Google's Mapping Contest Draws Ire From Indian Government 96
hypnosec writes with news that India's Central Bureau of Investigation has ordered a preliminary enquiry (PE) against Google for violating Indian laws by mapping sensitive areas and defence installations in the country. As per the PE, registered on the basis of a complaint made by the Surveyor General of India's office to the Union Home Ministry, Google has been accused of organizing a mapping competition dubbed 'Mapathon' in February-March 2013 without taking prior permission from Survey of India, country's official mapping agency. The mapping competition required citizens to map their neighbourhoods, especially details related to hospitals and restaurants. The Survey of India (SoI), alarmed by the event, asked the company to share its event details. While going through the details the watchdog found that there were several coordinates having details of sensitive defence installations which are out of the public domain."
So, to summarize... (Score:4, Insightful)
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So is a cover of the NSA to get meta-data with some nefarious purposes? Like they did with the vaccines in Pakistan to find Bin Laden's family and kill them.
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Vaccines in Pakistan? Do you have a link for me to read about it? Thanks.
Simply google it... -- https://www.google.com/?gws_rd... [google.com] -- and you will see many links for your reading.
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"You didn't get a permit from us about writing a map, so we will ask you to share the map with us."
So it's known that Airline pilots don't learn to fly in India; they come to the US to learn to fly.
Why? Because there are too many permits required to fly any where it's just not feasible to learn in India.
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It's because there are too few planes in India and too few candidates to make the economics of flying schools work in India. The entire aviation sector in the country is probably less than what JFK handles.
So, you see, it isn't really about permits. Its about economics of scale. Also, there is a huge sunk cost in airplanes like Cessna in the US which enables a pilot to get all the hours necessary for commercial certification.I was looking into all of this some years ago for when the aviation sector opened u
How much more? (Score:1)
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They didn't see the WMDs themselves, they saw shitty trailers that the neocons labeled as WMD manufacturing plants and everyone believed them because why would our own intelligence agencies lie to our own government?
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> our intel was wrong,
I don't understand that lie when we found plenty of ricin, sarin and mustard gas. Quite a few Americans, including my nephew, were hurt or died from the WMDs in Iraq. You are insulting them and their families by claiming that lie.
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No, we didn't.
Prior to the first gulf war (the one in the early 90s), Iraq had a chemical weapons program. After the war, that was shut down and most of their stocks destroyed. When the inspectors came through after the second gulf war (the one in the early 2000s), they came across old shells on which they found residue of chemical weapons, indicating that a decade earlier they had once contained chemical weapons. They found no evidence that Iraq had actually restarted its chemical weapons program, or ha
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sigh, this tired story again? look, half the world believed there to be WMDs, our intel was wrong, it happens
Yeah... It happens. And as a result, a country is torn to tatters, there are over 100,000 civilian deaths, over 15,000 Iraqi military deaths, close to 5000 coalition military deaths, and now we have an insurgency that is bringing some of the most frightening radical Islamists to power in a large swath of the country. All of this is a result of the fact that "our intel was wrong", and you want to just shrug it off as mistake?!? *spits*
oopsie... (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone didn't get his bribe!
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Get some priorities (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't the Indian government have better things to do? Oh like feeding their hundred of millions of impoverished citizens or even building toilets so they don't shit outside everywhere. Or even solve the massive corruption they have.
No wonder India is such a shithole of a country.
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You mean, other than letting a foreign company doing spy work in their country? LOL :)
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Doesn't the Indian government have better things to do? Oh like feeding their hundred of millions of impoverished citizens or even building toilets so they don't shit outside everywhere. Or even solve the massive corruption they have.
No wonder India is such a shithole of a country.
In India, if you want to do anything you have to ask an official for permission first. This is why nothing gets done; the official is thinking like a parasitic pimp more concerned about how to get a cut of someone else's efforts. A hundred years ago, everything everywhere was a nation of outhouses. 70 years ago, nobody had any wealth or money, including countries like the U.S.
Those countries are where they're at today while India is still unable to replace their free-for-all sewage system. Why is that?
It'
Better be careful Google! (Score:1)
Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
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Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
How do I mod funny, insightful and informative? That was awesome! :)
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You promise?
So how do I go about starting my own Indian mapping competition?
/ H1Bs GTFO.
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Piss off India and your labor supply will come to an end!
Get with the times. My employer just hired Cognizant for a project. The managers are Indians, but the development has all been outsourced to Shanghai. Must be too expensive to hire Indians...
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Must be too expensive to hire Indians...
I'll show myself out.
Ignorance is no excuse ... (Score:3)
"The company[Google], noting that it was not aware of any privacy issues, ..."
Re:Ignorance is no excuse ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The government body trying to protect its turf from competition did not cite any privacy issues, either. It cited security issues, which of course it could not describe in detail because security.
Did Google specifically solicit information about defense installations, perhaps as a particular example of hospitals or restaurants? If not, did Google have any way to know which information about which installations is considered secret? (Obviously, the government would never publish such a list for general consumption, because that would both reveal the data that they want to protect and distinguish the sensitive data from information that they consider non-sensitive.) Did Google republish this data, or is the perceived offense merely that Google has the data?
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You did not answer any of my questions. Did you just want to highlight that India seems to be whining about Google instead of trying to work with them?
