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Google to Blur Sensitive India Sites
theodp writes "Citing unnamed officials, the Times of India is reporting that Google Earth has agreed to blur and distort Indian locations identified by the government after security concerns were voiced by the country's president. This includes total blurring of locations like government buildings, as well as the outlines/building plans of key facilities. This came about after a recent meeting between Google technicians and Indian officials."
You can call me crazy, but this sounds like an interesting idea. Sure, it's not the best, but in a country like India, it makes sense. Glad to know Google will listen to a government that doesn't give harsh threats as a welcome.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
I'm not saying I am afraid of it happening (I'm not that hysterically moronic, yet.) but it seems to me that the premise of "Google must blur this building because terrorists could somehow benefit from already slightly blurred photos of the outline of the building." applies equally to my house - "Google must blur this area because burglars could use the pictures to plan an escape route along the back of the garden which is hidden from normal view."
The last thing I want to have to do is put an opaque roof over my greenhouse shrine to Peter Krause.
tide of free information. The little dutch boy approach won't 'hold water' in the age of ever increasing amounts of data. Data that wants to be free, or freely sold to the highest bidder. What should be happening, and probably is, is that such photo services' data should be used by those that want to hide things, ensuring that they have done their hiding correctly.
If you want to be sure that nobody steals your identity, don't give it to anyone for any reason, or better yet, always pretend to be someone else. Same applies to sensitive infrastructure. The problem with trying to hide information is that you tell people where to look more intensely. This simply puts a big target on those areas for local spy work. It doesn't take much to find out what you want to know about most places, if they aren't hidden or protected with the same efforts as is Area 51. Even if Google blurs the pictures, China won't, nor will any other government with a space presence.
I think the whole thing is either a ruse, or just another example of people thinking they can regulate the Internet or its uses.
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I think this is the truth behind all this histery coming from governments directed at internet companies which try to make information freely available (or available in a less-restrictive way).
I somehow think that this situation is analogous to other governments trying coerce Google into providing their user's personal details or removing content that is legal under US law, despite being illegal in other countries (e.g. hate speech).
Governments are losing their power and they're not liking it. This time Google decided they could drop them a cookie or something, you know, just to show some good faith. I'd prefer if they didn't blur anything, though - would make me respect Google a little bit more (but I don't think this will make them automatically evil or anything like that).
This isn't about security. It's about being able to say that you've done something about something.
In this case something very important about security. This is what politicians do to profile them self. It really doesn't matter what they do and what they do it to, but at the moment "security" is the cheap way to do something. Mostly because it's so damn hard to prove that the measures are ineffective. It's impossible to prove that blurring some images *didn't* foil some terrorists plans.
Being able to say that you got google to do something that you wanted them to do, is just an added bonus in the "look how important I am" hat.
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One doesn't need to see that an area is blurred out on a Satellite picture to know that it's a government facility. You could just look at the big metal or stone sign in front of the building. Or military uniforms.
Really, though, people who want to do a government harm don't have to discover targets. Real estate is slow, and governments are slower still. If a building was used by a government 20 years ago, it's likely still used by that government today. That puts the ownership of the building into the "common knowledge" category.
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I think this is a great idea. Now terrorists don't have to figure out which buildings are government / sensitive buildings. Now they can just attack everything that is blurry. Makes them a lot easier to find for terrorists.
It's like playing whack-a-mole against every source including blogs and online photo album sites.
And besides, it's just security through obscurity, and we all know very well how much that strategy works well.
You can keep secret a small password, you can't keep secret the outside structure of a whole building, that any plane / sattelite / hot-air balloon / small probe / home made autonomous mini-glider with a webcame stuck on it / etc... could see. Google is listening to a government that is controlling most of the (outsourced) IT infrastructure of Google's home country.
I think it's wise not to disturb the sleeping Tiger in those circumstances.
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"blurring doesn't increase security" messages. The location of such buildings in any country is not a secret. The goal is to make figuring out further details, such as the exact dimensions of the buildings, a little more difficult. Everyone but /. realizes that getting sensitive data is not impossible, but that does not mean you go and put it up online and make it easily searchable.
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For an Indian politician, a promise to get out of Kashmir would be political suicide. That is because regardless of when actual national boundaries were established, the sub-continent was always a free-trade/free-movement zone, despite petty wars between the warring kingdoms. At different times through history, the map of India (or the time-prorated equivalent for what would be India) has been different - but at no time has Kashmir (or, for that matter, most of Pakistan) not been accessible for trade, travel, migration, etc. National boundaries are, essentially, never fixed for ever. But the idea of "Kashmir going to the other side of the iron curtain" is not palatable to any Indian. Neither was the idea of there being an iron curtain between India and Pakistan - but a couple million deaths during the partition in 1947 kind of pushed the actual act of "raising the wall" to the back-pages of people's collective consciousness.
Personally, I wish the boundaries between India and Paksitan and Bangaldesh were made irrelevant - somewhat like EU. I mean, if France and Germany, or Engand and France can be friendly after centuries of war-fare, surely, India and Pakistan can too? And in an irrelevant boundary situation, just like Germany doesn't seem to care about Alsace anymore, maybe India and Pakistan will stop worrying about who controls Kashmir, but instead start worrying about how to enhance the overall welfare of kashmiri people, sindhi people, punjabi people, baluch people, rajasthanis, gujaratis, and everyone else.