How Canada's military reacted to seeing Pokemon Go players trespassing
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
I could you tell some stories... There's several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.
There's a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe "just because they can". That's timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn't possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it's much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)
On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.
On a more positive note... after finally hiring data scientists and mobile device hackers, Niantic have been progressively banning Ingress accounts suspected of scraping and/or automating the gathering of resources and recharging of portals. The impact in my area, southern California, changed longstanding faction dominated territories into fragmented pockets that either faction can now control. Suspected "automated" supply chains are now broken and rule changes to Quantum capsules resulted in the slowing down of attacks and lowered volume/frequency of those beneficiaries.
I don't miss the "cheating" griefers, though.
In the case of games where you use the camera, wouldn't someone maybe also want to use (at least snapshots of) the video feed? Like, on the benign side you could use it to update Google Street View, but on the more malicious side it's easy to imagine putting some rare Pokemon down somewhere and baiting someone off in order to get them to take pictures of specific things for you without needing an agent on the ground to go and do it.
I can't imagine running a game like this on my hardware or allowing my kids to do so. You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.
How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.
Simply get into an iPhone of a known location based app gamer and then add a pokestop to a location. Even if the gamer gets picked up it won't be too suspicious since they'll have a history of going to lots of random locations. Even if the hack is detected by a suspicious organization, the phone will have transmitted the info out by the time they detect the hack.
This is just one poorly thought out scenario, there are lots of things you can do with phones nowadays - use them as collection tools, relays etc
How is this useful? Well, it's well known that Ft. Meade in the US is an NSA outpost. If troops from Ft. Meade regularly get transferred to Camp Pendleton (chosen arbitrarily), then we can infer that there's likely to be a lot of SIGINT (electronic spying) activity at Camp Pendelton. For a smaller installation (say a covert safe house abroad), these sorts of clues may be the first signs that foreign intelligence agencies can use to detect that these bases even exist.
See the activity heat map about halfway down the front page? That is (or could be) a single person's play pattern. It is ludicrously easy to figure out where the average player works, if they play at work. It's often easy to figure out where they live. There are enough points of interest in any urban area so that game activity tracks where you typically go, not just where the game wants you to go.
And that site is using a fairly crude, incomplete method for scraping. It doesn't capture everything by any means.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
> Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.
Of course you can. You can for instance see where people can't go because the area is restricted.
Yes. That was exactly my point.
> You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.
I certainly didn't assume anything of the sort.
https://bit.ly/ingress-sitrep-homecoming-1
1. Remove the threat (PokeStop) where it is a security risk.
2. Harness the attention for organizational benefit where possible (Add PokeStop to increase museum attendance)
Best of all, this approach stems from some good life/business advice from Rear Admiral Newton, "Life and work are best accomplished if there is good fun, health and friendship."
for that you didn't need much vetting and because the popularity was low nobody cared so much. most likely some servicemen (servicepersons?) submitted the spots.
i wonder (have never played myself) whether the Pokemons can be customized according to location - a restaurant owner would pay for the Pokemons enjoying and cheering the food there while the Pokemons in the military settings like that museum would ride a tank or a plane or shoot some weaponry military ads style.
The closest I've heard of was when the game just came out. There's an item in-game called lures that attract Pokemons to a specific stop. Many restaurant owners were trying to attract customers by consistently buying and applying them, so people could continue to play while eating.
They cost 1$ for like 30 minutes or something like that.
> "Plse advise the Commissionaires that apparently Fort Frontenac is both a PokeGym and a PokeStop. I will be completely honest in that I have not idea what that is," wrote Maj. Jeff Monaghan at CFB Kingston.
> The game's premise seems to be going to the 'PokeStops/Gyms' to collect 'Pokemon's' (we should almost hire a 12-year-old to help us out with this)
And I loved how the CFB Halifax made a recommendation that apparently (from my very limited understanding of Pokémon GO) requires getting some of their people to play the game to upgrade the stops at the museum :D
I suspect there was a lot of trolling the upper echelons by lower level personnel claiming they've never heard of any pokey-man and similar. That's how it would have rolled when I was in the Army. Privates always create their own fun. The military guy who convinced his boss to let him explore the base to find more pokemon for himself, err, I mean, strictly for research purposes, is a truly epic stereotypical military story.
