Google Earth Uncovers Secret UK Nuke Base 240
thefickler writes "Gone are the days when governments could easily hide top secret bases. These days it's a weekend pastime to see who can find top secret facilities using Google Earth. Now it's the UK government's turn to be outraged after a secret facility was revealed by a British tabloid. The facility is said to be located in Faslane on the River Clyde in Scotland. This nuclear base was previously blurred out by the request of the British Government. However, with the latest update provided via Google Earth, many of the blurred out locations were accidentally revealed."
Update: 3/08 at 14:24 by SS: Multiple readers have pointed out that the issue here is not the location of the base — it's simply that details of buildings and objects within the base (such as the location of a pair of nuclear submarines) are accidentally visible after the UK government specifically requested they be blurred out.
"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Insightful)
Oooh... like that huge bottle-green and cream building with all the satellite dishes on top was invisible to the tens of thousands of commuters who pass by it on the railroad every day.
Everybody knows where these things are anyway. The newspapers are just having a slow day, so let's take another whack at technology/Google/the Internet.
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Funny)
Back when that building was used in the Bond film, HIGNFY reported: "MI6 were concerned the film might reveal the location of... one of London's most distinctive landmarks"
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Insightful)
And who in their right mind thinks that a foreign nation doesn't already know the existence, location and layout of various bases around the world?
Some bribes or joint ventures later and information exceeding the information available at Google Earth is widespread.
Blurring a satellite or air photo today is just a giveaway since two different distributions never have the same blurring and that tells others that this is a site of interest.
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Insightful)
What the gov't is pissed off about is that you can see 2 nuclear subs docked ... scroll up to the top of the bay, zoom in.
Sure, foreign governments probably already have assets on the ground keeping watch of the ebb and flow of traffic, but it's nice to have visible confirmation (you can confirm the date of the pictures by using shadows - every day, the shadows will be slightly different as the sun appears to trace a slightly different arc in the sky).
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Really? Afghanistan has satellites? Where'd they get them from - in a box of Girl Guide Cookies?
UK nuclear subs are equipped with BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles. And they HAVE been used by the UK Navy against Afghanistan ... and Kosovo [wikipedia.org]
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. The day you have to actually launch a strategic nuclear attack is the day that your nuclear submarine fleets' actual purpose - which is to be enough of a threat to retaliate in the event of such an attack (see Mutually Assured Destruction) - is over. The submarine fleet will have failed in its' primary goal, which is to be a credible enough threat to PREVENT a nuclear attack.
The nuclear submarine fleet's second purpose is to protect the rest of the naval fleet, allies, and shipping, both by being the "joker in the hole" against other forces, and against other subs.
The third purpose is, as I've mentioned elsewhere, to do stand-off attacks via cruise missiles, which they (UK submarines) HAVE launched against targets in Afghanistan.
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:4, Insightful)
Any foreign government with an interest in this information HAS IT'S OWN SURVEILLANCE SATELLITES. They are not going to use Google, which can be months out of date, when they can get real time images. Even Iran has the capacity to launch these now. And anyone else can just pay a small fee to one of several commercial satellite surveillance services, not all of which are beholden to the UK government.
Of course, TFA talks about "terrorists" targeting the subs with rockets. Right. Could terrorists get that kind of weapon into the UK and close to a nuclear weapons installation? I find it hard to believe. But there is an infinite number of soft targets they could hit with greater hope of doing damage and less risk.
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Not true.
UK nuclear subs have launched cruise missiles against both Kosovo and Afghanistan. If these countries have satellite surveillance, it's got to be one of the best-kept secrets in the world. Citizen, it is your duty to report this new Afghani satellite capability.
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In this game, NO information is useless in the right hands.
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It doesn't matter if the data is months behind - its usefulness in this case is to confirm what ground-based assets have already told you. If they told you that, at that date,
Except that you often don't know the date, since the maps are a patchwork of satellite imagery. If you check the maps (or other people's comments), you'll see that these subs are visible from public roads. If you can get pictures of something on the ground, old satellite imagery doesn't really add much information.
And as I pointed out (with links elsewhere in this thread), the UK has already used their nuclear subs to launch cruise missle attacks against targets in Afghanistan. Please don't confuse "primary purpose" with "only purpose." ... Subs make a better launch platform than surface ships - you can move them into the area without alerting your target,
This is really grasping for straws. Afghanistan is 400 miles from the nearest ocean, and US planes can already fly around that country, so you could just drop a bomb on something. Cruise missi
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, TFA talks about "terrorists" targeting the subs with rockets. Right. Could terrorists get that kind of weapon into the UK and close to a nuclear weapons installation?
They've got the weapons, they don't need to get them into the UK, there's a sea route past Arran, looks like there's a torpedoe net around the subs but I'm sure a shoulder mounted SAM would do enough damage to put them out of action for a while.
