« Do Jews Win Too Many Nobel Prizes? | WILLisms.com | Wednesday Caption Contest: Part 80 »

Fun With Intelligence!

Google Earth kinda makes me feel a little . . . naked. Like, there is the house I grew up in, from a perspective I had never known it from. There is Manhattan, beautifully laid out in all its detailed splendor. I am quite sure al-Qaeda finds it to be an invaluable tool. It is like the GPS satellites launched by the Pentagon: all are free to use or abuse its powers.

Mind you, it allows someone like Douglas Hanson, writing at the American Thinker, to put on his amateur imagery analyst monocle and estimate that Iran's defenses in the Strait of Hormuz have improved since the first incarnation of Google Earth.

Google-Earthing North Korea has unearthed some very interesting finds.

And check this out:

Huangyantan - a 900x700m scale model of Aksai Chin in the Karakorum region of the Himalayas, a battlefield in the 1961 Sino-India war, discovered by an intrepid amateur analyst. Very cool and kinda creepy.

If you want to see something really interesting, go look up Diego Garcia in Google Earth. Diego Garcia is the Pentagon's permanently-fixed aircraft carrier in the south Indian Ocean, actually an island that is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. A strategic base for the B-52, B-1 and B-2, this is a place so secretive and sensitive that journalists have never been allowed to visit. Close to all the action in the Middle East, the U.S. government naturally denies that any terrorist suspects have been 'detained' there.

Searching for 'Diego Garcia' in Google Earth will not get you there, but type in 'Maldives' and then keep going south. Then you can instantly see what an interesting arrangement Diego Garcia is. Er, perhaps national security should preclude releasing such images. Then again, any intelligence agency that has failed thus far to amass at least that much information about Diego Garcia is probably little threat to our nation.

Hmm, it looks like our B-52 in the middle there just kinda evaporated.

Be sure to toggle on the Google Earth Community in the layers menu, so that little markers appear that inform or disinform you of some of the features of Diego Garcia, including the 'Diego Garcia base crop circles' that one sly and clever vandal inserted there.

It is not surprising that these photos exist. The only thing new here is that now the public can see them, a small democratization of the previously arcane and occult art of imagery analysis.I can't help but think that, all things considered, these types of disclosures will favor the open societies that developed this technology over those dark forces that still think ignorance is best.

Posted by Ken McCracken · 21 November 2006 03:20 AM

Comments

Posted by: zsa zsa at November 22, 2006 01:58 PM

Posted by: Chief RZ at November 25, 2006 05:11 PM