Geospatial Informational Security Risks and Concerns of the U.S. Air Force GeoBase Program

Technological advancements such as Geospatial Information Systems GIS and the Internet have made it easier and affordable to share information, which enables complex and time sensitive decisions to be made with higher confidence. Further, advancements in information technology have dramatically increased the ability to store, manage, integrate, and correlate larger amounts of data to improve operational efficiency. However, the same technologies that enable increased productivity also provide increased capabilities to those wishing to do harm. Todays military leaders are faced with the challenge of deciding how to make geospatial information collected on military installations and organizations available to authorized communities of interest while simultaneously restricting access to protect operational security. Often, these decisions are made without understanding how the sharing of certain combinations of data may pose a significant risk to protecting critical information, infrastructure or resources. Information security has been an area of growing concern in the GeoBase community since, by definition, it is required to strike a balance between competing interests, each supported by federal policy 1 the availability of data paid for by tax dollars and 2 the protection of data as required to mitigate risks. In this research we will explore the security implications of the US Air Force GeoBase the US Air Forces applied Geospatial Information System program. We examine the rapid expansion of the use of GeoBase to communities outside of the civil engineering field examine the intrinsic and extrinsic security risks of the unconstrained sharing of geospatial information explore difficulties encountered when attempting to rate the sensitivity of information, discuss new policies and procedures that have been implemented undertaken to protect the information, and propossharing geospatial inf