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The trouble is, as the Entrope mentioned, unless they tell you specifically what information is not to be published, then how are you to know? Making it illegal to publish data about "sensitive areas" means somehow they have to make it clear what areas are sensitive, or else they are creating unrealistic expectations. Imagine a law that said it is illegal to proceed through a green traffic light when an unmarked police car is approaching from a perpendicular direction. How can you obey such a law since A
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Does India have anything like the US Constitution's requirement for due process of law before someone is punished? It is conceivable for the government to ban the collection or publication of national security information, with the burden on the collector/publisher to figure out whether they have done so. This would be a recipe for arbitrary enforcement and unjust outcomes, but similar schemes have been implemented in the past -- between restaurant reviews and search engines, recent European cases provide
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Indian Constitution Article 21: "Protection of life and personal liberty. No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law."
Note that the phrase "due process" is not in the Indian Constitution. For more information on why it was replaced with "according to procedure", see this reference [thehindu.com].
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... a blanket law that is equivalent to saying you may not publish anything the government deems sensitive unless they give you a way to know what information that is
I take it that you've never dealt with people in real government security agencies. The very existence of such a law would be deemed sensitive.
Re:Ignorance is no excuse ... (Score:4, Informative)
You want something hidden from space? Build it deep enough underground to hide its IR footprint. Attempting to hide things through censorship works sooo well - Just ask Babs S.
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People have been using the internet to find out more about 'sensitive areas' for a long time now. ;-)
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The company[Google] is never aware of any issues. It's their standard smokescreen/disclaimer.
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If the average citizen knows your defence details (Score:1)
You can't really censor that from the internet, now can you?
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Exactly. If it was crowdsourced, then by definition, it is in the public domain. It's public domain information they want to cover up. Not 'information not in the public domain'.
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They can... And I think they should... Put a big red polygon there with the label "Indian Government Declared Sensitive Area" right on top.
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When I lived in the UK, there was a big blank space on the official maps just outside town. Anyone who lived near there knew it was the local nuclear weapons dump, and any Soviet spy who drove past would see the buildings that mysteriously didn't appear on the map, and know it must be something important enough to hide, and therefore important enough to bomb in wartime.
The whole thing was just stupid.
Out of the public domain? (Score:5, Insightful)
out of the public domain
If you can see it from public property and tell what it is, it's (effectively) in the public domain, isn't it?
If it's supposed to be secret, and someone who shouldn't know where it is does, you've got a security leak.
I'd say Google's doing them a favour. If any of their secret installations turn up on it, you know it's time to shut them down or move them.
Re:Out of the public domain? (Score:5, Informative)
Except, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of places which are also censored [list25.com] or blurred from Google maps and the like.
India is hardly the first country to do this, and there's a few US installations which are blurred out.
Governments censor data, film at 11.
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North Korea makes it extremely hard to get map information! Face recognition algorithms sometimes go awry! A power plant is shown with similar resolution to neighboring buildings! News at 11!
At least 15 of the 25 places on the list you link to are closed to the general public, several others might be (not clear from quick Google searches), and several appear to have high-quality satellite imagery now. It is not surprising that Google blurs out places that governments intentionally make it hard to see.
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As an open-source project, it has no nationality...
Different country. Different rules. (Score:5, Informative)
If you can see it from public property and tell what it is, it's (effectively) in the public domain, isn't it?
Not necessarily. This isn't the United States. Different laws and customs applied differently. Your normal expectations regarding the law may not apply.
I'd say Google's doing them a favour. If any of their secret installations turn up on it, you know it's time to shut them down or move them.
Yeah... I'm sure that's exactly how they will see it too... [/sarcasm]
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It may be practically difficult to prevent that information from getting out to people who want it, but that doesn't make it legal to do so. Plenty of governments continue to try keeping stuff secret even when there's no real hope of doing so.
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"you'd be rotting in a cell for 25 years."
Mostly because the legal system is so slow it'd take that long to even get to trial.
As an Indian I know joked: "The British gave us stifling bureaucracy, but we PERFECTED it!"
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How very American of you.
How very presumptive of you.
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If one can ride by on their bicycle and take a picture of "secret installations", they have a security leak. It's not an American concept.
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Not starting a flamewar. Both Google Maps and OSM have their place. But if I was an Indian, I would donate my time to OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org] so that everyone can profit from the data instead of just one American company.
Seriously, India... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad Analogy Time Again. (Score:2)
Have you never heard of the Streisand Effect?
The Streisand Effect works only if you know and care about Barbara Streisand --- and only in a time and place where Geek Rules override every other consideration.
The geek has a one-size-fits-all cultural mindset that has never served him particularly well.
timothy can't spell (Score:1)
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India has disputed borders too. (Score:2)
Also the border is disputed with Pakistan and China. Since Pakistan has been the "ally" of USA since 1950s, and India kept dallying with USSR all those days, almost all the American magazines will carry maps that show disputed parts of Kashmir as part of Pakistan. I have seen so many Reader's Digest, Time, National Geogr
Foreigners vs Locals (Score:1)
It could also have something to do with the fact that normally foreigners are not allowed in cantonments and other restricted areas and so the use of locals opens both sides up to problems.
My visa specifically mentions which cities I can live in (so I must register with the FRRO in either of those cities; as far as I know, I don't think I can just up and move from say Delhi or Mumbai to somewhere else without getting some additional permitting or a replacement visa first) but it also says "not valid for pro