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Comment by hamolton | Hacker News Reader

Looks like OSM doesn't have a ton of data on US pipelines or water lines. It's understandable. I do wonder if tools like this would encourage more mapping of these.

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Alot of that info is probably already publicly available as GIS datasets. Many counties and cities have surprisingly good web interfaces to such information or at least will let you download it. Most people probably use it to look up land parcel information, but they usually include many more layers such hydrants, water and sewer, sometimes detailed local electrical grid info depending how local utilities operate.

Someone should make a crawler that specifically looks for GIS data on government pages and auto-adds it if passes sanity checks and is up-to-date.

Let me be the one to say: Open Street Map has had some difficult experiences with automated edits, and has developed a process to prevent such problems.

Creating such a bot might get edits reverted, unless done consistent with their policies: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Automated_edits

In addition, the licensing of "public" datasets is not always aligned with the Open Database License (ODbL) used by OpenStreetMap.

It's an issue faced by contributors globally.

For example you can see recent import and revert at https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=fire_station#... that is listing how many fire stations are mapped worldwide.

Some well meaning person imported outdated dataset of fire stations in USA. Quality of data was - lets say - not great.

certainly US legal questions apply, but what about other criteria? avoiding simplistic responses.. nations have responded differently to mapping and open maps. A recent UNGGIM report showed that close to fifteen (edit not thirty) percent of nations politically recognized worldwide, do not publish national maps themselves in any meaningful way. Next consider the case of the UK Commonwealth Nations, who generally considered maps and mapping to be Crown authorized only, until a certain date not long ago. Opposite to that is the nation of China, which I think forbids all mapping of anything at all, to be done or publicly published, without a license from the single political party government. Other interesting cases abound, in fact, most nations have unique stories and solutions.

I suggest we avoid simplistic responses or carefully worded trap questions from a Defense point of view only, and really engage in a civil manner, about a topic that does have Defense elements, but also real civilian elements, too.

The RAND report "Mapping the Risks" (2004) [1] finds that only 6% of sampled US federal GIS datasets were useful to an adversary wanting to attack US infrastructure. The datasets sampled were quite varied and included the obvious power, natural gas, etc infrastructure but also included less obvious datasets such as the location of hazardous chemicals. The report found that none of the GIS information provided to the public they sampled would be useful for adversaries, primarily because the information was readily available via other means that an adversary would prefer to use instead (e.g. [2] for how this was done in the cold war prior to satellite imagery becoming commonplace). The report also characterises the main barrier to a terrorist attack on infrastructure not being a lack of knowing where to attack, but rather, having the means to perform an attack that would have any significant effect. Knocking out a few power pylons here or there would be more of an inconvenience that could be quickly recovered from. By comparison, destroying the only factory in the world with machinery capable of producing a critical consumable component needed for power stations would be a more valuable target if it would take 5 years to recover supply of the component.

From a military point of view, the scorched earth tactic[3] of destroying infrastructure to disrupt an enemy force is out of favour because it also denies the victor from quickly rebuilding and stabilising a country[4]. Instead of blowing up power stations that could take a decade to rebuild, modern military forces would rather destroy a substation on a military base, such that the military base is rendered temporarily less useful. Due to the minor effect caused, within 12 months, the substation could be rebuilt and the the base repurposed for a new military force established by the victor. Invading military forces are not going to have difficulty identifying critical infrastructure used for military purposes which they should target, particularly because of the prevalence of satellite imagery.

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG142.html

[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth

[4] https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/infrastr...

Maps in Commonwealth countries made by their geophysical departments tend to have Crown copyright rather than Crown authorization. Unlike US government products which are by definition and law, not considered subject to copyright (ie are in the public domain).

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