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Google Earth and "Collateral Damage"
netbuzz writes "British news reports say insurgents are using Google Earth to pinpoint vulnerable targets within bases in Iraq. Could Google be doing more to prevent this? Should they be doing more? They certainly could explain more."
I wondered when someone was finally going to try to blame Google for blowing buildings up. With GPS as accurate as it is, and satallite imagery easily accessable, I don't think Google is what we need to deal with. We need to deal with the guys with the bombs.
is to ensure that terrorists, insurgents, and other undesireables, shall not have access to information that is freely and publicly available through other channels anyway.
Perhaps they should recruit all of the ISPs in the developed world to aid them in carrying out this grave responsibility. If will all just signed affidavits of government loyalty and agreed to undergo extensive background checking prior to using the Internet or any Net enabled tools, the problem would be solved.In all seriousness, when did Google become charged with being the Internet Police? Isn't combating "terrorism" someone else's job, already?
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas Gandhi
Just wait until they discover they can control their Roomba with a Wiimote. Goodbye suicide bombings, hello Roomba bombings! Down with Nintendo, down with iRobot!
The other difference is that, at least in theory, a 'resistance' would refer to a group trying to drive the invaders out, as is the case with the European resistances in WWII.
However in Iraq, the US and UK would like nothing better than to leave, but feel a responsibility to insure stability after the mess we caused (in one set of rhetoric), or to secure freedom for the people (in another set of rhetoric.) The insurgent forces are not fighting to remove a foreign dictatorship, or if they think they are they're doing a really bad job of it. What they're doing, at least as best as I can tell, is to insure that the new government is their groups government, or, at risk of sounding self important, to stick it to US because they don't like us and our policies on Israel and other various issues.
Obviously it's a much more complex issue, we are trying to impose our own idea of order, and put up people in power that we can at least stand. However, it seems to me, though I'm biased, that the basic differences are there and important.
Depends on how you define 'useful'. Governments spent billions of dollars, risked many dozens if not millions (as in all of our) lives, to get information of lower quality than google earth in the 50s, 60's and 70's. Most military installations are built/used with this in mind now. Something you want other satellite holders to see you put out there, stuff you don't you spend oodles of time effort and money to hide, and anything you don't care about (like where the US army parks its old aircraft), you put wherever is convenient or cheap. In that regard I doubt the occupation forces in Iraq are so braindead as to have anything particularly useful of theirs show up on google earth now.
However, buildings don't move, and the insurgency in iraq, while predominatly made of Iraqi nationals, is most certainly far more mobile than any previous insurgency in recent memory. Simply put the iraqi's have cars. If you're an insurgent in one town, you can look at google earth, plot out where you want to go, set up, position, coordinate based on GPS locations etc.. with other people in another. I was thinking loosely about this problem where I live. I live in one city (~70K people), but really I don't know my way around any of the smaller towns that surround us, nor do I know my way around the biggest city near me (which is toronto nearly 150Km away). But, moving from place A to B is fairly easy, at least when I'm not crawling through the jungles of borneo or riding my camel through the middle of the desert. The resistance in Iraq can use GE just the same as any of us can use google earth to figure out where we're going.
With respect to the article specifically. The parking lots of Iraq's military installations, now in use by the British, probably haven't moved too far, nor have the suitable places for housing since those photos were taken. Given how long the occupation has been going on, those bases haven't moved and I somehow doubt the british army has been able to magically conjure up new places within the bases to put their tents, and even if google pictures are a year or two old those things are likely not all that much different.
With Google Earth a resistance fighter can see their way around rooftops, so long as the buildings are still standing, target things that don't move, or things that are consistently moved to and from the same place (like vehicles), and generally get a feel for what the terrain they are going to operate in looks like, and the layout. The fact that google earth might be somewhat out of date is less of a problem, if your information is wrong, you get killed, but it was better than nothing. Whereas the US/UK/FR/PRC/RUS would demand up the day satellite info to ensure maximum survivability of their soldiers, resistance movements tend to be more willing to make sacrificies.
