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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.
No military installation in the world of the size of the large university campus is secret.
The secret could be details within that location, that's what map service provides by blurring.
Stop posting idiotic articles.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I can't imagine any intelligence agency on the planet was ignorant of the same information that Yandex had to blur their maps.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I suppose this is the Streisand effect of the cartography world.
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That's not the point. Take Incirlik; it's a nuclear bomber capable airbase (e.g. it's *big*) that frequently features in news reports during the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, so there's no way that any foreign intel agencies/terrorists/interested third parties were not aware of it, what it is/was used for, what was stationed there, etc. regardless of whether they are reliant on OSInt or have their own satellites. Likewise the Israeli SAM/Ironshield sites; they pinpoint themselves everytime someone lobs rockets at Tel Aviv or wherever, so there's no way the PLO/Hamas/Iran/etc. don't already know where they are. Ditto the Whitehouse; terrorists locating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue isn't the issue; it's having them find out where security check points, snipers, and other defenses are to help plan and facilitate an attack. Knowing the location is one thing, but knowing the detail is something else entirely. What makes this a clickbait story is that it makes it seem like the former that matters when it's really the latter that Yandex (and Google, Bing, and every other mapping agency that uses satellite imagery) are succesfully trying to obfuscate.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Last week I was on a civilian international flight and there there were a bunch of American IT guys sitting behind me. They were on their way to work on a network in a US military base in a different country and chatting about their mission loudly enough that I could hear them clearly. They must have assumed that nobody on the plane spoke English, but by the end of the flight I knew all the details about their mission, the network infrastructure, their software software and even which types of ransomware they were having the most difficulty dealing with, not only in that base but in other bases they had been working at. As a software developer myself I couldn't believe how much these guys were disclosing in public.
Instead of blurring they should just stamp down a Walmart and its parking lot, plus maybe a Dollar Tree plaza along with it. They can just scale the whole thing as needed - it's not like most people have any idea what they are looking at anyway. :)
Better known as 318230.
And it means that there is less plausible deniability for the location and even some details of said facilities. Lets say there is some accident, and the victims of the accidents point to a military facility as the cause. Until now, the responsible government could simply say: There is no proof that there is any military facility nearby and thus refuse recompensation. Now people can point to the publicly available imagery and say: There is.
There's a difference between "foreign intelligence services know where your military base is" and "every wahoo with an internet connection knows where your military base is." Secrecy comes in degrees.
But you could actually go and explore the maps, and maybe you find that the block where the Mom&Pop Meat Processing Plant should be located, and it is also blurred out. So you start to wonder if behind the gates of the Mom&Pop Meat Processing Plant something else than meat gets processed.
But Yandex, Bing, Google and everyone else blurring out the images means there are non-military, non-intelligence-agent people having access to the clear images they later blurr. So you don't know who else has access to those images.
Oh... my... God. So you mean that the taxpayers whose money bought all those ridiculously expensive weapons might learn where they are deployed? My, that is really awful.
And even foreigners!
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
They must have assumed that nobody on the plane spoke English.
That's always a safe bet anywhere in the world nowadays. Especially on airliners. After all, English is just a hole-in-corner minority language of no interest to most people.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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!
If a mapping service knows that a site is of "secret" nature, then so does everyone who's actual job is to know such things in foreign countries. All this blurring does is prevent general public from peeking in, it does squat against state players.
Since they are blurred out, Waze will now direct people through them as shortcuts around traffic jams.
I think that deserves a whooooosh.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If Israel has nuclear facilities and refuse to sign non-proliferation treaties, then it is a violation of federal law to send them foreign aid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was amended by the Symington Amendment (Section 669 of the FAA) in 1976. It banned U.S. economic, and military assistance, and export credits to countries that deliver or receive, acquire or transfer nuclear enrichment technology when they do not comply with IAEA regulations and inspections. This provision, as amended, is now contained in Section 101 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
The Glenn Amendment (Section 670) was later adopted in 1977, and provided the same sanctions against countries that acquire or transfer nuclear reprocessing technology or explode or transfer a nuclear device. This provision, as amended, is now contained in Section 102 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
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.
So they partnered with Japan for the blurring technology?
#DeleteFacebook
They should probably be fired for gross misconduct.
Like that's ever going to happen.
I have a friend who used to run a photo processing lab (when film was still a thing). One of his techs told him to come and take a look at one of the rolls coming off their machine. Pictures of the family and kids on the front lawn, with license plates and house number visible. And then pictures of the control room of a modern submarine. Having served in military intelligence (back in Vietnam), he knew this was a no-no. So he called the FBI, who came and took the film,saying that they would 'take care' of the problem. Nothing ever happened to the person (an exec at a local defense contractor) but he lost all the photo business (unclassified) from them and a few other DoD contractors.
The DoD isn't going to lean on the big shots in private industry. Or the next war they fight, they will have to do so with sharpened sticks.
Have gnu, will travel.
I remember buying the USGS 15-minute (that's distance, not time) series of maps around Durham, NH when I lived there in the 60s. Because Pease Airbase was a military base at that time, no buildings or elevation information was allowed to be plotted on the map. However, it apparently was ok to plot vegetation (green) vs. non-vegetation (off-white, applies to roads, buildings, etc) over the whole airbase. Didn't take a genius to find the airstrips, the main control buildings, the family housing developments on-base, etc.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
If the mapping company blurred out secret bases, how did they know those bases were there if they were a secret???