Pike's Boner

John Pike practices disinformation that on a slime scale is a perfect ten. There is a big difference between something being available to a seasoned computer user, and making it easy for any terrorist bonehead to acquire potentially dangerous information.

Last year, John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which has an online repository of satellite imagery was asked by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Defense Department, to remove from his site some of the maps of cities in Iraq that the Coalition Provisional Authority had created for planning cellphone service...

"Google Earth is not acquiring new imagery," he said, "They are simply repurposing imagery that somebody else had already acquired. So if there was any harm that was going to be done by the imagery, it would already be done."

If this sort of thinking were taken to its ultimate conclusion, detailed plans for atomic bomb making should be made available to all because the information can be readily found by those with the necessary chops for acquiring and utilizing such information.

John Pike is a classic scientific bonehead with an ax to grind. Pay him no attention whatsoever.