In a broader sense, I think militaries and goverments will have to adapt their organization around satellite imagery. Right now they're all used to thinking only other people with spy satellites can see these things. Sure everyone has maps, but maps are no where near as useful as a satellite photo, even a crappy one. This probably means a lot more things in semi portable or easy to construct bunkers like they use for jet fighters.
To this day, the U.S. military makes the same claims about Vietnam...
The fundamental flaw in your logic is that you think that all wars are voluntary. While the recent Iraq War was certainly a voluntary war, many others have not been. You can ask Poland, England, France, China, etc. about several wars that they didn't vote for but that still came to them.
Don't let your hatred of the Bush Administration cloud your views. You, like many people, are unable to separate people from events from ideas. It wasn't just George Bush or Saddam Hussein who started the Iraqi War, nor was it 9/11 or Iraq ignoring UN mandates. You are trying to blame people or events instead of challenging ideas. Hence, you have no understanding of the underlying conflict, albeit in 2003 or now (which are completely different things).
The death of al Zarqawi didn't stop terrorism in Iraq because he was just a person. The crushing of the city of Fallujah didn't stop terrorism in Iraq because it was just an event. Genocide or democide, an idea, very well could stop terrorism (an idea) in Iraq. There are other possibilities that may occur and hopefully we don't need to see genocide or democide implemented (such as in Cambodia) nor politicide (such as in Vietnam after 1975).
We are currently fighting a war like we are playing a game of football. Each side is scoring 'goals' and claiming to be winning. Instead, a comprehensive campaign should be run. The Allies didn't win WWII because they killed more people than the Axis Powers (in fact, they killed fewer). They won because they were able to implement an effective campaign against the Axis Powers.
I didn't realize there was one government body that controlled the internet. Nor did I realize that the military could retroactively shoot down satellites that have taken pictures of the Earth for years. Nor that it would suddenly be legal, under treaties most countries capable of shooting down satellites have signed, to start shooting down all satellites that "fly over" a warzone.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Now I'm not a sniper and my service wasn't with the US army, but then it sounds to me like either that's hyperbole or the US is doing something else very wrong.
I'm one of the AA guys. You know, those who in a war would get to jam a SA missile down someone's tailpipe or put a helluva lot of 30mm holes in a helicopter or low flying plane. Specialized troops too, with specialized (big) guns, lots of electronics and radar dishes, specialized training, etc, not your average infantry grunt.
But guess what? We had assault rifles too, and we were trained to use them too. We also did our own guard duty (in a visible guard tower, too), patrols, etc.
Not only that, but it was pretty much assumed and understood that in a pinch we could and would have to fulfill other roles too. We had our own light machineguns, our own rocket launchers in case we have to deal with a mess of tanks, we were trained to chuck a grenade, storm a hill, or dig a foxhole and defend that hill.
Wars aren't neatly organized affairs, and you don't always have exactly what you need in exactly the right place. And sometimes having exactly what you need of everything in every place is a waste of manpower and material. For example, you don't dig in two brigades of infantry around your big guns brigade, just so the big guns guys can be so ultra-specialized that they never have to touch an assault rifle. It's easier to just put them somewhere where normally they won't be assaulted, but if shit hits the fan and they do, they'll have to fight like everyone else. You also don't give them a company of infantry for guard duty, they get to post their own guards.
Also war isn't so neatly organized as to always have a designated target in advance. I know I wouldn't expect a designated airplane to surgically shoot and then go home, so I'm not sure why these guys would absolutely need a strategic target designated in advance. Most of war is dealing with unplanned stuff. Some guys appear from where you didn't expect. You shoot them. If you're a sniper or designated marksman, you do your best to put a hole in someone while the other guys pin them down. And add your own suppression factor, because the fear of a sniper ranks up there with fear of heavy machineguns in a fight, when it comes to keeping people with their head down.
So if you're telling me that US snipers are so ultra-specialized that they absolutely can't function as anything else, and can't possibly shoot anyone other than as strategic target designated in advance, then methinks the USA badly needs to rethink their training and logistics. But I doubt that the US military is _that_ inept, or that indeed officers coming from a military academy and various training courses would use Hollywood action movies to learn tactics from. It's a bit like saying that programmers use Hollywood movies to learn how to use a command line.
