John Pike Government Quotations

If it is an international transaction, the National Security Agency is monitoring it. The target is wide open: Essentially, it consists of anything that would be of interest to the U.S. government -- and the rest of the English-speaking world.

The bottom line is that the U.S. government looked at this imagery and decided that it was OK for it to be publicly released,

The fact that the government authorized the release of this imagery I think indicates that the Defense Department decided that the release of this imagery was not going to jeopardize the troops.