Trump tweeted sensitive U.S. surveillance image of Iran, experts say

Today, illegitimate, popular-vote-losing, manifestly unfit U.S. President Donald Trump did something extraordinarily stupid on Twitter, even for him.

Looks like the president may have just tweeted an image from a classified satellite or drone that shows the aftermath of an accident at an Iranian space facility.

Yeah, no big deal.

Security experts' jaws were on the floor Friday afternoon as the Trump tweet circulated.

Vladimir Putin's having fun with all of this, one presumes.

Here's the tweet.

"The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir [Space Launch Vehicle] Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran," the president's tweet with the image on Friday reads.

"I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One."

From NPR's Geoff Brumfiel:

NPR broke the news of the launch failure on Thursday, using images from commercial satellites that flew over Iran's Imam Khomeini Space Center. Those images showed smoke billowing from the pad. Iran has since acknowledged an accident occurred at the site.

Some of the highest-resolution imagery available commercially comes from the company Maxar, whose WorldView-2 satellite sports 46-centimeter resolution.

But the image shown in the president's tweet appears to be of far better quality, says Ankit Panda, an adjunct senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, who specializes in analyzing satellite imagery. "The resolution is amazingly high," says Panda. "I would think it's probably below well below 20 centimeters, which is much higher than anything I've ever seen."

Panda says that the tweet discloses "some pretty amazing capabilities that the public simply wasn't privy to before this."

"The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about the image to the White House, which declined to comment."

Oh, and right around the same time this drama hit Twitter, the CEO of Twitter's account got hacked.

God help us, man:

President Trump Tweets Sensitive Surveillance Image of Iran [NPR]