A top-secret base in Taiwan, revealed on Apple Maps. The Navy SEALs’ rehearsal site for the Osama bin Laden raid, found on Bing. Once again, commercial satellites have snapped images of things that governments would rather hide from public view. And once again, those governments are finding that there’s not much they can do once this sensitive imagery ends up online.
The big technology companies and their mapping apps have been turning generals red-faced for the better part of a decade by posting on the net pictures of sensitive locations. Back in 2009, the Pakistani press blew the lid off of the U.S. drone campaign there by publishing Google Earth pictures of a local airbase — with American Predators parked on the runway. This summer, orbital images appeared online of a stealthy and previously undisclosed robotic aircraft at Lockheed Martin’s “Skunkworks” facility.
Still, it was a bit of shock Tuesday when internet sleuths noticed on Bing Maps the mock compound where members of SEAL Team Six rehearsed their mission to kill Osama bin Laden. Matt Bissonette, a member of that team, mentioned the place in his memoir, No Easy Day. (The full-scale model was so realistic, he wrote, that ”construction crews put in mounded dirt to simulate the potato fields that surrounded the compound.”) But Bissonette didn’t mention where the compound was, specifically — only somewhere in the North Carolina woods.
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