How Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Ho

Metadata

• Author: KASHMIR HILL
• Full Title: How Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Ho
• Category: articles
• Document Tags: #geospatial
• URL: https://gizmodo.com/how-cartographers-for-the-u-s-military-inadvertently-c-1830758394

Highlights

• No, they are not criminals. They just happen to live in a very unfortunate location, a location cursed by dimwitted decisions made by people who lived half a world away, people who made designations on maps and in databases without thinking about the real-world places and people they represented. (View Highlight)
• Since 2002, Massachusetts-based MaxMind has been in the business of determining where in the world a digital device is based on its Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is the unique identifier a device needs in order to connect to the Internet. If you’re reading this story online, you’re doing it on a device using a IP address, and our servers have recorded that IP address. We have also probably mapped it in order to figure out whether you’re an American reader, or a European reader, or an African reader. You’re probably seeing ads surrounding this story that are targeted to you based on where we think you are, based on your IP address. (View Highlight)
• They can do real-world research by sending cars out into the world, a la Google Street View, which look for open WiFi networks, connect to them, get their IP addresses, and then record their physical location. Or they can buy location information from apps on people’s smartphones, which correlate IP addresses to GPS coordinates. (View Highlight)
• The thing about IP mapping that many people don’t realize (and I wish they would, since I wrote two huge stories about it in 2016) is that it is not an exact science. Sometimes an IP address can be mapped to a house—you can try to map your own IP address here—but in general, an IP address, at its most precise, just indicates what city and state a device is in. At its least precise, it simply reveals what country a device is connecting to the internet from (View Highlight)
• But computer systems don’t deal well with abstract concepts like “city,” “state,” and “country,” so MaxMind offers up a specific latitude and longitude for every IP address in its databases (including its free, widely-used, open-source database). Along with the IP address and its coordinates is another entry called the “accuracy radius.” (View Highlight)
• The accuracy radius does what you might expect. It says how accurate the coordinates are; it indicates the 5-mile, or 100-mile, or 3,000-mile area included with “a point” on a map. Unfortunately, it is ignored by many geo-mapping sites such as IPlocation.net, which gets its data from IPInfo and EurekAPI, two more IP geolocation databases that use MaxMind as a source. (View Highlight)
• When Olivier visited the database and did a search for Pretoria, South Africa, he discovered that the designation for “the capital of a political entity” pointed straight at John’s house. When he looked up the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s website, he discovered it’s both a U.S. intelligence agency and part of the United States Department of Defense and “delivers world-class geospatial intelligence that provides a decisive advantage to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responders.” (View Highlight)
• Human beings conceive of the world as a giant map, as a series of places with lines drawn around them and labels inside the lines. The NGA is in charge of the official recording of the lines and labels for the entirety of the U.S. government (so that it works from a standard map of the rest of the world), but also for everyone who uses the NGA’s free online database. The only part of the world the NGA mostly ignores is the U.S. itself, because it is not supposed to be “spying” on Americans, and the U.S. Geological Survey takes care of local mapping. (View Highlight)
• It’s not that IP addresses are useless for evidence gathering, but the proper approach is to go to the internet service provider that operates the IP address and get it to tell you who was using it at the time it did the bad thing. This usually requires a subpoena or court order, so regular people turn to IP mapping sites instead. And those sites sadly don’t tell people just how imprecise IP mapping is unless they read the fine print or click into the FAQ (View Highlight)
• Our Political Geographers use medium-scale maps to place a feature’s coordinates as close to the center of a populated place as possible.” said NGA spokesperson Erica Fouche. “In this case, [John] lives near the capital. There was absolutely no intent to place the coordinates on his residence.” (View Highlight)
• For additional context, our coordinates for politically sensitive features, such as Jerusalem, are precise and based on State Department specifications,” she added in a later email, as if to say the cartographers are not usually so casual about these things. (View Highlight)
• What is a place? What is its center? What best represents it? There are several different possible “centers” of Pretoria. There’s the zoological park. There’s Africa’s biggest mall. There are multiple government buildings that have served as political centers over South Africa’s long complicated history. There’s the Palace of Justice in Church Square, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. There are the Union Buildings, with the famous statue of Nelson Mandela, his arms upraised, which serves as the seat of the South African government. John and Ann’s backyard is in a suburb north of the city center, and it’s unclear how NGA’s cartographers decided it was a key location. It was a weighty, if apparently random, decision. (View Highlight)
• Companies who use the database to display a location are supposed to tell their users that the point on a map is actually a large blob on a map. (View Highlight)
• And that’s the problem, really. John and Ann’s problems weren’t necessarily caused by one bad actor, but by the interaction of a bunch of careless decisions that cascaded through a series of databases. The NGA provides a free database with no regulations on its use. MaxMind takes some coordinates from that database and slaps IP addresses on them. Then IP mapping sites, as well as phone carriers offering “find my phone” services, display those coordinates on maps as distinct and exact locations, ignoring the “accuracy radius” that is supposed to accompany them. (View Highlight)