellite imagery company, Maxar, along with images from other similar companies, including Capella Space, Iceye, BlackSky, Planet, among others. The Ukrainian access was resumed within a week. However, it was during these few days of the diminished flow of US geospatial intelligence that the French space imagery provider Safran.AI approached Kyiv as an alternative aggregator to the GEGD of French geospatial satellite data. This entire scheme of things proved that geospatial shutter control can be used as a political tool. It could effectively prevent nefarious regimes, such as the Pakistani army and their proxies, from gaining access to such datasets.
The second mechanism to consider is geospatial user regulation. Who was viewing Pahalgam from January to April 2025? The attribution needle can swing from security agencies, businesses, to innocent enthusiasts, academics, and potentially nefarious players. A true-positive attribution to nefarious players and the prevention of their access to such strategic data is essential. For this purpose, geospatial imagery companies must be required to create a dataset of their subscriber base and conduct compulsory Know Your Customer (KYC) checks at regular intervals. The KYC should also include information on the device from which the commercial image was viewed, along with cryptographic hashing (algorithm-based tagging) of all geospatial images downloaded by all users.
Both geospatial shutter control and user regulation can be implemented only through diplomatic mechanisms, and immediate discussions are required during bilateral and plurilateral technopolitical dialogues. New Delhi should consider taking the following steps:
- The Ministry of Defence and the National Security Council Secretariat could consider requesting the National Geospatial Agency of the US and the Direction du Renseignement Militaire of France to help restrict its commercial imagery suppliers—GEGD commune, Safran and Airbus—to mask all low- and high-resolution geospatial images of sensitive locations. At the Track 1 level, the geospatial intelligence agencies must engage in intelligence-sharing, especially market intelligence of sold images, as well as sharing cryptographic, hashed images to assist in user attribution.
- The Ministry of Home Affairs can effectively advocate with the other 195 INTERPOL members to encourage commercial geospatial data companies within their respective jurisdictions to share information about suspected data subscribers by invoking the Seven Global Policing Goals.
- The Ministry of External Affairs could do the same at the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact and through the inter-UN mechanisms. In particular, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime should create mechanisms to prevent the supply of geospatial data to terror groups.
- The Ministry of Finance can advocate to the Financial Action Task Force on the methods to determine finances mobilised for purchases of geospatial data subscriptions from commercial suppliers, later used for terror activities. This could be another point pushing non-compliant countries into grey and black lists.
- India, along with like-minded partners like Israel, France, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and the US, must draft international treaties to cease the use of commercial space-based services by terrorists, proxies and non-state actors.
- Finally, at the national level, the use of geospatial data to aid and abet terrorism and criminal activities should be penalised under enhanced anti-terrorism and criminal laws. Additionally, consideration should be given to drafting a National Geospatial Security Policy that is independent of the civilian National Geospatial Policy 2022.
There are numerous mechanisms through which geospatial technology is used for counter-terror activities by security and intelligence agencies. However, not many policies have been put in place to prevent terrorists from using geospatial technologies anywhere in the world. India, at this point, has waged a war on terrorism, and in this war, forbidding the use of civilian-commercial technologies by terrorists should be a pan-government priority and one that would receive ample global support.
- About the author: Chaitanya Giri is a Fellow at the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology, Observer Research Foundation
- Source: This article was published by Observer Research Foundation
