Shady US sigint base upgrade marred by stolen photograph An upgrade to a major US signals intelligence centre in Northamptonshire, UK, has been struck by controversy – after architects acting on behalf of the US Air Force and Blighty's Ministry of Defence nicked a photo of it from a website devoted to uncovering secret military bases in Britain. Alan Turnbull, who runs the excellent …
A secret base design using images marked secret base.
I imagine the site itself is not really that secret albeit the activities may be. A proper architect would use their own drone or similar. Given that the NSA HQ pics used are normally 20-30 years old its hardly a guarantee of accuracy for actually planning to dig holes.
AC, just 'cos a photo is on the Internet does not make it automatically in the public domain! I post my photos on the Internet but they are still protected and you still need to ask my permission to use them, unless by using a particular website I relinquish that right. There are lot of images on WikiCommons and they're free to use but they're still copyrighted to the original photographer, they simply let you use them ideally with credit back.
@FuzzyWuzzys:"AC, just 'cos a photo is on the Internet does not make it automatically in the public domain! "
Totally agree with ya. BTW, don't ever look at @for_exposure_txt on twitter or you'll blow a gasket.
I worked my way through the poorly expressed, spelled and 'grammared' posts to find this gem:
"I think there is a difference between compensating artists for their work, which is obviously a good thing, and allowing them to keep our culture hostage. At a certain point art becomes bigger than the artist."
Oh wow!
"I think there is a difference between compensating artists for their work, which is obviously a good thing, and allowing them to keep our culture hostage. At a certain point art becomes bigger than the artist."
Isn't that the point of copyright? (Before it got abused by people with money and lawyers...) Allow people to correctly profit from their work but not devalue culture overall.
Amen brother.
"did the photographer have permission to photograph what is possibly a prescribed place under the official secrets act?"
Where and what is a "proscribed place" (or more accurately "prohibited") is almost impossible for the "man on the Clapham omnibus" to now work out if even the Ministry of Justice don't have a clue:
http://p10.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/blog/foia/2008/09/current-prohibited-places-under-the-official-secrets-act-1911.html
That part of the country is littered with unmarked places that nobody talks about much - I've known a few people who worked in them and they were completely unable to say what they did and had to report everything that they did that might become known or detected by their superiors. Mostly I kept my mouth shut around them too - this was a long time ago, how long? Weed was 16 quid an ounce then.
In the case of an RAF base:
"any work of defence, arsenal, naval or air force establishment or station, factory, dockyard, mine, minefield, camp, ship, or aircraft belonging to or occupied by or on behalf of His Majesty, or any telegraph, telephone, wireless or signal station, or office so belonging or occupied"
Seems fairly obvious, even to a girl from Clapham.
Or, more practically, there tends to be a sign outside.
"any work of defence, arsenal, naval or air force establishment or station, factory, dockyard, mine, minefield, camp, ship, or aircraft belonging to or occupied by or on behalf of His Majesty, or any telegraph, telephone, wireless or signal station, or office so belonging or occupied"
On the other hand, on a visit to an RAF base to do some work recently, I got there a little early so looked for somewhere to eat my sandwiches before going in. I parked in the specially created "viewing area" under the flight line just off the main public road which passes by.
I'm not sure if it was this one, or possibly another "RAF" base elsewhere, but I was chatting to some ex-GCHQ staff, who found it hilarious that at one base the yanks had had enormous trouble with rabbits eating through their cables. "British bunnies munching American cables" was their reaction :)
Being a provincial and not knowing Latin. I googled ipsos custodietting and got a single result pointing to this article. I'll be off. Both for not recognising ipsos custodiet and also for bothering to type this... There's probably grammatical errors to be ashamed about also.
Bye.
There was a 'secret' military listening post just out of town. It had the best conker trees along the outside of its perimeter. We used to sneak up and hide behind the trees when ever there came traffic to and from the base. The innocence of this, thinking no one had spotted us, brigs a smile to my face as I type.
Also, more than once I was, asked directions to the secret air base. We gave them naturally.
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In the early nineties I used to keep my horse next door to some Raytheon offices and labs, one day I saw a bunch of guys panting hardware in the ground along the fence line. I walked over to be most and asked what the gadgets were, One of the security guys told me they were hypersensitive geophones that could pick up anyone crossing the fence line or walking close to it.
Needless to say after that we regularly galloped up and down the fence line to keep them amused.
Well since fair use is an American doctrine, and el Reg is nominally a UK-based site, that should be 'fair dealing'. Except that there is no fair dealing exception which would permit this sort of use. The copying of photographs for the purpose of reporting current events is strictly prohibited by section 30(2) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/30]
I'm afraid you really don't understand how copyright liability works, do you? The putative owner of the copyright (the secretbases site) is based in the UK and so is the corporate base of the Register. Even if the piece had been written by one the Register's US based journalists, the fact that they have a UK trading presence still means the UK is the jurisdiction where the 'harm' occurs. Ergo, any action for infringement would need to be carried on in the UK courts and under UK law. That is not to suggest that the Register has in fact done anything wrong. They claim to have permission to use the image and if true, then there is no problem.
