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Rand Report Says Geospatial Data Not Big Threat 167

Posted by simoniker from the maps-and-diagrams dept.
scupper writes "An article in Federal Computer Week came out Monday that announced The Rand Corporation has published a report (sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) concerning the threat that publicly available geospatial data on US Government web sites might pose in the hands of terrorists that 'found that less than one percent of the 629 federal data sets they studied appeared to have notable value to would-be attackers', according to the report titled: Mapping the Risks:Assessing the Homeland Security Implications of Publicly Available Geospatial Information. A curious 'finding' from page xxv of the summary not mentioned in the article states: 'However, we cannot conclude that publicly accessible federal geospatial information provides no special benefit to the attacker. Neither can we conclude that it would benefit the attacker.' The release of this report reminded me strangly of the Washington Post news story about a George Mason University graduate student, whose dissertation mapped critical fiber optic network infrastructure."
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Rand Report Says Geospatial Data Not Big Threat More

Rand Report Says Geospatial Data Not Big Threat

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  • Rand?? As in the Rand Corporation?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:34PM (#9136025)
    As in: the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with with the saucer people, under the supervision of reverse vampires, are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner.

    Holy Shit!!! We're through the looking glass here, people..

  • Possibilities vs. Probabilities... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:36PM (#9136035)
    The big problem with terrorists is that they cause terror.

    In this case, we're falling for it. We're having an unrational fear of the unknown. We're worried that in everything we publish, there's a terrorist reading it and trying to use it to their advantage.

    On 9-11-01, they did something we didn't expect. They hijacked planes and brought their on minimally trained pilots to fly them into buildings. We didn't think that was likely to happen... at that time, standard policy during a hijacking was to let the hijacker into the cockpit. We're never going to make that mistake again.

    But think about that, in all of our past dealings with hijackers, we assumed the hijackers wanted to live, and therefore would not crash the plane, nevermind know how to crash the plane into something else. In every case prior to 9-11-01, that was a correct decision. In most cases, we were able to get a majority of the passengers and crew members off the plane alive.

    If a hijacker were to take over a plane today, there'd be much more opposition given to them by the passengers and flight crews. However, if a hijacking team were ever to succeed... now the default response would not be to attempt to reason with them but instead shoot the plane down. 100% of the innocent passengers would be lost, but we would be relieved that the plane didn't crash into a building.

    Hey, wait a second... we're playing the game not to get the maximum lives returned, but instead to avoid the worst-case senario that has only struck once. That's somewhat a broken logic.

    And that's really the culture that's taking over the nation. We've gotten so risk-adverse at doing things that when there's a possiblity of information being used negatively, we're ignoring all of the more-likely probablities that the infromation could also be used for good causes that we'd want to support. It's easier to point at the fear of what could go wrong than the dream of what could go right.

    When a player is at a casino, the lure of the possibilty of a big jackpot convinces them to play games where the probabity of coming out positive just isn't there. Again, it's a case of possibility of an positve extreme case causing the ignorance of a probablity of a negative result.

    Somehow, the concept of multiplying odds by result values is something average people just can't comprehend because emotions get in the way of cold logic... we act based on the possible emotional outcome rather than more likely outcome that logic would lead us to look for.
    • What I want to know is how many more targets or methods the terrorists have that the FBI, MI5, etc. have not even considered?

      Have they considered the chance of a coordinated poisoning of all the US drinking water sources with the Ebola virus (or another virus that would survive the filtration process)?

      I know that here in Australia that there are thousands of kilometres of exposed water pipes (Perth to Kalgoorlie is a good example) that can easily be accessed. With the right tools you could tap into the

      • Re:Possibilities vs. Probabilities... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:14AM (#9136239)
        Oh, it's worse than that. Most of our root water sources are open-air lakes.

        We're basically operating on the theory that public water supplies are safe even from the intentional attempt to poison them because of the theory of dilution. Since the average person's drinking water comes from more than one source, and any one source would take a huge-huge megadose of the toxin (that'd most likely be noticed) in order to survive being diluted. It's highly unlikely a fatal dose would make it into anybody's single glass of water before the alert got out.
        • But if there was a nationwide attack on all root water sources with a 'megadose of toxin' even if it was noticed, where would our water come from?

