Google Blurring Sensitive Map Information

Cyphoid writes "While viewing my school (the University of Massachusetts Lowell) with Google Maps, I noticed that a select portion of the campus was pixelated: the operational nuclear research facility on campus. Curious, I attempted to view the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It too was pixelated. What or who is compelling Google to smudge out these images selectively? Will all satellite images of facilities that the government deems 'sensitive' soon be subject to censoring?" Not surprisingly, the same areas are blurred in Google Earth. But how about images from satellites operated by other nations, such as SPOT or Sovinformsputnik?

MassGIS

[pHZero]

Google Maps gets the Massachusetts aerial photos from MassGIS http://www.mass.gov/mgis [mass.gov]

I believe you will find they are the blurring culprits if you download the latest aerial photos done by a 2005 fly by.

Old news in The Netherlands

[BaatZ]

This is old news for dutchmen; when the latest satellite image update swept over holland last may, newspapers were full of reports with government buidlings being pixelated (uitgesmeerd ;) ). All military terrain is censored, the royal palaces, nuclear facilities and even some corporate chemical plants. They're all nicely placemarked in Google Earth if youn want to inspect for yourself.

Re:MassGIS

[markb]

You're right. I don't think Google is the one censoring the photos. For a counter example, check out the photos of the White House on Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth (http://local.live.com). Google's images (from a private source) do not appear to be censored, but Microsoft's (from the USGS, I believe) are heavily edited.

Re:MassGIS

[avdp]

Not too long ago, it used to be that the White House and Capitol (and others) were blurred on Google too. I remember getting a kick out of search for those "special sites" on Google and see if they missed any. I guess they've switched their source of data for Washington, DC....

Re:Not Just for Nukes

[Anonymous Coward]

Google maps doesnt have high resolution pictures of the entire earth. They only get the high res pics of places that people care about, which doesn't include Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

Re:MassGIS

[novus ordo]

Google surely [telegraph.co.uk] wouldn't censor it's maps on request by an interested party.

Re:MassGIS

[rizzo420]

nope, it's not google... the millstone nuclear power plant [google.com] in CT is not pixelated.

details for you

[r00t]

This thing probably got caught up in a general order to obscure ALL nuclear plants.

It's a really lame little plant, with barely any fuel. The white thing is a metal containment dome, attached to a 3-story or 4-story research building. It's about 4 stories tall. They give tours; you can look down into a pool of water to see the glowing blue core. It's called the Pinanski Energy Center.

Attacking this plant would do nothing of any real interest, though some idiots would surely freak out. The radiation source is deep below ground and really weak.

Most of the obscured area is just a parking lot. The research building extends to the northwest of the white reactor; they are attached. The area to the southwest is a parking lot for that building and the adjacent ones. The area to the northeast is a parking lot for the gym, which you can see with the white rectangle on the roof. The farthest west obscured area is a pedestrian overpass at the 3rd-floor level that runs between two unrelated buildings, the physics building (north) and engineering building (south). Most everything in the area is 4-story.

There are far more interesting things on campus that a person could attack, starting with the dorms!

You can find pictures on the web, including a lame attack by ABC news.

http://www.uml.edu/maps/pinanski.htm [uml.edu]
http://www.uml.edu/student-services/disability/ada services/north_campus/pinanski_hall.html [uml.edu]
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/LooseNukes/story?i d=988778 [go.com]

Say What?

[DrJimbo]

AC said:

This is very similar to news reporters reporting in Iraq back in 1991. They were perched up on top of hotel's miles away from the battle front, and reporting the precise position, direction, and numbers of the US forces. This information, freely available on CNN gave the enemy real time reports on the US troop movement and lost many US lives because of US reporters not thinking about their actions.

Can you provide any credible references for this claim? I had never heard this before and Google has not given me any leads.

The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] does not mention media caused American deaths but it does tell us that of the 147 American deaths, 41 (28%) were killed by either friendly-fire or allied munitions. The Wikipedia does report [wikipedia.org]:

U.S. policy regarding media freedom was much more restrictive than in the Vietnam War. The policy had been spelled out in a Pentagon document entitled Annex Foxtrot. Most of the press information came from briefings organized by the military. Only selected journalists were allowed to visit the front lines or conduct interviews with soldiers. Those visits were always conducted in the presence of officers, and were subject to both prior approval by the military and censorship afterward. This was ostensibly to protect sensitive information from being revealed to Iraq, but often in practice it was used to protect politically embarrassing information from being revealed.

It seems to me that the lack of troop movement information caused more American deaths than any CNN news reports. It also appears that you've been taken in by anti-free-press FUD that was used as an excuse to even further curtail objective reporting in the current Gulf War. But if you have credible evidence to the contrary, please share it with us.

