Pakistan Used Google Earth For Military Targeting

NeoBeans writes "According to this article in the New York Times about the recent 'improvements' in military strikes by the Pakistani military it is revealed that they have dropped Google Earth as part of their target planning for a more precise technology. From the article, '... the air force has shifted from using Google Earth to more sophisticated images from spy planes and other surveillance aircraft, and has increased its use of laser-guided bombs. And no, you can't really find Osama Bin Laden using Google Maps either."

Comments

Re:ban google earth

[Sl4shd0t0rg]

They STOPPED using it...meaning that Google Earth wasn't a good tool for military use.

Google needs to improve their product

[R4nm4-kun]

I guess this is one unsatisfied customer.

Re:Google needs to improve their product

[recoiledsnake]

They should've just tried to set the evil bit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

Re:Google needs to improve their product

[ElectricRook]

The writers of the article made the fatal mistake of stating "you can't". Which combined with our proximity to an improbability field, means not only "you can", but that someone will. Or more likely, someone already has...

everyone's doing it.

[gandhi_2]

When I was in Ramadi (mid 05 to mid 06), all the local insurgent groups and out-of-town AQI used google earth for rocket and mortar attacks. Crazy, when "poor man's sat imagery" is almost as good as the rich man's. Luckily, GE images are often out of date....and insurgents fire rockets with an Insha'Allah kind-of mentality.

Re:everyone's doing it.

[mdm-adph]

His nick is "Gandhi," not bloody "Rambo," you moron.

Re:everyone's doing it.

[dkleinsc]

Come on, man. Haven't you seen the Gandhi 2 trailer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfvLcozLwtE

Re:everyone's doing it.

[gandhi_2]

The insurgency is a rough game. You hang one too many mortar rounds, the counterfire gets you. Apaches get you. Snipers get you. Poor safety standards, your own IED's get you. And often enough, Allah does NOT Insha.

And I'm Gandhi II.

What did they drop Google Earth for?

[Monkeedude1212]

Microsoft Encarta Atlas 97?

Re:What did they drop Google Earth for?

[TheRaven64]

OpenStreetMap! Targeting information wants to be free!

Pakistani citizen

[ryzvonusef]

The problem is, unlike you lucky folks with you spy satellites, we have to rely on such open techs as Google Earth. If only you guys would share the info and the tech with us.

Instead, your military insists it wants to hunt the terrorist itself in our territory, which seeing your track record, we simply cannot allow.

And the terrorist roam free as a result, blowing bombs with impunity, at least once a week.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[ryzvonusef]

Um, troll? I am being deadly serious here. Read the news please, our president recently attempted to (and failed) to get drone tech from you guys, but you wouldn't share. Come on, if you want to defeat them, then please help us, instead of ignoring us.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[recoiledsnake]

The problem is, unlike you lucky folks with you spy satellites, we have to rely on such open techs as Google Earth. If only you guys would share the info and the tech with us.

Instead, your military insists it wants to hunt the terrorist itself in our territory, which seeing your track record, we simply cannot allow.

And the terrorist roam free as a result, blowing bombs with impunity, at least once a week.

Looks like a self made problem. The Pakistani military, intelligence and government sponsored terrorism and trained and armed them to create big trouble in Afghanistan and India. It succeeded. Now when the chickens come home to roost, you're blaming others. The US gives billions in military and other aid to Pakistan, every year anyway. Stop whining, the terrorist problem you're facing now(and you and your country no doubt cheered in glee when India or Kashmir was/is attacked by pakistani made terrorists) is entirely of your making. As you sow so shall you reap.

signature: muslims!=terrorists

That might be true, but there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures. Is it because the culture prohibits all contact with members of other sex except in marriage, resulting in testosterone fueled violence or is it the strict adherence to some questionable material in the holy book? I don't know, but all I know is, the tendency and problem does exist and you can't brush it under the carpet with inane platitudes like the one in your sig.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[aquatone282]

Maybe the West would be less reluctant to share sensitive military technology if your track record didn't include sharing nuclear weapons technology with the Stalinst freak-show that calls itself the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

Your ISI leaves a lot to be desired, too.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[recoiledsnake]

Um, troll? I am being deadly serious here.
Read the news please, our president recently attempted to (and failed) to get drone tech from you guys, but you wouldn't share. Come on, if you want to defeat them, then please help us, instead of ignoring us.

