Without getting into the conspiracy-ish side of this, I'd like to point out that this is changing. Until recently, I worked at Planet Labs where our goal was to image the entire landmass of the Earth, at 3m resolution (not quite as good as Google's most zoomed-in imagery), every day and make it available to everyone. The monitoring system design means, amongst other wins, we don't need to know "something is about to change" to get the before/after pictures, and it also prevents the "checkbook shutter control" the article talks about.

You can sign up for an account[0] with just an email address and start digging through imagery right now (unfortunately, purchasing it at full quality is a different story). Make sure to select an Area Of Interest to get down to daily imagery, I'll start you off with one for the Tonopah Test Range[1] which has coverage on 21 different days so far in October.

[0] https://www.planet.com/explorer/ [1] https://www.planet.com/explorer/#/area-coverage/0.32,1/mosai...