          Basically, I think we would be stuffed for a few weeks...
        • It's highly unlikely a fatal dose would make it into anybody's single glass of water before the alert got out.

          Why do you assume that the goal is to kill? Imagine if you could give the entire city of Chicago diarrhea for two weeks.

          Cryptosporidiumparvum [t-online.de] is something that can be grown near the site of deployment. No need to go about sneaking huge volumes of it across the country.

          Most of its victims make it not too much worse for the wear, but just think. If they could deliver it to a city like Chicago(I
        • LSD would do it. Takes ~50 ug to work. That's ~20,000 doses per gram. Wouldn't kill anyone directly, but the resulting mass hysteria would do some damage, I'm sure.
          • Screw that, make it a 500ug dose and count me in, please just let me know where the lake is so I can beat the rush and get there first.

            Doctor: "You should really try to drink at least 5 gallons of water a day with all the coffee you have been drinking!"

            Me: "I'm trying doc, but the dragons are guarding the rainbow that leads to the well, and I can't feel my legs. Shhhh, did you hear that?"

      • Water companies test their output all the time, precisely because they could be wiped out by half a million wrongful-death lawsuits in one swell foop if they don't.

    • The above post, while the truth, is basically a summary of the first few chapters of Bruce Schneier's book, "Beyond Fear".

    • In many ways, terrorists are like hackers/crackers. They know the systems and the vulnerabilities and then they exploit them both.

      Hey, wait a second... we're playing the game not to get the maximum lives returned, but instead to avoid the worst-case senario that has only struck once. That's somewhat a broken logic.

      That all depends on how you gather the data set. How many hijackings of American planes since 2000 have resulted in the hijackers letting any/all of the hostages live?

      We can't take the motive
      • In many ways, terrorists are like hackers/crackers.

        Funny. When you say it, you get +1 Insightful.
        When Congress says it, everybody freaks out.

        And I can't decide which is worse.
      • "As you said before, we had no idea that terrorists would send their operatives to flight school so that they could crash planes into buildings. Well, until they did it."

        Probably because it was taking an insane risk. If you don't care about takeoff, landing, or survival, and you're willing to wait until you can see the city you're aiming at before taking the controls, you can learn everything you need to know about flying from a book in about ten minutes. Some days I can't help thinking that these guys *
    • How does removing aerial photographs improve security? Security through obsecurity is no security at all.

      Security should be robust even if the attacker knows everything there is to know about the system.

      Simon.
      • I wish I could mod this post 'retarted'.

        Why do you feel repeating a line you read somewhere makes it correct in all scenarios? Obscurity has it's place in security. It can do a lot to improve security. One shouldn't *rely* on obscurity, but one shouldn't ignore it.

        If you have a safe to keep your expensive things in, would you hide it in your house or keep it on the front porch?
        • Actually, you might be better off putting the safe on the front porch. As long as you anchor it properly, so the thieves can't just carry it away. If you had to crack a safe, would you rather do it in the privacy of a windowless basement, or out on the porch where any passerby can see you?
    • This is one thing that scares me. In a number of countries (think of the old USSR and China) there is no freedom of information and that the information that is available is tightly controlled. These are societies that have been painted with lack of freedom and oppressive. If current USA policy is allowed to evolve in the direction it is going then there is danger that its citizens will lose their freedoms and being a free-thinking academic would be badly thought of. Also, with what we have seen happening i
    • Not quite. I bet if a highjacker took a bunch of passengers hostage in the BACK of the plane and started demanding to be delivered to a particular destination it wouldn't be shot down. This would not likely be tollerated by the passengers these days, but I think as long as the plane was demonstrably in control by the right people we won't be shooting it down. Ready to fire yes. Passengers just won't tollerate any crap now anyway, so the struggle would result in a crash or the highjackers taken out. The good
    • Hey, wait a second... we're playing the game not to get the maximum lives returned, but instead to avoid the worst-case senario that has only struck once. That's somewhat a broken logic.

