The reality: this only applies to full-sky survey telescopes, particularly the Rubin Observatory, because of its unprecedented capabilities: it will image the entire visible sky every three days with enough sensitivity to detect and track satellites. This creates a national security concern that doesn't exist for narrower-field telescopes or those with different missions.
The encryption and filtering system represents a compromise between scientific openness and national security—scientists still get access to the data, but information about classified satellites is removed first. This is fundamentally different from claiming intelligence agencies see all telescope data before scientists, which would be false. And that's not what Avi is saying. (deep research with Perplexity Pro).
