3 ms·

Is there any international law or treaty explicitly requiring countries to allow their roads to be mapped by foreign countries/companies?

juanmirocks 9y ago
No. But the agreements of the WTO support the equal treatment for every company anywhere. The Chinese government only permits its own Chinese companies to profit, while block basically all foreign ones.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Common sense, perhaps? Large militaries will create their own up-to-date maps for every region of the world where they could possibly expect to be operating. They will, of course, keep strategic details in such maps secret, but with a bit of marginal effort, the maps deemed to have low military relevance can also be sold to civilians for their business purposes. In order to keep a location secret now, it can't be visible from space. And it can't have surface roads leading to it, or even change the surface significantly from historic aerial photographs of the same location. And it definitely can't have radio signals coming out of it. That basically means tunnels and submarines. There exist people whose jobs are to stare at satellite images all day, classify them, and draw shapes into a database. There is no longer any credible military rationale for restricting by law the creation of surface maps.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  It eats up foreign military budgets.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Those militaries can't trust your civil maps anyway, no matter how accurate they may be in the parts where people actually use them. It's not like you're going to have that featureless black square labeled as "ICBM silo" instead of "dairy barn".
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      You can fairly efficiently check that a city's street layout is accurate by random sampling. That's much less human labor. China might also be concerned about internal security.

3 ms·

Is there any international law or treaty explicitly requiring countries to allow their roads to be mapped by foreign countries/companies?

by dis-sys 9y ago

juanmirocks 9y ago
No. But the agreements of the WTO support the equal treatment for every company anywhere. The Chinese government only permits its own Chinese companies to profit, while block basically all foreign ones.
logfromblammo 9y ago
Common sense, perhaps? Large militaries will create their own up-to-date maps for every region of the world where they could possibly expect to be operating. They will, of course, keep strategic details in such maps secret, but with a bit of marginal effort, the maps deemed to have low military relevance can also be sold to civilians for their business purposes. In order to keep a location secret now, it can't be visible from space. And it can't have surface roads leading to it, or even change the surface significantly from historic aerial photographs of the same location. And it definitely can't have radio signals coming out of it. That basically means tunnels and submarines. There exist people whose jobs are to stare at satellite images all day, classify them, and draw shapes into a database. There is no longer any credible military rationale for restricting by law the creation of surface maps.
- SamReidHughes 9y ago
  It eats up foreign military budgets.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Those militaries can't trust your civil maps anyway, no matter how accurate they may be in the parts where people actually use them. It's not like you're going to have that featureless black square labeled as "ICBM silo" instead of "dairy barn".
    - SamReidHughes 9y ago
      You can fairly efficiently check that a city's street layout is accurate by random sampling. That's much less human labor. China might also be concerned about internal security.