      On the other hand, since the hijacking-a-plane-to-use-as-a-weapon was so spectacularly successful the first time around, you're much more likely to see it attempted again. A pretty good counterargument is that passengers wouldn't sit still for such a hijacking any more--then you get into questions of how well-armed the te

    • Somehow, the concept of multiplying odds by result values is something average people just can't comprehend because emotions get in the way of cold logic...

      Bzzt! Wrong.

      They can't comprehend it for a totally different reason - most of them being retarded and illiterate morons. Seriously, I would estimate that just a few percent of American adults understand what a weighted average is. I don't have a direct evidence for that, but consider that according to National Science Foundation only 9% of 2,000 peopl
  • but not one that is easily addressed. There's a balance that has to be maintained, and hopefully we're going in the right direction.
    • Well yes, it is a threat - so are the AAA maps, tourist gides and almanacs, should we regulate those, demeand photo ID with biometrics to purchase a map? (I know, the FBI and Almanacs)As an early poster pointed out we play into terrorist hands by being scared of this and limiting our information that is available.

  • It's the math, stupid! (Score:4, Funny)

    by jm92956n ( 758515 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:40PM (#9136070) Journal
    found that less than one percent of the 629 federal data sets they studied appeared to have notable value to would-be attackers

    Less than one percent of 629 is still 6. Granted, six isn't a large number when one considers it's relative relation, but it's still a number greater than zero.

    (I'm not being paranoid, right?)
    • Less than one percent of 629 is still 6. Granted, six isn't a large number when one considers it's relative relation, but it's still a number greater than zero.

      (I'm not being paranoid, right?)

      No, but you forgot to computer and discount for the number of reports in the 629 that if published could aid various anti-terror intersts in preventing attacks. If the number of attacks prevented by publication outnumbers the number aided by publication, we the people come out ahead in the long run.

  • This is not a terrorist problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:45PM (#9136093) Homepage Journal
    But it has become a public interest problem.

    Not long ago, you could finally get information from the government without spending several days and gobs of cash. It was brought to you via an innovative system called the Internet. If you were living next to a toxic waste dump, you could do a search on the 'web' and literally dozens of published reports were at your finger tips. At long last, public interest groups and individuals could see the reports the government was publishing about these sites, but were largely unavailable unless you lived near a library that qualified as a federal repository.

    In short, there were damn few access points for information about what the government was doing with your money and the Internet made the barriers disappear.

    Along came 911 and now everything is back to the old days. I publish scads of documents about cleaning up nuclear waste dumps and no one will see them unless they can convince the government that they are not a threat. You can pump your arms all over the place and tell me how "newclear stuff should be off the web 'cause its dangerous", but I'm not buying it. The stuff we are not allowed to discuss is so difficult to extract that even the US government is wondering what they are going to do with it. How the hell do you clean tritium out of groundwater?

    What my colleages and I report on is soooo not a terrorist target that it is laughable. But the information is in geospatial coverages that are now considered off-limits (official use only) to the public. The 911 tragedy has been a coup for those who want to obstruct the public's access to information related to their own health and safety.

    The government just uses terrorism as an excuse.

    • The government just uses terrorism as an excuse.

      The government rarely thinks for itself. Special Interests on both sides of the asile are using terrorism as an excuse to pass laws that they always wanted to pass... not because it prevents terror, but because it secures their interest's goals.

      Everybody's doing it. If you're a lobbiest and you can't explain how 9-11-01 is a reason why your bill-of-the-moment is needed, then you're in the wrong industry.
      • If you're a lobbiest and you can't explain how 9-11-01 is a reason why your bill-of-the-moment is needed, then you're in the wrong industry.

        Too true. If I hear the phrase "Now More Than Ever" one more time, I'm going to hurl.

    • That's not the half of it.

      Most/many of the free US Gov't datasets that were online have been taken offline for more same-old reasons. Politics & corporate lobbying.

      One part "if someone can sell you a CD with gov't data on it, and their big parent company can make campaign contributions, we won't give it away for free anymore"; one part bandwidth costs (tiny fraction of data collection costs WRT satellite data for instance); and one part ideology driven governance (see rant below).

      All this great data

    • Finally somebody who gets it! Terrorism may be some threat, but a government saying "Boo" every day is a much bigger threat.

