Comment by lnsru
3 days ago
It’s really interesting how perception of openness changes over time. During cold war publishing this information would send one directly to gulag.
3 days ago
It’s really interesting how perception of openness changes over time. During cold war publishing this information would send one directly to gulag.
I saw a nice presentation by Michael Cruickshank with an intelligence background that was using public geospatial data like what this is based on to model how climate change would affect power outages in an African city. In that case he was trying to figure out where all the power infrastructure was that would be affected in a flooding and then model network effects to figure out which parts of the city would end up being affected. Really interesting work.
Michael presented at the Berlin Geomob. His website has a more general overview of what he does: https://www.michaelcruickshank.me/recentwork. That does not seem to include a lot of detail on what he presented. Possibly because he is trying to be responsible here.
The security angle did come during the presentation. This is not the type of information that a lot of governments would want to make public but also something that could help them. You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting. That's something that can be used for good and for evil. And obviously something that a lot of intelligence agencies are probably already doing.
> You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting.
That’s sort of how it happens in the intelligence world. A bunch of analysts can look at open source data - news snippets, public data sets etc, but once they analyze it and distill to some conclusions it may become sensitive or classified.
It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.
There are cables not on this map that are uncharted for things like acoustic monitoring & finger printing of vessels.
> It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.
Yeah, and the other edge of the sword is on display in the Baltic Sea nowadays, where "fishermen" accidentally keep dragging their anchors for miles across the sea bottom, always somehow exactly where the communication cables are.
I have license for boat and use nautical maps. They show me a cable, but not the hierarchy of the infrastructure. I see a cable, but can’t evaluate if half of town stays without electricity or only an island with dozen houses if I damage it.
However the available maps do not stop russian ships regularly dropping anchors on European infrastructure in Baltic see. Obviously charting them does not help. Maybe they should stay secret at the end.
You can hide the position of the cables from fishermen and the public. But if someone knows where they are, it is the KGB, I mean, FSB.
We should make information about infrastructure public. There was a power outtage in Berlin, due to to an attack aginst a 'secret' cable bridge. If the map of cables would have been public, then the public may have had a chance to realize that having no backup cable is a bad idea for critical infrastructure.
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Would you feel comfortable making a decision on putting an anchor down on a cable if you knew it would only take out a few hundred houses worth of power.
I would imagine that any body that issues you a license should inform you to not anchor in proximity to cables, regardless of size / spec etc. if you put an anchor down on a charted cable, and the cable is where it should be, I think you’d be responsible for the cost of damage.
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In the EU all that data, including high res LiDAR data has to be made publicly available by the responsible authorities. also high res aerial imagery which with the lidar together you can use to build a 3D model of the surface and ground of military buildings/area in blender, because even that in many cases is not excluded or censored. It’s already used for “criminal activities” by metal detectorists and grave robbers a lot haha but it shouldn’t be too hard for foreign intelligence to render some maps for egoshooters from them to train their soldiers for missions in specific locations
With the recent blackout in Berlin, I've heard requests to hide these information.
Because obscurity works against insider threats and OSint /s
I know I will never live to see a site like this that documents all of the innards of airports. Airport layouts are my special interest.
Yeah, and it feels like we’re sliding back the same way.