Being sent together with a squad of other soldiers, also isn't the end of the world like you make it sound. It's not being sent with a group of civilians, it's normal military procedure anywhere in the world. The designated marksmen, SAW guys, anti-tank guys, etc, actually train for that. Sure, a sniper rifle or designated marksman rifle isn't raw firepower, but it's not there as raw firepower in the first place. That's what the other soldiers around you are for. They'll do the spraying lead job. You do yours.
Now I'm as anti-war as it gets, and, yes, I'm against the war in Iraq. I could understand ideological or humanitarian reasons against it. But "waah, they're making me work together with a squad, like in Hollywood movies!" is just awful mis-understanding of basic military tactics.
Also, it seems to me like the apex of hypocrisy, if someone is indeed against war for oil and influence, to advocate instead being a hired assassin for some equally corrupt dictator or cocaine baron. At least the army does have some democratic checks (just vote against the guy sending them there), just taking money from the highest bidder doesn't have any
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
> We aren't at war, we've invaded some random country for no good reason.
You know, invading some random country is one of the two main causes of getting "at war". The other is being invaded by some random country.
"What, you mean they were peachy keen with us the FIRST time they tried to blow up the World Trade Center?"
I hate to break it to you but they were not iraqis.
"And when they blew up two of our embassies in Africa"
They were not iraqis either.
"And they hit the USS Cole with a missile named Studied Indifference?"
Still not the iraqis. Oh and it wasn't a missile either, it was a boat.
I know facts are kind of annoying but you should still try to place one or two in your post.
evil is as evil does
That doesn't go far enough, I believe that the July 7th bombers may well have used maps such as these - http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tube/maps/ which I might add are openly available to the public in pamphlets, the back of diaries, they are even posted on the walls of the city!
How many people have to die before we realise that the Ordinance Survey and London street mapping should be stopped. Fortunately those saintly graffiti artists are already working on censoring maps in public places.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
This works great in the Netherlands. Here's our Ministry of Defense and this is the air force headquarters. If you can't see it on Google Maps, you can't bomb it. </sarcasm>
There's more of this nonsense, but these two are close to home for me.
Maybe
You have our administration to thank for this state of affairs, where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
Go read up on the ideology of those mortal enemies a bit. Their "grievances" go back well before the liberation of Iraq or any actions of President Bush 2.0. In one of his statements immediately 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden talks about the sword reaching the US "after 80 years", referring to the breakup of the Ottomon Empire after WW1, at a time when the US was barely world power. Ayman al-Zawahiri (Al Qaeda's second-in-command, more or less) frames the Israeli/Palestinian dispute in terms of the "Al Andalus tragedy", the end of Moslem rule in southern Spain -- in 14-freaking-92. And while that's probably not a majority outlook, neither is it an isolated one. If Americans thought like this, the first thing we would have done upon perfecting the atomic bomb would have been to drop one on Buckingham Palace to get back at the British for burning the White House during the War of 1812. That's one basic problem: an inability to "get over it." Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we A-bomb'ed them, yet sixty years later we're the closest of allies. Germany conquered France, now those two nations are the core of the EU. Yet in the Middle East they're still upset about the Crusades.
This isn't a problem that started with Bush, nor will it end once he's gone. It's a war that's been going on, at a lower level of intensity, for quite a while -- the recent phase having begun in 1979. 9/11 was merely the first time something happened where people couldn't ignore it, and the Middle East military operations under Bush just the first time the US has attempted (whether you agree with how he's conducted it or not) to actually do something about it. It's going to continue, whether we try to influence the outcome or not, and the US will be a target. We're just too big to be ignored, given how ubiquitous our worldwide economic and cultural presence is.
Nor is this an exclusively a US, or even Western, problem. Or do you maintain that it's Bush's fault that Moslems are killing Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, and animists in Darfur, whilst threatening to murder British authors, Danish cartoonists, and Dutch parliamentarians, and succeed in murdering a Dutch film-maker?
Now, as to the original article about Google's maps and the idea of restricting them somehow, that seems pretty useless. Anything on Goggle Maps/Earth is derived from sources which are publically (or at least commercially) available, anyway.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."