Hindustan Times reports today that "Wikimapia puts city on terror map"

In tune with the trend of alarmist and sensationalist reporting that this country has been seeing over the past few years, the article on the front page goes on to ask "What if terrorists send a guided missile to the city? All they'll need are the exact latitude and longitude of the place they want to target. They'll find more than that on Wikimapia..."

I have few words to describe reporting of this kind. Under researched, alarmist and short sighted are a few of the less hard hitting words.

Information of the kind referenced to is available from more sources than one can imagine, not just on the Internet but from survey maps published by the Geological Survey of India! While one can argue that the exact co-ordinates of Fort William and Raj Bhawam are not available in these other sources, the task of interpolating from available information is one that can be given to an undergraduate student as a weekend project.

If terrorists are in possession of missiles and more so guided missiles within the borders of the country, the failure lies elsewhere. It points to a failure of the security establishment, customs, border controls and the efficacy of your armed forces in general.

If missiles are fired from across the border it is a larger issue of cross border terrorism , and aggression between nation states and banning Google Earth and Wikimapia within India will in no way solve the problem. In any case it is a given that with satellite imagery of the kind available today, such information is available with armies the world over in any case.

The threat is not the Internet and new technology. The real threat is alarmist and under researched reporting and the short sightedness of Indian politicians and the Indian establishment. One hopes this does not now result in a blanket ban on Wikimapia. It is not unlikely that Indian ISP's will end up banning any site that begins with "wiki" and it will be goodbye Wikipedia as well then.

Recently when the same noise was being made with reference to Google Earth some reports suggested that Air Chief Marshal S P Tyagi, Chief of the Air Staff, said Google Earth was not a threat

and some reports suggested that the IAF chief thought Google Earth was a threat,

One can only wonder what the real stand of the armed forces is. I suspect , as is reasonable that they work under the assumption that information regarding military installations is available by default with the opponent, be they nation states or terrorists. It would be foolish to base any notion of security on the assumption that the opponent has partial information of physical locations, as opposed to strategy and other soft information.

Sriramkrishnan Srinivasan