I think I'd have asked that the subs be duplicated a few hundred times around the coast line instead. Now that's a deterrent!
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Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Funny)
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You should read TFA... they're asking google to blur real life as well.
d
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:4, Informative)
And who in their right mind thinks that a foreign nation doesn't already know the existence, location and layout of various bases around the world?
It reminds me of the story (reported in various tech journals but not so much in the MSM) back in the 1970s about the US DoD funding a study by some university people of what could be learned about US military sites and activity from public sources like newspapers, libraries, etc. The story was that a couple of profs (i.e., their grad students) spent a year perusing such public information sources, wrote up their report, sent it in - and with a few days, it was classified Top Secret.
When I read that, I did wonder how many offers of employment the profs (and their grad students) got from various foreign governments. It seemed to me that it could become a viable career path for a small number of people. But I never read any followups.
Now I wonder how much you could learn by just googling for the information. And if you sent your summary report to the DoD, how quickly would it get classified?
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, but the UK has never been that big on keeping their secret nuclear bunkers very secret: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mimram/122464288/ [flickr.com]
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All absolute bollocks.
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The best Doughnut story I've heard was in the local rag recently (last year or two.) Apparently some contractors (plasterers, chippies, "allied building crafts") forgot the car-park pass on their van one morning. Rather than waste time explaining this at the gatehouse, filling in forms, et cetera ad nauseam, they decided to show a little initiative and cut through the tangled web of form-filling. They parked up in a nearby side street and attempted to /vault the fence/...
Cue a few dropped cups of coffee, wa
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Countries, just tell this large American corporation all the things you don't want anyone to know about.
Not to mention all the webbased email accounts hosting in America, does anyone think that the FBI doesn't have a direct thunk to the Googleplex?
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In theory Google could also do quite well in the financial markets using their info, since lots of people actually use Google to look up financial info.
Re:"Also revealed are MI6's London offices" (Score:4, Funny)
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You think the submarines are still there? (Score:2)
Google earth data is usually very old. Last I heard, nuclear submarines tend to move around.
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There's a permanent protest camp just outside it.
This is about an article from the Sun
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There are often nuclear subs at Plymouth too though I don't know if it is a permanent base or just a refit facility. In fact there is some controversy in the local newspaper [thisisplymouth.co.uk] this week as a reactor from HMS Vanguard is being cut up for disposal in the dockyard.
I used google search (Score:5, Funny)
Blurred out by request (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't that just mean that a whole chain of people at Google now know the location is sensitive and could turn around and pass on that information?
If they ask to have it Photoshopped into non-existence then you know you've got really hot property!
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Doesn't that just mean that a whole chain of people at Google now know the location is sensitive and could turn around and pass on that information?
Not if the government is smart enough to request enough blurs, with some of them being duds.
Besides, it's really hard to hide the existence of a facility in a densely populated area such as South England. The best you can hope for is to hide some of the internal details.
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I guess it wasn't that secret after all... Anyone with access to the original pictures could discover the base, and as you mention the people at Google were given at least a huge hint that it is lying there.
I wouldn't call anything secret is a whole bunch of people with no connection to the base in question that have the information to find it. Sure, with more eyes looking something hidden might become easily uncovered, I guess that's part of the reason they requested the blurring, but once they made that h
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Perhaps, but Google also know the enforcement people's browsing habits, so no enforcement will be done.
You can't really hide big things :) (Score:2)
Doesn't that just mean that a whole chain of people at Google now know the location is sensitive and could turn around and pass on that information?
Don't you think the workers who built the place knows where it is, or did they bury them when they were done building it?
It's not like you can easily hide big things when thousands of people are involved in building and maintaining them... Perhaps it's just better to let it be a public secret...
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Building a facility, and knowing what will be inside it are two completely different things.
"You're here to build an office building, a big warehouse, and a large dock"
Big deal. It could be moving plastic dog turds from China, or ... well ... a base for storing nukes and docking nuclear submarines. :)
If the folks requesting the work to be done did their job right, the cover story will adequately explain the facility.
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Of course you can.
What about the enemies? (Score:4, Funny)
Do the enemy nations also blur their secret bases at the request of the british government?
Re:What about the enemies? (Score:5, Funny)
Most nations can't afford the 18,558,720 pixel wide brush required.
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But they can afford to pay my employer a few dollars to get their own picture of the site.
We aqcuire and sell satellite imagery of the location of your choice. If the weather is nice enough you can expect an image within hours of ordering.
We are also downlinking most of the imagery used by Google...
These things are availible commercially for anyone and for any purpose.
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And that's downright cheap when it comes to government spending!
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Exactly. I'm not sure when exactly Google's commercially available, unclassified satellite maps became any kind of threat compared to actual spy photography.
