Secret Base Uncovered by Google Earth?

A post on the Corner caught my eye, and led me to this article at the UK Times Online.

According to the article:

The US was secretly flying unmanned drones from the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan as early as 2006, according to an image of the base from Google Earth.

The image — that is no longer on the site but which was obtained by The News, Pakistan's English language daily newspaper — shows what appear to be three Predator drones outside a hangar at the end of the runway. The Times also obtained a copy of the image, whose co-ordinates confirm that it is the Shamsi airfield, also known as Bandari, about 200 miles southwest of the Pakistani city of Quetta.

An investigation by The Times yesterday revealed that the CIA was secretly using Shamsi to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants around Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

Click through to read more.

One of the outcomes the digital age is that more and more and more information is available online -- often for free. The challenge now, it seems, is to be able to weed out the poor information (read: false, spun, out-dated, biased, etc.) from the good information, and to discern between those that are experts and knowledgeable and those that are not. I've been collecting different websites, online tools, and search engines that I have found useful; perhaps I'll share someday.

Information out on the web -- news articles, blog posts, video, maps, satellite images, audio files, and much much more -- can be used be anyone willing to take the time to search. Businesses can gather intelligence on their competitors; consumers can compare and contrast companies, services and products; news reporters can gather information from within and across borders; and governments can discover information about their allies and enemies.

In this case, someone used the freely-available Google Earth to discover what is claimed to be the presence of US Predator drones at a base in Pakistan. This type of discovery, done through an "open source," can lead to what is known as Open Source Intelligence. [It's not just the gathering of open information, but a process. Check out the Wikipedia article for more information.] This kind of discovery and "intelligence" may seem like second-nature to those of us who grew up in the Internet/Google age -- going online for information -- but this organized concept is spreading to all types of organizations.

Nice use of Google for OSINT. Look here for some other interesting things found on Google Streetview. What else do you use open source(s) for?

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