[talk-au] tennis court land

John Smith deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 22 19:21:08 GMT 2010


On 23 February 2010 04:23, James Andrewartha <trs80 at student.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> A Perth street map I have has the path of the Dampier-Bunbury gas
> pipeline mapped. Now that's a clear target and isn't even readily
> visible in real life, but there doesn't seem to be a problem with it
> being mapped. So I don't think it's something we need to worry about.
> The locations of telephone exchanges are widely available, people use
> them to work out how fast their ADSL should be.

I don't think it matters what gets mapped, since someone some where
can probably figure out something that would disrupt peoples lives if
they put their mind to it.

Excluding things from maps will hardly deter someone suitably
determined, anyone with half a brain cell planning on doing something
nefarious isn't going to rely on maps, they'll do proper surveillance,
and maybe even look at aerial imagery. :)

People keep pointing out potential targets, but in reality most of
these are very low threats as they generally have very low impact, in
fact the better the infrastructure is mapped the less accidents are
likely to occur from councils digging up phone lines and what not,
which will prevent much more inconvenience than any attack would
cause.

>From an infrastructure point of view the threat is generally
economical terrorism, blowing up a phone exchange doesn't have much of
an impact, it may inconvenience people but it certainly won't instill
fear in the masses.

If people are truly worried about this then you need to look at what
would cause the most inconvience for the least amount of effort, which
would be the power infrastructure.

Numerous reports have highlighted in the past that the electricity
grids are usually the most vulnerable and would have the most impact
if attacked, and there was an interesting report released some time
ago from the Pakistan Government concerned about this, they estimated
it would cost about US$500 to mount a successful attack. You can do
some pretty nasty things to power grids on the cheap and you don't
even need to be in the immediate vicinity of the target to do this.

Even with the knowledge of what could occur, I don't think there is
any justification for not mapping power lines and power stations, most
of which is easy to find already by the power companies own websites.
In fact by better mapping things it could reduce accidents to the
point that nefarious activities are cheaper than dealing with constant
damage from back hoes etc.




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