Key Findings and Recommendations

• Published in: Mapping the Risks p. 121
• Main Authors: JOHN C. BAKER, BETH E. LACHMAN, DAVID R. FRELINGER, KEVIN M. O’CONNELL, ALEXANDER C. HOU, MICHAEL S. TSENG, DAVID ORLETSKY, CHARLES YOST
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: RAND Corporation 02.04.2004
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Applied geography; Applied mathematics; Applied statistics; Communications; Communicative content; Consumers; Criminal law; Criminal offenses; Data products; Data ranges; Datasets; Descriptive statistics; Earth sciences; End users; Federal criminal offenses; Geography; Geoinformatics; Geospatial information; Government; Human populations; Information relevance; Information resources; Information retrieval; Information science; Information search and retrieval; Law; Mathematics; Measures of variability; National politics; National security; Persons; Physical sciences; Political science; Politics; Population studies; Recommendations; Retrieval effectiveness; Social sciences; Statistics; Terrorism; User needs; User profiles
• ISBN: 9780833035479; 0833035479

An integral element of homeland security is minimizing the opportunities for adversaries to acquire essential information for undertaking attacks on critical U.S. sites. Publicly available geospatial data and information are a potentially valuable type of information that attackers could exploit to help identify critical U.S. facilities and then carry out their attack plans. Thus, denying adversaries access to any type of “sensitive” geospatial information is important to enhancing U.S. homeland security. Placing access restrictions on this kind of data and information, however, should be based on a reasonable expectation of improving U.S. homeland security given that such restrictions are likely