      I live in the area of Huntsville, Alabama. This city besides being home to much of Uncle Sam's "Whizz Bang Gun" development and management is also home to a substantial part of the US Space Effort.

      Huntsville, Alabama is the home to a monument that tells just how much a lie "Homeland Security" and all this secrecy stuff is. The monument one block east of Monroe and Green Street int

  • Public/Private? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:49PM (#9136110) Homepage
    Does it really matter if this information is easily available to them? If these people are willing to put enough effort into things to coordinate the hijacking of several airplanes and flying them into key buildings, I REALLY don't think they're going to have much trouble getting this information, whether they have to kill/bribe/brainwash someone to get it or not.

    • The real value to the data is that analysis that can be done to it. I think the main concern is that with analysis of the data, the terrorist can more easily determine high value targets.

      My background involves working with GeoSpatial data and the types of datasets available on the web is really useful to the public. Data from USGS and NGA alone provide quite a bit of information on the US and the rest of the world. Anyone with a GIS application can perform spatial queries to locate ideal targets based

  • infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)

    by koshimetsu ( 746799 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:51PM (#9136119)
    Sean Gorman mapped and correlated data about a whole lot more than just fiber optic lines. Data, electric, transportation and god knows what more, wrapped up in a nice little program that makes the data quite easy to get at. Incredibly useful, but quite potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. Now what I wouldn't give to have that thing in MY hands...pretty...

  • He who protects everything... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tsotha ( 720379 ) on Wednesday May 12, 2004 @11:59PM (#9136155)
    ...protects nothing. We would be far better off not worrying about the small and mid-level threats and concentrating on the big threats, like dams. If someone sliced through fiber networks it would be profoundly annoying, but nobody would die.

    If we spread our attention and resources too thinly, though, any target becomes accessible.

    Terrorists have to have large-scale loss of life to generate the headlines they need for fundraising. I wouldn't worry about infrastructure (even vital infrastructure), since it's too hard to explain to uneducated fundamentalists why snarling up internet traffic is a victory for Allah.

    • Hard to explain (Score:2, Troll)

      by oob ( 131174 )
      it's too hard to explain to uneducated fundamentalists why snarling up internet traffic is a victory for Allah.

      As difficult as explaining to the equally uneducated fundamentalist Americans that bombing the fuck out of people then complaining when some of them retaliate is hypocritical?
      • Such nonsense! Just who were we "bombing the fuck out of" on September 10th, 2001? If this is your idea of "bombing the fuck out of people", you need to hit the library and learn some history. In fact, our comparative lack of retaliation has invited more attacks, since in the Middle East you are assumed to be too weak to retaliate if you don't.

        No amount of European-style cowering will make these people go away. Did that work after the embassy bombings in Africa? Did it work after the attack on the US

      • Absolutely! Very good point. Next time terrorists kill thousands of civilians with a hijacked plane, detonate a bomb and kill civilians, or just decapitate a civilian worker to teach the U.S. military a lesson, we should just give them a big hug and forgive them...
    • How much money do you need to bring the Internet to it's knees? Hint: Zero.
    • True. Terrorists live to cause, well, terror. While knocking out a lot of fiber could very well cost billions, there's little psychological effect.
    • If someone sliced through fiber networks it would be profoundly annoying, but nobody would die.

      If I dont refresh slashdot at least once every 3 hours I WILL die.
  • What lenghths have they gone through to hide their IP addresses to thwart would-be terrorists from performing dDOS attacks?

  • RAND, other stuff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Merovign ( 557032 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:16AM (#9136247)
    RAND hasa bit of an uneven history. I wouldn't even call the right wing so much as establishment/pol/mil/industrial complex wing. This is probably on honest report on the part of the person who made it, but it does smell odd from this distance.

    Fundamentally, I think they're right on this (and privatizing schools :), the targets terrorists want to and may actually try to hit are pretty well known and not at all hard to find. Stuff in the middle of nowhere is pretty low on their list.

    It's also pretty unlikely that the punks will get their hands on a launchable ICBM or suchlike.

