Does It Pose a Homeland Security Risk?
http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB9045/ In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) asked the RAND Corporation’s Intelligence Policy Center to assess how federal agencies’ publicly accessible geospatial information could be exploited by possible attackers and to develop a framework that would help policymakers evaluate the nature of the potential risks of such information. The RAND study concluded that although publicly accessible geospatial information has the potential to be generally helpful in selecting and locating a target, potential attackers, such as terrorists, are likely to need more reliable, more detailed, and more up-to-date information to plan and carry out a strike than is typically publicly accessible. There is abundant geospatial and nongeospatial information on U.S. critical sites that adversaries can obtain to select and locate targets. In comparison,