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Comment by jedmeyers | Hacker News Reader

“the agency was using National Geographic maps from the nineteen-sixties, with names for landmarks and villages that didn’t correspond to those used by the locals.”

I call disinformation on this one, since agency has been involved in counter-USSR operations in that area in the eighties their maps should have at least been from that time period, not the sixties.

“the Kalashnikov, a Soviet-developed assault rifle that can penetrate a person’s torso from more than half a mile away.”

I have yet to meet a person who can throw a Kalashnikov with a bayonet attached for half a mile. Such poor writing.

“designed for use in war zones”, “high-powered weapons”

For some reason one can always tell when a piece writer got their hands on a Common Sense Gun Control Thesaurus.

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“ Although police-issue bulletproof vests can stop rounds fired from a handgun, they are useless against assault rifles. “After seeing what little kids can get their hands on, I went out and bought hard plates,” designed for use in war zones, McClellan told me. The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars—a week’s salary. “

“Designed for use in war zones” described his body armor, not a gun. And it was armor he acquired after confiscating a Kalashnikov from a dealer.

Your comments read like nitpicking as applied to a light skimming. If you can’t criticize in good faith, why comment at all?

The nitpicking is somewhat understandable, in that TFA highlights "assault rifles" as having anything to do with the vests. Any rifle (other than e.g. a .22) can do what "assault" rifles are described as doing. In fact most hunting rifles are a lot better at penetrating armor than an AR-15 is.

I don't know much about guns but my impression is that rifles seem to be categorized likely use case (e.g. sport rifles, hunting rifles, assault rifles) and in this case assault rifle seems to match both the use case he was talking about and also is an apt descriptor of the specific gun that led him to buy it. I don't really understand why assault rifle is inaccurate in this case.

I do not doubt some people were using unclassified public domains maps. CIA should use Openstreetmap so they can all share the same info, just add a "NOT_FOR_TERRIES" the the entries that should be kept secret.

Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps. I don't know how the military/intelligence community works, but have they really invested manpower into this? This is from experience with mapping around lake Victoria and Haiti, the map might look ok but when you put your boots on the ground things are different. Especially since official vs. local names can differ so much.

“Getting names of landmarks right is really hard unless you have people on the ground that are specifically looking for that, and who are supposed to update maps”

Isn’t the purpose of intelligence agencies to collect intelligence, such as landmark names and maps?

Yes of course, and I have no insight into how they worked with maps (except remote imaging), I just know that the amount of hours you need to invest per village with 300+ pop is quite large. There are also several organizational issue with maps, how do you keep them secret, what do you map, where do you map, if caught with a map are you a spy. Basically why would you give a beat cop a top secret map, my comment about Openstreetmap was a joke but it highlights the bigger problem that maps are a social good and that is not always the goal of the intelligence community in hostile environment.

Lots of places have multiple names. Especially in the Arab world, I would expect many places to have a "formal name" that might appear on a government map but that differs from how locals refer to it.

I'm alo not sure if the purpose of intelligence agencies is to collect the names of landmarks either. And speaking as someone who works with maps, it wouldn't surprise me at all if various agencies used severely outdated maps. In fact, I'd be shocked if they were efficient about that kind of thing.

Of I was CIA, I would fund openstreemap. Wait...

Wait, the map is not the territory?

> I have yet to meet a person who can throw a Kalashnikov...

It’s a figure of speech called a metonym: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy. Quote: “Tools/instruments: Often a tool is used to signify the job it does or the person who does the job, as in the phrase "the press" (referring to the printing press), or as in the proverb, "The pen is mightier than the sword."

And what you are doing is a bad-faith method of disrupting debate called “pedantic illiteracy”.

Thank you, learned a new phrase. And 'pedantic illiteracy' really hit the nail on its head, social media comments at large follows this pattern. Econ Twitter, starting with Tyler Cowen, is full of these people.

Thank you!

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