    That being said, I'm trying to think of why I would need GPS coords for cabinet offices or suchlike. It's a pretty limited use, I'm not sure it would be worth doing, especially with My Tax Dollars (I know, pennies, but it's the principle).

    Obviously if you have a sensitive (NSA, Weather mountain, Federal Brocolli Pricing Board, etc) site, don't put GPS coords on your website. Duh.
    • I wouldn't even call the right wing so much as establishment/pol/mil/industrial complex wing
      I think most non-Americans would equate the two.

  • Actually, it's common sense... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:31AM (#9136300)
    My first knee-jerk reaction upon reading the Slashdot summary was:

    "We find that this information isn't really important to terrorists"
    >boom
    "oops. uh... guess we were wrong..."

    But after reading the article it sounds like they're making a perfectly valid statement. Sure, some information like large military bases off the beaten path shouldn't have their details published. But it makes no sense to remove maps of public utility Nuclear Reactors because that information is commonly available from about a dozen other sources. Like, street maps! So removing it from the federal records doesn't make it "secure". Or from the example in the article where the feds removed offshore oil sites from their public records. Turns out Scuba diving maps sold to divers were showing where those were ANYWAY. Rand is calling for the government to redefine what needs to be "secret" and it it does, work with local companies to have all sources removed.

    Where is planet Kamino, anyway?
  • I mean... I'm still getting my brain up to the proper caffiene levels, so maybe this will make sense to me later. But that hell is this article even about? Geospatial time continuum anamoly. Am I in the Expanse or something? Where is Archer... wait.. to hell with him.. where is T'Pol???

  • Data Sets?!? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MoonChildCY ( 581211 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @12:40AM (#9136337) Homepage
    What is their definition of a data set? A data set for the NSA/CIA/FBI may have attributes for military locations, population density, etc.

    Now, if they get their hands on a data set by the Parks Commisioner, indicating locations of forests with attributes relating to the trees, I highly doubt that would be threatening.

    So a 1% possibility that a data set may be useful to terrorists is subjective, as it depends on their objective.

    In the right hands, any data set can potentialy enhance the ability of terrorists. And of course, don't forget. Private companies are the ones that sell most of the data to the government (see US Census for example). Why bother going after government publication of data and not control to whom a company sells the data?

    As for the fiber optic map... It was useful not because you can cut cables (redundancy does exist), but because you know the ends of cables are to where corporations are (that is why the dissertation did get credit in the first place). Also, you know that where the biggest bandwidth cable go to is a prime target, as it promises a network depended coproration/entity that could be damaged by loss of communications.
    • Ah, I don't think you work with geospatial data.

      Noone is suggesting that all geo data should be taken offline. FEMA, for instance, isn't worried in the least about flood plain data. They are, however, slightly worried about critical infrastructure data such as highway bridges (silly), water pipelines, emergency care facilities, nuclear power facilities, and so on.

      The fibre optic map was useful because it put glaring spotlights on massive concentrations of cables: Where to target if you wanted to inflict
    • NO NO NO!!! Nobody sells data to the Census. They give it away as public domain data. They call it the TIGER files (Topographically intergrated geographic end reference). They did this in 1990 and again in 2000.

      Mapquest.com and MS Streets use the public domain data and resell it. So does every other mapping company.
      • Mapquest.com and MS Streets use the public domain data and resell it. So does every other mapping company.

        These companies provide value added datasets based on TIGER data. TIGER data itself tends to be attribute rich, but geospatially generalized/inaccurate for most usages. Companies like MapQuest, Rand McNally, etc... often have arrangements with local governments to obtain more accurate information based on aerial photos, cadastral datasets (tax maps), site plans (future roads), e911 maps, etc.... T
      • Have you ever even bothered to look at this? The US Census website advertises the "good deals" they get from private companies to build their geospatial data. I am not refering to the population count, I am referring to the spatial data (locations of streets, housing units, etc).

        I refer you to the Department of Commerce publication CB96-194 of 1996, which announces that the US Census Bureau would acquire data from GDT Inc. in a long term cooperation effort to have an up-to-date TIGER database.

