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Mapping Service Blurs Out Military Bases, But Accidentally Locates Secret Ones
schwit1 shares a report from Popular Mechanics: A Russian online mapping company was trying to obscure foreign military bases. But in doing so, it accidentally confirmed their locations -- many of which were secret. Yandex Maps, Russia's leading online map service, blurred the precise locations of Turkish and Israeli military bases, pinpointing their location. The bases host sensitive surface-to-air missile sites and facilities housing nuclear weapons. The Federation of American Scientists reports that Yandex Maps blurred out "over 300 distinct buildings, airfields, ports, bunkers, storage sites, bases, barracks, nuclear facilities, and random buildings" in the two countries. Some of these facilities were well known, but some of them were not. Not only has Yandex confirmed their locations, the scope of blurring reveals their exact size and shape.
Don't know if it's still the case, or how that might play out between jurisdictions, but I had to become SC to handle raw satellite imagery on the off-chance they might contain imagery of the type being blurred out here around 20 years ago. (We were leasing use of a former Soviet spy-sat to do large-scale ground surveys of Western Europe for agricultural applications. The resolution we were getting wasn't as good as today's publically accessible imagery, but the mono resolution was still high enough to get a feel for the size and shape of buildings, and I could tell my car was on my driveway when I pulled up the relevent image for a poster sized printout - and yes, I still have it.) If that is still the case, I'd assume that the satellite operators - e.g. DigitalGlobe for many of Google's images - have a team of SC cleared people that do the initial processing of raw images, then those images are passed on to customers like Google to use as they see fit.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
What's your source on this "long history"?
Well I can think of one example. In 1986 the US bombed Libya. One building that was hit was the French Embassy in Tripoli. The French had refused to allow US bombers to traverse their airspace from bases in England that forced the US planes to fly an additional 2600 nautical miles around France to get to Libya. It was understood/suspected right at the time that this was an "accident" with plausible deniability.