...Mark Thomas flew a hot air balloon over Menwith Hill to piss off the Yanks.
Croughton is formally designated as a Royal Air Force station to comply with various obscure laws about permanent foreign military bases on British soil...
Are we to assume that you mean the Visiting Forces Act 1952? Being a cynic I suspect the words "obscure laws about permanent foreign military bases on British soil" were used to avoid having to take the trouble to find out the name of the act in question.
A mate of mine had a similar experience with Transport For London, who, in their online documentation for the London Exclusion Zone, nicked a photograph of his to illustrate a type of vehicle that was not compliant.
The photograph, which was taken by him of his own vehicle, was published on his own website which was for enthusiasts of that type of car. Under every image on his site there was a copyright notice, but sadly he didn't watermark the image.
TfL didn't even bother hosting the image themselves, they just linked to my mate's server, which is how he found out about it - he noticed a sudden increase in traffic to the site.
When he contacted TfL to get them to stop, they claimed they had tried to find the copyright owner before using the image, but couldn't. Clearly bollox.
He said afterwards that he regretted the missed opportunity of replacing the image with one of the same filename, but different content...
He said afterwards that he regretted the missed opportunity of replacing the image with one of the same filename, but different content...
That's what I would have done. I did once find someone who had done just that. There was a risqué picture on an otherwise very uninteresting website and the caption didn't fit the image. When I checked the website that was hosting the picture it turned out to belong to a photographer. He'd replaced the image after learning that someone was using it without permission. The description beneath it explained why the risqué pic was there.
"He said afterwards that he regretted the missed opportunity of replacing the image with one of the same filename, but different content..."
I've had links to images on my site too and I did exactly that. I have no idea if the persons responsible or their site visitors were amused or not.
Soooo, this super secret base...
Opened 'Maps' on my Lumia 950
Typed in RAF Croughton
Searched returned: 'RAF Croughton (United States Air Force)', along with a pin on the map, directions, and an estimated journey time of 2hrs and 1min.
I eagerly await my offer letter from and/or detention by MI6
@Salestard:Soooo, this super secret base...
In a past life I lived near Faslane sub base, back in the days when it was blurred out of Google Earth.
The story used to go that Russian spies could keep tabs on the comings and goings of subs by hanging out at the picnic area on the A817 which overlooked the base: https://goo.gl/maps/u1seNhNZ2cK2
The place look's out of date and the domes are rusty and it looks jolly well unmaintained. Good ole england, glad to see our secret bases still stick out to every tom dick and harry, like a sore thumb!
Good to know our Government is doing all it can to stem the rise of "Communism" considering so many of the poor where left embracing it, when it became common knowledge to chat, freely and openly about illegal wiretaps and there personal choice of which "Computer Operating System."
Never a good idea to pick a fight with the Free Ones!
They spank you, there was a Reason they called it the Computer "Revolution!"
In the mid 90s a colleague of mine was sent to repair some storm-damaged power lines which fed a TV repeater on the top of a hill.
There were several other installations on this particular ridge, none of which officially existed. These installations did not appear on Ordnance Survey maps except as empty fields and suddenly truncated roads.
His job sheet was however accompanied by a photocopy of a small, but detailed map showing all the installations and their associated power lines, lettered in Cyrillic script.
It turned out that this map, which dated from the height of the Cold War, had been bought from a Moscow bookshop by an engineer who happened to be there for a conference.
Yeah I live close by as well..
They used to have "gate guardians" by the main gate. I think one was a Voodoo and the other was a Sabre, in typical US style they weren't on their wheels on the ground but mounted like airfix toys on small pylons very dynamic. They've gone now and I don't know if they'll be replaced.
Two of the old brown radomes had aircraft lights on top which was great at Xmas, cos they looked like giant Xmas puds.
When they built a new white one it was a geodesic panel job, and they left the top open with a jagged rim, and just lifted the last few segment in one go by crane. So for a while it looked like a giants hard boiled egg.
With these bases unless there is risk to flyover (actual risk to work, transport, sensitive information) why bother enforcing a no-fly. That just indicates there is something "going on" and attracts attention.
A collection of domes in a field with some supporting infrastructure is hard to hide from physical view and not preventing flyovers really isn't compromising things. I'm sure they'd be aware of the difference between some hot air balloons occasionally passing over and repeated intrusions of a more suspicious nature.
It seems Alan Turnbull at Secret-Bases.co.uk has established that HLM Architects are serial offenders.
They have stolen another RAF Croughton aerial pic off a specialist pilot/photographer Damien Dyer of Air Frame Photography @theflyinggopro (Twitter) for the very same US DoD planning application document.
See his Flickr stream https://www.flickr.com/photos/tupperware_pilot/2808304855
Turnbull has the write-up in his updated article.
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