        Apparently,
    • Apparently, GDT Inc. is the provider of street network for all major GIS Software corporations (including MapInfo, Intergraph and others) and government entities. Perhaps the most important information on this company is the Department of Commerce publication CB96-194 of 1996, which announces that the US Census Bureau would acquire data from GDT Inc. in a long term cooperation effort to have an up-to-date TIGER database.

      The question from where GDT Inc. acquired their data is further hidden, appart from the

  • Fibreoptic network story got me thinking (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quizo69 ( 659678 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @01:36AM (#9136507) Homepage
    I remember when the story about mapping the fibreoptic infrastructure broke.

    I also remember several months later, massive power grid failures in the US and UK among others, all within a reasonably short timeframe.

    I thought even back then, while the two aren't directly related, that there was a possibility that someone had figured out the electrical grid chokepoints sufficiently to do a test run of sorts, to see if it worked or not, possibly inspired by the fibreoptic story.

    My point is this - if you were a terrorist and wanted to hit hard again, why not follow standard military doctrine and cut off the enemy's power grid first? After all, we do it, so why wouldn't they do it as well? In all the confusion, that's when you conduct your real strike.

    Thankfully, since the information is public, we too can look for potential chokepoints and demand of governments that they fix them or mitigate the risk by building in redundancy. If we don't keep this information public, we will not be able to hold governments accountable when they don't make the effort and the system fails when it's most needed. And if you can no longer hold your government accountable when they screw up, because you don't have access to the information you need to do it, then you are no longer in control, and they are ruling you, not governing on behalf of you.
  • Of a similar report compliled by the RAND Co's subsidiary the BLAND Corporation, completely discounting the efficacy of a doomsday device in the war on terror.

  • Creativity (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mauthbaux ( 652274 )
    Any information is really only valuable when you have enough creativity and common sense to make something of it. People aren't trained to think "outside of the box", but given enough time and motivation, things will happen.

    I'm not saying that we should keep all of this info under lock and key(among dozens of other safeguards), but we should at least make a few more independent analysies(sp?) of the threat the data poses.

    The thing that I think would be alot more interesting is to take the layouts of so
    • analysies(sp?)
      Analyses.

      There's this little known web site called "google" (crazy name, crazy guys) where you can type in "definition:word" and it tells you what the word means!

      Amazing.

    • You have the nut of an important point. This study merely looked at data sources and considered "could this be useful to an attacker". But that is a poor measure of vulnerability, because it doesn't theorize what an attacker would do. A better measure would be, once you've identified some allegedly exploitable geospatial information, to go back out the front door and try to come up with a credible plan of attack - credible in terms of goals, resources, methods, and available skillsets - that uses this piece
  • Golden opportunity to try and load some of this non-threatening geospatial data with our very own free software GIS. Model your neighborhood in 3D with high resolution Space Shuttle topography radar mission (STRM) elevation data!

    http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ [nasa.gov]
    http://grass.ibiblio.org [ibiblio.org]

    STRM is new, so get the CVS version if you want access to the latest auto-load & clean scripts. View with NVIZ.

    cool stuff.

  • Dont hold it back (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GISGEOLOGYGEEK ( 708023 ) on Thursday May 13, 2004 @03:37AM (#9136922)
    Speaking as a GIS tech/programmer, and geologist ... holding back geospatial data from free public use will hurt the enonomy far more than any of those imagined threats. If a terrorist really wants to know where a target is, he can just wander on past with a GPS.

    If the US government really cared, they wouldn't have turned of the 'selective availability' distortion that used to reduce the accuracy of common GPS units from a nice 10m accuracy down to an annoying 100m.

    I think history has proven that at least so far terrorists attacking the US have preferred large symbolic targets, the kind that you can't hide, where openly available geospatial data is irrelevant.

    And consider that having as much data available as possible to the public enables all kinds of value added / data mining uses to crop up that the data owners might never think of themselves. There are many business models out there working right now, feeding families.

    Open free exchange and full interoperability if geospatial data is the future. It is happening now through the Open GIS Consortium, GML, and through free open source programs such as Grass, and MapServer. Good things happen when the right people have easy access to your spatial data.

