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.

Comments

They were not secret

[mapkinase]

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.

Re:They were not secret

[mrbester]

Depends on the definition of "secret". If the location is classified as "secret" by US, there's no onus on a foreign entity abiding by that classification, if they are even aware of it.

Google (US, and probably others) has to but Yandex (RU) doesn't unless there is some agreement in place. Even then, what's the blowback if they don't?

Re:OSINT

[Zocalo]

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.

Use Walmart

[Dan East]

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. :)

Re:OSINT

[Zocalo]

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.

From the big-blurry-blocks dept.

[DontBeAMoran]

So they partnered with Japan for the blurring technology?