At least with the "soft targets" argument some days back, you could argue that terrorists don't have access to a well-equipped intelligence apparatus and rely on commercial maps. (The argument is still expertly defeated by Schneier's explanation how we cannot cripple our infrastructure in favor of security, though.)
With top-secret nuclear bases, on the
I NEVER KNEW IT WAS THERE! (Score:5, Funny)
Now all the mystery of the road signs, American Service personnel, people mentioning it in the media and the submarines sailing up and down the Clyde is solved.
WHO KNEW!!!!!
Re:I NEVER KNEW IT WAS THERE! (Score:5, Funny)
"the submarines sailing up and down the Clyde"
That certainly shoots down the "very large manatees" cover story.
Bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
SPOILER ALERT: Faslane is not a "secret" facility. It's the level and quality of imagery that's the problem. Good old /. editing at its finest, I had to actually check for a second that it wasn't actually another kdawson...in any case this "news" is at least a week old.
The actual article in The Sun (Score:5, Informative)
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As usual, El Reg [theregister.co.uk] has useful commentary
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Nnah, it was in the princes Diana memorial edition.
Re:The actual article in The Sun (Score:5, Funny)
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You have to love the complete misunderstanding of Google's explanation of blank areas. Google says "The lines are where the boat scanned, the gaps are where it didn't". The Sun says "Google can't explain the gaps".
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a reaction commentary by none other than Plato accompanies the story. You can't make shit like this up... because The Sun does it for you.
Maybe Atlantis was a republic?
Wonder what Pluto thought of that?
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for a moment there, I thought there was breaking news of a supernova visible in the skies above!
Public secrets (Score:5, Funny)
The places the government publicise that they want to keep secret aren't actually secret at all. They're a façade. Then there's the somewhat secret stuff that the government denies exists. The real secret stuff is the stuff the government never mentions.
Never heard the government mention their lunar base with telescopes that can see through the roofs of buildings and spy on you on the toilet? That's pretty much proof they've got one, but it's a secret!
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It is a secret runway used by the Royal Airforce to launch unmanned drones equipped with CCTVs. This allows Her Majesty's government to cover the few areas that have not yet had permanent CCTV cameras installed.
The Faslane nuclear submarine facility is used for cover.
so secret they have their own public website! (Score:5, Informative)
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Not only do they have a nicely put together public website, you can learn all about their secret ways in Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese! For defectors maybe...?
Oddly enough, no option for French.
Re:so secret they have their own public website! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure which one makes you look like more of an idiot--the fact that "kdawson" isn't two words, or the fact that the story was posted by timothy.
Re:so secret they have their own public website! (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe he meant two syllables?
Under cover. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ooh, like the Russians never knew there was a submarine base at Faslane before...
Since Sputnik went up, governments have known that secret locations wouldn't be secret for long. And if the Russians can photograph it, they can sell the photos to terrorists. Google will get them sometime after.
If governments want to do stuff in secret they know they have to do it undercover. There's a big covered dock right next to the two obvious submarines on the Faslane google maps imagery. That's where the secret stuff happens. Until we get Google Thermal Imagery Earth, of course.
Anyone know what the circular mounds are to the north of the base?
Re:Under cover. (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone know what the circular mounds are to the north of the base?
I could probably tell you that those are the Top Secret military pancake storage facilities, but then you would have to be blurred out on google maps too.
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And if the Russians can photograph it, they can sell the photos to terrorists. Google will get them sometime after.
Which reminds me of the TerraServer [terraserver-usa.com] sat images, that IIRC were bought by Microsoft from the Russians (after the wall came down). Makes sense, good pictures of the US you buy from the ruskies and for high quality pictures of Moskou you go to the CIA.
OK, where to begin. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of the other locations revealed are MI6â(TM)s London offices, Britainâ(TM)s nuclear crisis HQ and the SAS training facility. Apparently the UK Government is worried that terrorists could potentially launch missile attacks to those target areas with the exact coordinates readily available on the Internet.
So, the UK Government is actually saying, "Oops! You got us! That's exactly what they are! As matter of act, those buildings are exactly what you think they are and then some! What what! Cheers!"
Could these buildings be not very important and the UK gov is making them seem more important to distract everyone from the real targets? I don't see anything that makes that facility ultra secure like you'd expect for someplace that is that sensitive. Look how close it is to the highway (A814)? Here in the States, there'd be a HUGE driveway or access road so that someone couldn't just park at the side and lob a mortar shell over or what have you.
A tabloid said this? A PRINTED tabloid that will do anything to increase circulation; especially in this economy?!?
I could go on but I'm sick of typing.
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The UK would protect anyone with real skills in the 'safe' part of a structure.