    Do your part! set up a MapServer WMS server today, make your spatial data available to the world yet still maintain control (the server passes out raster map layers that become part of a user's raster map, no one gets your valuable vectors)

    • I'd love to see companies/agencies sharing their GIS data through WMS or preferably WFS (getting the vectors would be nice) services. Doubt we'll see it as most people consider their data too valuable to do that, but it would be nice.

      Good to see another GIS person on /.
  • A subsequent Rand Report found that information available in the Yellow pages posed a potential security threat. In an attempt to staunch the flow of information to would be terrorists, all people in or arriving in the United States will soon be fitted with a mask that covers eyes, ears, and mouth... so that we might hear no evil, speak no evil, and say no evil...

    Your tax dollars ar work...

    Genda
  • Maybe they don't think the data is a threat because they've already had their way with it before it's made publicly available. Take this TerraServer shot of of the US Capital [terraserver-usa.com] using the new .25 meters / pixel USGS natural color data set. The Capital and Senate / Congressional office buildings are mosaic'd out!
    • So what? Point your missiles towards the mosiac'd out buildings.

      Or, how about pulling out a USGS topo sheet from 1983 and finding the buildings the old fashioned way.
    • Imagery from Keyhole Corporation Keyhole Corporation [keyhole.com] doesn't have those problems.

      The Keyhole viewer is very impressive. They have the whole planet available. Resolution varies; for much of the world it's low-res satellite imagery. But for most urban areas in the developed world, the imagery is quite good. The imagery is overlaid on height data, so you can get a 3D view from any angle. The height data is too coarse to show buildings.

  • I mean, seriously... call these terrorists what you want, they're definitely smart and resourceful. They knew enough about American society and culture to select very traumatizing targets.

    We should assume that they will find whatever is of interest to them, and that security through obscurity is bound to fail. Given that, geospatial information should be free so citizens can point out weaknesses to the government.

    In terms of cost for security... I recently asked for geospatial information from my city, an
  • Does anybody remember the story of the GPS units and how the 9/11 terrorists used them? To summarize, they drove to NYC on September 10th with their GPS units. They stood b/t the 2 WTC towers and marked a waypoint. The next day, they flew airplanes towards this waypoint.

    OK, OK, So what??? Well, they could have just read a USGS topo sheet to get those Lat/Long coordinates. Or they could have used any GIS package.

    This is really scary to think about b/c almost every county has GIS data on their webs
    • Why is this scary?
      So getting coordinates from some GIS software will be easier...yet I'm somehow forced to think that if someone is really determined to make an event happen, taking away that simple convenience won't stop them.

      Terrorists hope to induce shock and fear in as many people as possible...I really doubt that this is going to occur by driving a bus into your Town Hall or Baptist Church.
    • Or they could have looked out the front windows of the airplane. The WTC was the hardest thing in NYC to avoid seeing, especially from the air. Why do you need coord.s for something that is sticking up out of the clutter and shouting, "yoo hoo! over here!"
  • Of course geo-spatial data is VERY useful for all sorts of purposes. Just like with a steak knife: you can do wonderful and fun things [ed.ac.uk] with it and cause a lot of nasty wounds and red stains on the living-room carpet as well...

    But seriously, the (US) governments totally gets the mind-set of these people wrong. They don't download multi-gigabyte maps [nga.mil] from the net before they attack, they simply and effectively pick so-called postcard targets [google.com], because they seek to attract media attention and these targets stand for what they resent.

    Most terrorists are surprisingly low-tech, but that's actually why they can be difficult to track down: if you never use Web browsers, phones and credit cards you leave few traces.
    If you read the recent intelligence 'success story' where they tracked some people because they used a Swiss pre-paid mobile phone SIM-card from somewhere in Pakistan, apparently swapping mobile phones and not SIM-cards instead of the other way round, this gives you an idea of what to expect.

  • Really, if you and a buddy put on orange vests and hard hats, and spent your days peering through survey instruments and jotting notes, how many weeks would you have to do this before anyone bothered to speak to you at all? Okay, you'd be nabbed quickly if you surveyed the Pentagon or ORNL, but there are *supposed* to be people checking over those thousands of bridges and dams and whatnot -- who would stop you?

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