We probably shouldn’t make light of such things but sometimes you have to call stupid where stupid is: A California lawmaker’s bold anti-terrorism measure would force satellite image makers to blur soft targets so the evil doers don’t know where they are.
The practical effect of this means that services such as Google Earth would blur out schools and hospitals so that people can’t find them on the map.
It’s been done before. As the New York Times points out, imagery makers have voluntary blurred out the White House and shelters for victims of domestic violence.
But it’s a bit of a reach to suggest that blanket bans solve our security concerns, or generate an overall good when access to a good or service is removed from all of society.
Terrorists have been known to use Skype, Twitter and mobile phone networks. Do we ban those too?
Indian courts are contemplating banning Google Earth after it was learned that the Mumbai terrorists used the service to help them plan their attack.
As security technologist Bruce Schneier writes:
Let’s all stop and take a deep breath. By its very nature, communications infrastructure is general. It can be used to plan both legal and illegal activities, and it’s generally impossible to tell which is which. When I send and receive email, it looks exactly the same as a terrorist doing the same thing. To the mobile phone network, a call from one terrorist to another looks exactly the same as a mobile phone call from one victim to another. Any attempt to ban or limit infrastructure affects everybody. If India bans Google Earth, a future terrorist won’t be able to use it to plan; nor will anybody else. Open Wi-Fi networks are useful for many reasons, the large majority of them positive, and closing them down affects all those reasons. Terrorist attacks are very rare, and it is almost always a bad trade-off to deny society the benefits of a communications technology just because the bad guys might use it too.
