Public satellite data exposes Pentagon strikes killing 67 as legal experts call them extrajudicial killings
Amateur analysts use NASA thermal monitoring to track military operations in near-real-time, revealing how surveillance technology has outpaced official secrecy whilst accountability mechanisms collapse
A single thermal anomaly blinked into existence on 27 October at coordinates 14.0387° N, 106.4606° W—415 nautical miles southwest of Acapulco. For that entire week, it was the only ocean pixel flagged by NASA's wildfire monitoring system in that sector of the Eastern Pacific. The next day, Mexican authorities reported search and rescue operations approximately 400 nautical miles southwest of Acapulco following U.S. military operations. The geometry matched.
An amateur analyst, using nothing but free public data, had pinpointed a military strike the Pentagon described only as occurring "in international waters." The discovery, posted to Reddit's open-source intelligence forum, revealed something beyond clever methodology: the infrastructure of military secrecy assumes a world that no longer exists.
That thermal signature came from one of three strikes on 27 October that hit four boats and killed 14 people. Since September, the Trump administration has conducted at least 16 such strikes across the Caribbean and Pacific, killing 67 people. Not one faced trial. Not one piece of evidence has been made public. And anyone with internet access can now track these operations as they happen, using the same NASA system designed to monitor forest fires.
Thermal anomalies and operational transparency
NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System wasn't built for military surveillance. Its satellites scan the Earth detecting thermal anomalies to help manage wildfires and natural disasters. The VIIRS instruments aboard multiple polar-orbiting satellites achieve 375-metre resolution, updating globally within three hours. For the United States, data appears in near-real-time.
The system is simple: it compares the temperature of potential heat sources with surrounding areas. Exceed certain thresholds, get flagged. A daytime explosion on the ocean surface—exactly the type Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth posts videos of—produces the sustained thermal signature VIIRS detects.
Open-source analysts have used FIRMS for years. During the Ukraine war, observers tracked strikes through thermal detections appearing within minutes. When the United States and Israel hit Iran's Fordow nuclear facility with bunker-busters in June, analysts identified impacts via FIRMS within 15 to 20 minutes. Military operations governments prefer to announce vaguely—or not at all—are increasingly visible to anyone willing to look.
The boat strikes are particularly observable because of their isolation. On land, FIRMS detections might mean industrial activity, agricultural burning, urban fires. In the open ocean hundreds of miles from oil platforms or shipping lanes, a one-off daytime thermal anomaly at the precise time and location authorities later describe is considerably easier to attribute. The Reddit analyst who identified the October correlation reported 90 per cent confidence the detection represented the strike, based on the location match, the unique detection, and the daylight high-energy fire profile matching official videos.
The technical capability requires no sophistication. No special software, no paid subscriptions, no advanced training. Set FIRMS to VIIRS 375-metre resolution, enter the date, scan the area from news reports. Thermal anomalies appear with timestamps and fire radiative power measurements. For the October strikes, detections were visible within hours. For strikes during satellite passes, they appear in near-real-time.
What the data reveals
Sixty-seven people dead since September. The administration calls them "narco-terrorists" operating "designated terrorist organisations" along "known trafficking routes." Defence Secretary Hegseth posts videos of boats exploding, often claiming how many Americans each boat's cargo might have killed. President Trump announced the first strike from the White House: the boat was "loaded" with drugs bound for the United States.
No evidence has been made public. No trials conducted. No independent verification the boats carried drugs, were operated by designated groups, or posed any threat. The operation proceeds on executive assertion alone.
The administration's legal framework rests on presidential determination: the United States is engaged in "non-international armed conflict" with drug cartels. Suspected traffickers become "unlawful combatants" who can be killed without judicial review. This determination appears in a classified Justice Department opinion that even Gang of Eight members haven't uniformly seen. Military lawyers have conspicuously declined to defend it in public briefings.
Two survivors from a 16 October strike were briefly detained, then returned to Colombia and Ecuador. One had been convicted and deported from the United States for drug smuggling in 2020—known to authorities, yet simply released. No prosecution. No evidence presented. The decision avoided a legal quandary: holding them indefinitely invites judicial challenge about both evidence and the "armed conflict" designation. Their release undermines the administration's justifications whilst revealing these operations aren't designed to produce law enforcement outcomes.
A consensus on illegality
The legal assessment from independent experts is uniform. Morris Tidball-Binz, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, condemned the strikes bluntly: "International law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers." Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, demanded the United States halt the strikes to prevent "extrajudicial killing."
Brian Finucane, former State Department legal adviser now with the International Crisis Group, stripped away euphemism: "What this boils down to is the president of the United States asserting a prerogative to kill people based solely on his own say-so." The administration's legal conclusions are reached "by executive fiat," making "it permissible for the president to engage in premeditated killing." His assessment: "Outside of armed conflict, there is a word for the premeditated killing of people, and that word is 'murder.'"
John Bellinger, senior associate counsel to President George W. Bush, offered careful qualification: whilst Trump "arguably has authority under the Constitution to order the strikes, as a matter of international law, the boats are not lawful military targets." No evidence exists "that the boats and their occupants were planning armed attacks against the United States justifying the use of military force in self-defence." Drug trafficking "does not fit the accepted international definition of an armed conflict."
Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman called the order "so manifestly unlawful that in any other administration, including Trump's first, if anyone had even dared propose it, virtually every attorney who got wind of it, across the government—and many non-lawyer officials, too—would have immediately dismissed it as obviously out of bounds." Jeffrey Corn, formerly a judge advocate general officer and senior Army adviser on law-of-war issues: "This is not stretching the envelope. This is shredding it."