Because everyone knows that what happened earlier was that all the technology given earlier was used more to rattle sabers with India instead of using them against the terrorists that your intelligence,military and government raised in the first place.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[MozeeToby]

I'm sorry, but giving advanced military technology to the Pakistani government while said government is bordering on unstable would be mind numbingly stupid. If the Pakistani government were to fail, there is no telling what kind of government will replace it. The US government isn't quite stupid enough to take that risk, maybe they've temporarily learned their lesson now that they have to worry about F14s in Iran and Stinger missiles in Afghanistan. No, that that level of military technology should be given only to our closest and most stable allies.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop whining, the terrorist problem you're facing now(and you and your country no doubt cheered in glee when India or Kashmir was/is attacked by pakistani made terrorists) is entirely of your making. As you sow so shall you reap. Along the same lines, can't the same argument be made that the terrorist threat that the west is facing is the same enemy that the west created and nurtured to take on the USSR. The enemy that metastasized into a demon that is now giving everyone nightmares? How much blame can we assign to a third world country like Pakistan when more developed and advanced countries like US financed and supported folks that one day became Taliban and Al-Qaida.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[kalirion]

The Pakistani military, intelligence and government sponsored terrorism and trained and armed them to create big trouble in Afghanistan and India. It succeeded. Now when the chickens come home to roost, you're blaming others.

So what you're saying is that Pakistan is following our example?

Re:Pakistani citizen

[Anonymous Coward]

What you said is right but you cant neglect CIA-Osama relations, creating of military movements in Afghanistan by CIA using Pakistan as proxy ...... US played equal evil if not more than Pakistan

Re:Pakistani citizen

[rxmd]

you obviously can't kill all the Muslims, or convert them to something else, or change the nature of a world religion. At least IMHO you can't have much hope for

Actually in over a dozen countries, muslims have demonstrated the falsity of your statements. [...]

If by "falsity of his statements" you mean that yes, you can kill them all, then you're of course technically correct, because it's possible to kill everybody. This statement however is utterly useless, because if we start from the premise that we can kill everybody, our policy decisions aren't going to be good. At best they will create more terrorists because a lot more people will feel threatened that otherwise wouldn't. Great job.

The rest of your post doesn't warrant much discussion IMHO. You say terror has always been bound to ideologies - that's true, but it's a statement of the obvious, just like the AC's statement that it's also always been bound to particular political and economic situations. He maybe presents his point in a slightly less bigoted fashion. You say the US shouldn't question its own role in today's emergence of terrorism because terrorism existed already in ancient Egypt. Why don't say you shouldn't question Islam's role in genocide because genocide existed before Islam ever emerged then? From that point of view nobody should ever question themselves, because there's always somebody else who did the same thing.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[vertinox]

That might be true, but there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures. Is it because the culture prohibits all contact with members of other sex except in marriage, resulting in testosterone fueled violence or is it the strict adherence to some questionable material in the holy book? I don't know, but all I know is, the tendency and problem does exist and you can't brush it under the carpet with inane platitudes like the one in your sig.

I thought it had something to do with extreme poverty, corrupt governments, and lack of education that created such a mindset.

Yes, some of the 9/11 bombers were well to do and educated but their support base over all would be less inclined for such activities is they weren't rotting in hellholes.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[ryzvonusef]

1-Um, you are the ones who gave us the money to create the god-damned idiots in the first place, and they were created to bug the soviets as you well know, not the Afghanis and the Indians... and now when we are asking your help to get rid of them, you are ignoring us, come on, don't you want these guys gone or not? they attacked you because you stopped the gravy-train, and now they are attacking us because we did too.