Anyone or anything else can be replaced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Newry_mortar_attack [wikipedia.org]
Re:OK, where to begin. (Score:4, Interesting)
WTF? Hidden? (Score:5, Informative)
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For more info, read the 4-part series on secret bases:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan-turnbull/secret.htm [ntlworld.com]
Well since big brother can be watching us... (Score:4, Insightful)
.....so can us little brothers be watching big brother... No double standards here.
Of the 6 plus billion people on this planet, it is some fraction of 1% that messes things up for the rest of us.
Its about time we start watching them..
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.....so can us little brothers be watching big brother... No double standards here.
Of the 6 plus billion people on this planet, it is some fraction of 1% that messes things up for the rest of us.
Its about time we start watching them..
It's about time we start whacking them.
There ya go, fixed that for ya!
Missile guidances systems like clear pictures (Score:2)
Good aerial photos of potential military targets are extremely useful to missile guidance systems. Even if you use a non-visual guidance system, the high resolution photos are excellent for locating a base very precisely and adjusting inertial guidance systems. And the same issues apply to potential civilian protest or enemy sabotage at nuclear facilities: good quality aerial photos are very useful for plotting the location of the nuclear materials, access routes, security facilities, places to hide, and es
Re:Missile guidances systems like clear pictures (Score:4, Interesting)
The only people left that haven't a clue about what goes on in dockyards at Faslane are the British Taxpayers. Everyone else has spies there and photographs the place as needed.
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Also from US military (Score:5, Informative)
There are better pictures courtesy of the US military
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/~cannon/medports/Faslane/HMNB_picture.html [navy.mil]
About as un-secret as could possibly be (Score:2)
The submitter is clueless. The 'British tabloid' is a scandal rag not above inventing a controversy. Everyone knows where Faslane is. Everyone knows what is there. Do you think no-one has wondered where all the nuclear subs dock? Where do you think the Russian missiles spent 50 years targeting during the cold war, (and may even still do)?
Murdoch anti-google agenda? (Score:2)
Conspiracy theory anyone? Microsoft Virtual Earth has better and more recent imagery than Google Earth - there's some obvious new earthworks. No mention of MS Virtual Earth in The Sun. What's the Fox/MS relationship?
Flash New Update (Score:2, Funny)
Rubbish story (Score:2)
Google Takeover (Score:2)
haha talk about FUD (Score:2)
Blurred out on the map == (Score:3, Funny)
Secret nuclear base... (Score:2)
...ah, you mean this one? [exec-comms.com]
From TFA (Score:2)
""If people are really determined to target these sites they can find these images and there is nothing we can do to stop them." - MOD spokesman
In short, "people can get their hands on these images without Google"
They should slap a Coke logo over it... (Score:3, Funny)
BFD (Score:2)
Nothing special (Score:5, Interesting)
During most of the cold war, you would think that the superpowers would be cognizant of satellite spying. These days, there's ever more satellites out there so governments should take necessary safeguards. There were stories about how the Soviet missile sites were easily detectable on by satellite photos.
First of all, a nuclear missile is expensive. You probably want high security around it. According to Soviet protocols, three layers of fencing are standard. Also to get the missile to the site, it has to be a delicate operation. You can't haul them over rocky and uneven terrain. Unlike the West, the Soviets didn't build roads to everywhere, only where they were necessary. Also the missile launchers were loaded onto trucks that required a wide turning radius.
So American intelligence found 1) a paved road to the middle to nowhere, 2) wide turning radii in the road, and 3) three layers of fencing at the endpoint of the road, they found a missile site.
Google censorship of Washington reduced. (Score:3)
There's been progress. At one time, Google blurred the roof of the White House. That was just silly, and that stopped some time ago. The entire U.S. Naval Observatory area in Washington was blurred while Cheney lived there, but it's not blurred as much now. In fact, there's even a marker for "One Observatory Circle". There remains some blurring, though, and it ends just outside Observatory Circle.
The big change is that StreetView is now available for the Washington area.
Submarines move occasionally..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Geez.. if you look at the imagery date in GE, it's March 13, 2003!!! Last time I heard, submarines move around a bit.. especially over 6 flippin' years!!
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That plane is flying kinda low, innit? If you zoom out about half-way, you see the transition between aerial photos and satellite photos.
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The UK government had to negotiate more with dockyards in the area rather than the local populace.
Plus I can't think of a place where a nuclear accident wouldn't have an impact on the population
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There's a couple of places I could name where the radioactivity might do the gene pool a favour.
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Because the water isn't deep enough to hide a fully submerged sub close to the shore that could surface inside a special base or structure.
It's not James Bond - secret lairs with perfect terrain for your plans are not easy to come by.
It's no secret that the base is the home base for the nuclear deterrent, and it is no surprise that subs will occasionally be berthed there. The real secrets about the subs is not where they make their home, but when they are in the oceans when they're not in Scotland.