Human Rights Watch declared the strikes "unlawful extrajudicial killings," noting "the US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or with the alleged criminal groups involved."
Military lawyers scheduled to attend congressional briefings were pulled at the last minute. Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner condemned the Trump administration for holding briefings without informing Democrats, calling it "a partisan stunt" and "a slap in the face to Congress' war powers responsibilities." Republican Senator Rand Paul questioned the operations as killing people "without knowing their names, without seeing any evidence, without making a formal accusation or without collecting evidence."
Every credible independent legal expert consulted—including those who served in Republican administrations—describes these strikes as violations of both domestic and international law. The administration's response: keep the legal opinion classified, exclude military lawyers from congressional oversight, continue the operations.
The surveillance revolution governments haven't absorbed
The capacity to track military operations using public data isn't new, but its accessibility has reached a tipping point. What once required national space programmes and classified access now costs a few thousand dollars monthly for commercial subscriptions—or nothing at all for public datasets like FIRMS.
When Russian forces massed on Ukraine's borders in 2021, open-source analysts identified and tracked specific unit movements with precision matching government intelligence. The difference: OSINT findings came with full transparency and minimal delay. During the war, thermal detections from FIRMS appeared within minutes of strikes. The Ukraine war has been called the most documented conflict in history, with commercial satellites, public databases, and social media creating unprecedented observability.
When Israeli and American forces struck Iran's Fordow nuclear facility with bunker-busters in June, commercial satellite imagery showed craters and damage within hours. FIRMS thermal data captured the strikes as they occurred. Amateur analysts documented the operation using only public information, producing assessments rivalling official intelligence in detail whilst exceeding them in transparency.
Organisations like Bellingcat—founded by a blogger analysing weapons in Syrian social media posts—have evolved into investigative units whose findings influence foreign policy and legal proceedings. Bellingcat's investigation of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17's downing proved more comprehensive than many official accounts, systematically disproving Russian explanations and tracking the responsible missile system from Russia to Ukraine and back. Using commercial satellite imagery, social media analysis, and digital forensics. Without classified access or state resources.
The infrastructure enabling this work expands continuously. Companies including Maxar, Planet Labs, and BlackSky provide sub-metre resolution imagery distinguishing objects smaller than one metre across. NASA systems like FIRMS offer free global thermal monitoring. The barrier to sophisticated analysis has collapsed from requiring state resources to requiring basic digital literacy and curiosity.
Yet governments operate as if the old opacity still holds. Operations are announced in vague terms—"international waters," "known routes," "intelligence confirmed"—whilst actual coordinates, timestamps, and observable details appear in public datasets within hours. The assumption seems to be that most people won't look, therefore secrecy is maintained. But the capacity exists. The data is public. The methodology is established.
The accountability void
Accessible surveillance technology meets unconstrained executive power. Operations that could once plausibly be kept secret are now detectable by anyone with internet access—but they continue anyway, without evidence, trials, or meaningful oversight.
Sixty-seven people killed on executive determination alone. Zero evidence made public. No bodies recovered for identification. No survivors prosecuted to demonstrate their activities. Congressional oversight is minimal: some Republican senators have seen the classified legal opinion, whilst Democrats and Gang of Eight members largely haven't. Military lawyers who might defend the legal reasoning are conspicuously absent from briefings.
The pattern repeats: strikes occur, videos show explosions, assertions about "narco-terrorists" and "known routes" follow, people die. No feedback loop. No accountability mechanism. No way to verify whether the dead were traffickers, fishermen, or migrants. We are asked to trust executive power operating in secret, justified by classified legal opinions even congressional oversight bodies cannot fully examine.
Thermal anomalies in FIRMS data don't answer who these people were or whether they posed any threat. But they reveal operation locations with greater precision than official announcements, demonstrating that technical capacity for transparency exists even when institutional will does not. When an amateur analyst can pinpoint military strikes using wildfire monitoring data, but those strikes proceed without evidence or judicial review, something fundamental has broken.
The normalisation proceeds rapidly. Sixteen strikes, 67 deaths. Brief announcements, grainy videos, vague assurances, no follow-up. The precedent extends far beyond drug interdiction. If a president can unilaterally determine that suspected criminals constitute "unlawful combatants" in "armed conflict" and order their summary execution based on secret intelligence and classified legal reasoning, the constraints on state violence have collapsed.
What makes this moment distinct isn't just eroding legal safeguards but the contrast between technological transparency and institutional opacity. Satellites reveal what governments prefer to hide. The revelations change nothing. Strikes continue. Legal consensus that they violate both domestic and international law doesn't slow them. Congressional demands for evidence and justification go unmet. The UN condemns extrajudicial killings. The operations proceed.
Democratic accountability assumes transparency produces constraint—that when operations are exposed, they face scrutiny and justification. But exposure via public satellite data alongside refusal to provide evidence, exclusion of oversight mechanisms, and dismissal of legal objections achieves nothing. We can see explosions in NASA's thermal data within hours. We cannot see what justifies them, who died, or whether they posed any threat.
The analyst who identified the October strike noted that with FIRMS data alone—no paid feeds, no classified access—it was possible to narrow vague "international waters" language to concrete coordinates in near-real-time. The methodology has obvious implications for monitoring future incidents. But the more significant implication is what happens when monitoring capacity outpaces accountability mechanisms.
We've arrived at a strange moment. The technology to observe state violence has been democratised whilst constraints on that violence have weakened. Thermal anomalies appear in public datasets. Deaths accumulate without trial. And the distance between what we can see and what we can influence grows steadily wider.