Am Di., 22. Dez. 2020 um 10:12 Uhr schrieb Edward Bainton <
bainton@gmail.com>:
>
> Dangerous: I think there's a risk that by saying, "please follow local
> laws" (rather than saying nothing), we open ourselves to accusations of not
> policing "our" mappers properly. You can imagine the military attaché of
> some country emailing OSMF to say, "That request is very weak. I think you
> should toughen it up. In fact, here is a list of mappers whose edits I want
> you to revert because, ***by your own policy***, they should not have
> made them in breach of our laws".
>
question is, what would OSMF do when the Chinese government approaches them
and says, "this is the list of mappers that have illegally added things to
OSM, please help us identifying them by providing their email addresses,
etc." and what would they do if it was the French government? Or the
British? Imagine they claim it is for finding terrorists, or somehow
connected to national security. Or simply an offense. We would likely not
be able to reject any of these when coming from the British authorities (or
from someone else proxied through them). Are there board rules how to deal
with such cases? Has it ever happened so far? As far as I know (not really
far actually) in Britain there is the legal possibility of gag orders, i.e.
if the thing is considered "secret" authorities can order OSMF to not even
speak about it.
>
> A warning along the lines of "Mapping military sites is sometimes illegal
> under laws of that country" would be ok, but I would much prefer not even
> to do that. I haven't been on the lists long, but I don't recall anyone
> saying "I've just been interrogated for mapping this base without realising
> that was illegal - please don't do it!" On my information there's no
> problem to solve - just worries about "what ifs" - and so we should say
> nothing.
>
In Italy I have once seen a sign which said something along the lines of
"military area, survey forbidden, also by memory", while it usually says
something like "no photographs". I would bet that surveying military
installations in great detail is probably forbidden in any country, but the
level of detail that is allowed may vary by large. It is also very common
to not be able to take photographs.
For instance I would guess that mapping the facilities that are blacked out
in this image could get you into trouble:
https://yorkshirecnd.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/sigint-cryptologic-platform-768x575.jpg
Cheers
Martin
___
legal-talk mailing list
legal-talk@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
