On 7/12/07, R.C.Macaulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Howdy Vorts, Reading the MSN story describing how Google earth can give defense secrets away and how much info on military secrets is easily obtained on the web ...
Effectively there are not any military secrets anymore. Lidar/radar interferometry and other techniques makes everything public. Anything observable extraterritorially is per (at least military) definition public. The situation is so bad so someone just need to asses the situation based on the criteria that the technology will proliferate. It might not but that requires a change in the current trends. Some defense planners knew this way back when the new surveillance technology was conceived. Others just indulged in the seemingly extreme advantage these technologies gives.
Where a game plan exists, a counterplan exists, and the law of unintended consequences invades both plans. This results in defense secrets being posted on the web by the well intended.. however.. smart people in planning recognize the law and provide a skew to confuse.
That means that the defense planners have to replan. If they don't remind them or relabel the plans as expired. They should classifiy the former secret as exposed. Today in Sweden there is a crazy situation where the authorities falsify the domestic maps where something is by law forbidden to be photographed. This however has the obvious disadvantage that if the maps are compared they will actually disclose where the "secrets" are. The only valid reason to keep the former and current system om classified information is because some people still don't know the information. There is some insight. The concept of territorial abstraction has had some attention. The traditional division between military and civil is no longer working. Some also say that the division into strategic, tactic and operative is also no longer effective. This leads to blurring between the conditions of war and peace. Strictly speaking we are at war but there is not much fighting. There is a big imbalance between formal relations and effective relations. One outcome would be for parties to realize that we aren't separated. Another outcome is to realize that we are separate and that would require demanding measures to compensate the lost security with something else. This is not taking place. Illusory politicians still talk about defense cuts without realizing that the defense has been cut already and that it requires reestablishment. Even though I drive a Swedish interest in this I see no reason for other states to be misinformed about it. All states should be informed about their defense condition. It is to no help that some are illusory confident. That illusion will lead them t make wrong decisions and will increase insecurity even more. Nice to see someone addressing this issue. Not much of affiliations with vortex motion though. David
