JD Fenech wrote: > Well, a new update on finding the positional data on those wind turbines > in central Iowa to put into FG. > > How compatible is flightgear with US homeland security? > When I asked Mid-American Energy (or should it be Mid-CCCP Energo now?), > I was refused any real information, being cited that it was for > security. Fast forward about two weeks, and I'm getting a call from the > Iowa State Police wanting to know why (and how I feel about the US). Has > anyone else had a similar experience to this, how did they deal with > that, and how does one express disapproval with a corporate entity which > acts in this manner (without getting further attention from the usual > parties). >
I honestly don't fault these guys for being a little extra paranoid. The power grid would be a disruptive thing for someone to hit (and a pretty obvious target.) I'm sure it is highly unlikely anyone would target anything in rural Iowa and taking out a couple windmills isn't going to do much to the country's power infrastructure. But even so, this is probably something they are watching pretty carefully here in the USA. We could nitpick security all day long, but in some way I find this a little comforting to see evidence that people are checking up on potentially suspicious activity once in a while. (Maybe we can suggest better places for them to apply their energy, but if you were in charge of security for the entire country do you think you would get everything just right all the time. You don't have enough resources to cover every base every moment of every day so where do you concentrate your energy? Not an easy task.) You can get the lat/lon of just about anything you want within a couple feet off google maps so you don't need to call up the power company for this info. If you run into any more trouble with these guys, send them to take a look at maps.google.com and maps.ask.com (which has even more detailed and current imagery in many places.) I can look at the imagery of my house and see that my brother's car was parked in the street. There are some things that terrorists could do that would worry me a lot more than going after planes and buildings and other "glamorous" targets. But I'm not going to post anything here and give any deviants any dumb ideas they might not have already thought of ... Curt. -- Curtis Olson http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
