Yandex Maps Blurs Military Installations Which Brings Attention to Secret Facilities

cageymaru

cageymaru

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Russia's premier mapping service, Yandex Maps, has started blurring images of all military installations in Israel and Turkey. This includes small military installations in the middle of cities that weren't previously known to be a military property. Now anyone can just look on the Yandex maps and find all the secret military installations in Israel and Turkey. Of course Russia doesn't have its secret military installations blurred out as this would immediately bring attention to them.

Fortunately (from an OSINT perspective), this has had the unintended effect of revealing the location and exact perimeter of every significant military facility within both countries, if one is obsessive curious enough to sift through the entire map looking for blurry patches. Matching the blurred sites to un-blurred (albeit downgraded) imagery available through Google Earth is a method of "tipping and cueing," in which one dataset is used to inform a more detailed analysis of a second dataset. My complete list of blurred sites in both Israel and Turkey totals over 300 distinct buildings, airfields, ports, bunkers, storage sites, bases, barracks, nuclear facilities, and random buildings.
 
So how did Yandex get access to a list of secret military facilities excatly? Israel and Turkey wouldn't have told them where secret hidden facilities are only to have them become known in the process.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
So how did Yandex get access to a list of secret military facilities excatly? Israel and Turkey wouldn;t have told them were secret hidden facilities are only to have them become known in the process.
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According to the article it was most likely at their request, yes.
 
“Our mapping product in Israel conforms to the national public map published by the government of Israel as it pertains to the blurring of military assets and locations,” a Yandex spokesperson told Quartz. “Our Turkish map product observes local rules and regulations similarly.”
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As I explained in my previous piece about geolocating Israeli Patriot batteries, a 1997 US law known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA) prohibits US companies from publishing satellite imagery of Israel at a Ground Sampling Distance lower than what is commercially available.

Foreign mapping services like Russia’s Yandex are legally not subject to the KBA, but they tend to stick to the 2m resolution rule regardless, likely for two reasons. Firstly, after 20 years the KBA standard has become somewhat institutionalized within the satellite imagery industry. And secondly, Russian companies (and the Russian state) are surely wary of doing anything to sour Russia’s critical relationship with Israel.
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Huh, sucks if you're trying to navigate Israel https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TorontoJerusalem.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl–Bingaman_Amendment
 
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Google had some images blurred the same way. Until governments realized that blurring some areas actually makes them more visible, not less, so they stopped blurring military targets altogether.
 
Well, from the one pic, I can say that Turkey is violating the Geneva Convention with putting a military facility in the middle of a civilian residential area like that, using civilians as shields.
 
dgingeri said:
Well, from the one pic, I can say that Turkey is violating the Geneva Convention with putting a military facility in the middle of a civilian residential area like that, using civilians as shields.
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ahem, let me reassign it as 'diplomatic' then ..no wait

'ancillary facilities for the ministry of urban planning and welfare'
 
so when is russia going to up the trolling and have them start to blur out targets.. i mean military sites, in ukraine?
 
dgingeri said:
Well, from the one pic, I can say that Turkey is violating the Geneva Convention with putting a military facility in the middle of a civilian residential area like that, using civilians as shields.
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The Geneva convention doesn't come into play if your dead.
 
dgingeri said:
Well, from the one pic, I can say that Turkey is violating the Geneva Convention with putting a military facility in the middle of a civilian residential area like that, using civilians as shields.
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Well, if that's the case, the US would be screwed. A majority of any US military bases that are outside of the US are typically in relatively close proximity to large cities and residential areas. example: South Korea. the major bases there are basically in the middle of downtown seoul and other cities, surrounded by apartments, homes and everything else.
 
Number one way to get people to look at something, is to fudge it a bit. Its like it activates an "artistic" response, and a person cannot help themselves and examine this "imperfection".

UFOs, Bigfoot, and vintage porn... all blurry enough to make a sober person feel drunk, yet people just can't seem to take their eyes off this stuff.

Following that logic, if video resolution keeps going up the way it is, at some point I think people will stop caring about "real HD" and want the fake stuff again. "Lie to me beautifully" seems to be what the masses want.
 
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