A satellite view of Area 51. ©2007 Google Earth™ mapping service/DigitalGlobe
Want To See China’s Latest Top Secret Military Site? Just Google It -- Dan Kedmey, Time
It’s spy vs. spy vs. blogger in the brave new world of online intelligence gathering
In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s May Day Parade gave American spies an intelligence bonanza. As the latest Soviet fighter planes streaked overhead, U.S. diplomatic staff, scattered among the crowd, furiously snapped photos of the planes from miles below. With the advent of satellite technology, they no longer had to wait for the Soviet Army’s world premiere, as they could snap photos of secret military sites from space. The pictures astounded Lyndon Johnson, who learned that previous estimates of Soviet missile counts were hugely inflated. “We were building things that we didn’t need to build,” Johnson said at the time. “We were harboring fears that we didn’t need to have.”
Imagine, then, what his response might have been to the latest upheaval in intelligence gathering, whereby high-definition pictures of secret military installation turn up online, on obscure corners of the web, for anyone to see. “The grainy photos that they were getting from those spy satellites were nothing compared to what you can get from Google Earth,” says Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution. Singer and his co-researcher, Jeffrey Lin, recently wrote an analysis of China’s latest covert project, its first home-made aircraft carrier, based on nothing but photos pulled from blogs. With a little Googling, anyone can find them.
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My Comment: I concur with this analysis .... I now have access to information that one could only dream about 20 years ago.
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