An Interesting Study on Geospatial Data and the Threat of Open Info...

A favorite graduate student of mine passed this gem along...

"Mapping the Risks Assessing the Homeland Security Implications of Publicly Available
Geospatial Information" from the RAND Corp.

Highlights:

"Fewer than 6 percent of the 629 federal geospatial information datasets we examined appeared as though they could be useful to a potential attacker. Further, we found no publicly available federal geospatial datasets that we considered critical to meeting the attacker's information needs (i.e., those that the attacker could not perform the attack
without)....

Given the ready availability of alternative data sources, restricting public access to such geospatial information is unlikely to be a major impediment for attackers in gaining the needed information for identifying and locating their desired targets in the United States. The key exception to this general expectation is any type of geospatial information that reveals the location of vulnerabilities in the critical infrastructure that are not obvious or widely known, such as a particular choke point in a major power grid or telecommunications network."

The study can be found here.