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.

Crossposted from WILLisms.com