On the other hand, I agree with you that it is probably a good idea for Google Earth to be blurry around nuke plants.

Re:Simcurity

[Anonymous Coward]

"So you're saying we should pay no attention to the simplest and easiest of security measures because a potential adversary could take more agressive action."

No, I think he's saying that these "security measures" are not security measures at all. They're not simple security measures. They're imaginary security measures.

"That's like saying it's okay to have a sticky note with the root password on a critical server as long as you keep the firewall updated."

It's more like saying that your critical server isn't protected at all by the paper mesh screen you put in front of it -- especially since you left a sticky note with the root password on the keyboard and you never update the firewall.

And as other posters have mentioned, blurring out these areas is actually pointing out to potential adversaries that they are worthy targets. It's not even increasing security the tiniest bit; it's decreasing security.

Re:details for you

[rlazarus]

I work at the research reactor at Reed College, which isn't blurred on Google Maps. Incidentally, we were mentioned by that ABC story, which was (for the record) totally ridiculous. Pure FUD, with the "uncertainty" no doubt referring to the fact that they clearly had no idea what they were talking about. We got a copy of the segment, and we show it at reactor parties for a laugh. :)

No Sense

[LoneWlf794]

This makes no sense whatsoever. Why would you blur "sensitive information" in this way? I understand that this is not Google doing this, nor have I said that it is, I direct this to whoever the culprit(s) may be .If you have a single building blurred then there is absolutely no advantage to that. You have the building around it well within 100 yards to use as landmarks if you wanted to find the building, you can get a general view of the surroundings of the building from the map, and then the actual building itself I'm sure you could find pictures of elsewhere or just survey it personally as it's on a college campus.

Re:MassGIS

[Ucklak]

Why does the smoke appear to be saturated?

A coal powered plant [google.com] in Cartersvile, Georgia is the same way.

Re:MassGIS

[avdp]

I think the blurring probably had to do more with what's on the roof of the white house (rather than where it's located, which everybody knows), and some level of paranoia that an attacker would benefit from being able to make that out. It's my understanding they have quite a bit of weaponry up there to defend from potential attacker both from the ground and from the air (that, or I watch too many movies).

Lewiston, ME: See for yourself.

[Kadin2048]

Well, in the example I was talking about, you can look at Yahoo's and decide for yourself. It looks suspiciously intentional to me, because it's a blob right in the middle of a lot of high-rez imagery that's suddenly pixellated, centered right over the bridge, but I suppose there could be less nefarious (but seemingly less likely) reasons.

Here's Yahoo's (apparently censored) version:
http://maps.yahoo.com/index.php#q1=lewiston%2C+mai ne&trf=0&mvt=s&lon=-70.22285&lat=44.097109&mag=4 [yahoo.com] (I hope this link brings it up correctly)

And here's Google's, as close as I can match it:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=lewiston,+ maine&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=14&ll=44.10127,-70.22727&spn= 0.045795,0.107288&t=k&iwloc=addr [google.com]

It's interesting to note that Google's source for the images is the Maine Office of GIS. Yahoo's doesn't list a source that I can see, but the photos look dramatically different (they look like they were taken during the summer or late spring -- hence, green -- instead of the winter or early spring / mud season of Google's).

The "censoring" in Yahoo's takes out not only the bridge and the Maine Hydro plant at Great Falls, which is the only even halfway "strategic" target in that area, but also a whole lot of the industrial buildings on the Lewiston (east) side, which if memory serves are mostly abandoned, with one shoe factory. On the Auburn (west, left) side, most of a city park is obscured. They're applying the blur tool rather liberally, if that's what they're doing.

Re:MassGIS

[Nef]

Because it's not 'smoke'. It's water vapor from cooling towers and if the angle of the sun is just right, it'll give it the bloom effect naturally, making it appear as though the brightness of the water vapor plume has been fiddled with.

Re:A blur is almost as good as a bullseye

[Captain Zep]

What you are talking about is deconvolution.

Tends to be very noise and quantisation sensitive, so you can remove/reduce the blurring, but tend to get lots of artefacts instead. Probably isn't going to work too well on 8-bit compressed image data, but would be interesting to see how far it could be pushed.

Restoring images of numbers on cheques is a lot easier than restoring fine detail in a map, since your numbers become readable even when still significantly blurred.

Z.

Re:Other nuclear plants unblurred...

[gone.fishing]

Montecello MN is fine too: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=600+Rocky+ Hill+Rd,+Plymouth,+Ma&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=16&ll=41.9439 79,-70.577717&spn=0.009113,0.024934&t=h [google.com]

Censorship

[mindwar23]

At least their censorship doesn't include blurring out anything based on obscenity [google.co.uk].