2-We do get get aid, but we don't get "billions". Trust me, the finance minister is crying our budget is shot because we didn't even get the last-dole out of the international aid or whatever.

3-Also, its not the money problem only, we want the tech to find the the bad guys in the first place.The bottom line is, the bad guys are out there (literally in my case) and since you guys are so pressurizing us to get rid of them, then help us. The recent govt. seems to be genuinely interested in getting rid of the menace.

4-No we don't cheer in glee, because we have more attacks then them. We get even more paranoid.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[Scrameustache]

there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures. Is it because the culture prohibits all contact with members of other sex except in marriage

No, it's because that culture uses that tactic against your culture's use of massive armies with sophisticated, laser-guided, satellite-targeted weapons.
If your culture was Sinhalese it would seem to you that there is something about the Tamils that makes them terrorists more than others.

Now stop trying to make yourself feel better by calling The Other a bunch of sexist terrorists.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[FailedTheTuringTest]

That might be true, but there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures.

Different times make different terrorists. Today, when you think "terrorist", you think "Muslim". But from the 1970s to the 1990s, "terrorist" meant the IRA, who were of course Catholic Christians. In the 1950s and 1960s, the main terrorist group in the USA was the Ku Klux Klan, or to a lesser degree in terms of body count the Black Panthers. In each case, I suspect people at the time said the same thing you wrote above: "there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures."

Re:Pakistani citizen

[ElectricRook]

Heh, in my day, enemies of the US could by top-notch military technology directly from the Commander in Chief of the US military.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[mano.m]

I agree, the Taliban wasn't created to bug India. That would be the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Re:Pakistani citizen

[Mr. Slippery]

That might be true, but there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures.

Religion and culture have little to do with it -- it's all about semantics. So long as state actions are labeled "war" rather than "terrorism", then those parts of the planet that got hosed by colonialism and the Cold War to the point of leaving behind unstable nation-states are going to produce "terrorists" rather than "soldiers".

If we were honest and labeled all aggressive transnational violence and use of weapons of mass destruction as "terrorism", then the greatest source and supporter of terrorism would be a nation that's about 76% Christian.

Its only a matter of time.

[hombrejava]

Satellites are becoming smaller and cheaper because of advances in miniature high-performance computers, solar panels, batteries, and increased launch capabilities due to standardization. CubeSats are one example. People can put small, but high-resolution cameras into space, and if you can launch 100 pico-satellites with cameras then your going to get near real-time imagery of many places on the earth. Its only a matter of time until even the poorest third-world country gets its own fleet of spy satellites.

Re:weapons of war is not consider evil?

[Shatrat]

If I was to use an android phone to call you up and tell you not to be such a $%^&ing moron, would that be another example of google being evil?

Re:weapons of war is not consider evil?

[Whatsisname]

Combatants could use gmail to communicate and organize their attacks. Combatants could use google docs to prepare training and intelligence information. They could use google's tools for a lot of nasty things.

However, they are amoral tools. Google tries to provide them to everyone.

Their don't be evil motto applies to how they operate in the market, using vendor lock in, suing competitors, etc. If google provided google earth to the enemies of Pakistan but not pakistan themselves, how would that not be evil?

In Another Five Years, If Google is Not Stopped...

[RobotRunAmok]

...the headline is likely to read, "Google Uses Pakistan for Military Targeting."

Re:In Another Five Years, If Google is Not Stopped

[Mr. Firewall]

...the headline is likely to read, "In Soviet Pakistan, Google Maps YOU!"

There, fixed that for you.

Re:In Another Five Years, If Google is Not Stopped

[mpatmcg]

... or "Google Uses Pakistan Military for Google Maps Testing"