I know it's just a local sample, but for something supposedly more popular than Pokemon Go, I'd expect to encounter at least one player.
I know some people in the middle east who even do it as a side "job" since the pay is significant enough
anecdotally, I don't notice clash royale being as popular with adults as pokemon go. it may be true that it's not very popular in your world, if you don't spend a lot of time around children/teenagers. in my bubble, I hardly ever see people playing pokemon go anymore.
there is a comedy gold here. Cleaning the base from Pokemon infestation before an inspecting visit by General. The Major pondering whether he should salute to the Pokemon in General insignia. Soldiers getting to/from AWOL presenting themselves as undercover secret Pokemons to the drunk clueless Major on duty (my imagination naturally drifts to the specifics of the military i'd known from my childhood, ie. USSR/Russia) - they disappear AR-style when the Major looks at them through the phone.
https://support.garmin.com/en-CA/?faq=QPc5x3ZFUv1QyoxITW2vZ6
Important quote:
"It is not uncommon for satellite heights to be off from map elevations by +/- 400 ft."
Wow.
If someone is trying to state the location of, for instance, a good bivy site on a rock climbing route, "1890 m on the SE ridge" is equally as precise as the GPS coordinates, but much more descriptive.
Anecdotally, when standing next to FCC licensed radio systems on roofs, which are supposed to have accurate license data in their database entries for height MSL and AGL, I have seen elevation data from my late-2019 vintage smartphone just as accurate as on a $5000 surveying GPS.
At least to within 2-3 meter Z axis of reality.
> Prior to founding Niantic Labs, Hanke was the CEO of mapping company Keyhole, Inc. through funding from the CIA’s venture capital branch, In-Q-Tel in 2001. Keyhole was later bought by Google in 2004.
> The In-Q-Tel website clearly states its mission on the front page, so there is no doubt as to what interests the company serves:
> IQT identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.
The upside of this security posture is that to get eyes on the guarded perimeter you have to first enter the open area of the base, somewhere where unusual activity will be noticed.
You could go the government’s list of Completed Access to Information Requests page, find Canadian Forces and ask for an informal copy.
They may send you a copy.
There may be a lot of rédactions though.
It may not be up yet, might be a few months.
I do wonder though if someone might weaponize this. Being able to "generate a crowd" at a particular location all with a plausible excuse for being there would make accessing some places surreptitiously much easier.
In the western US, you will find several remote military bases that include ground and air live-fire ranges that are un-fenced. There are usually signs though. (Some) military bases are very large, making it impractical to maintain complete fencing around them.
>And if there's no fence, isn't it just public land that it's OK to walk on?
Why would it be?
> Why would it be?
This isn't the culture in the US, but in some parts of the world, the default assumption is that land is accessible unless it's fenced or otherwise marked. There are some politeness norms like not walking right up to someone's house in the woods, but generally in i.e. Norway, if it's outside, you're probably allowed to be there.
The culture in the US seems to come from capitalism being such a part of our culture. Every resource, including land, is viewed as a commodity. Even many of our publicly-owned land which is ostensibly intended for public use, such as state and national parks, has entry fees.
It costs money to maintain public lands like national parks. The neanderthals who don't understand Leave No Trace principles cause massive amounts of damage that needs to be prevented, policed, and repaired. Chores like trail maintenance, habitat restoration, wildlife studies, trash removal, toilet upkeep, etc. etc, all need to be done to keep the parks as close as possible to wild, so that the next generation can enjoy it. Entry fees fund the conservation of these public lands.
It costs money to maintain public land, but that's not any less true in the other countries I'm talking about. The difference is that that cost is more likely to come from national budgets, rather than from fees, which is better in a lot of ways: it's more transparent, and is a progressive rather than regressive tax, is better for tourism, etc.
Also note that a lot of the non-fenced land in i.e. Norway isn't public land, it's private land, and it's still accessible to the public due to cultural norms. This may seem weird that there's a social expectation that people will open their private property to public use, but the flip side is that there's little cultural opposition to government helping maintain property. Many hiking shelters, for example, are on private property, but built and maintained by the government.
I don't think there is any doubt that these military bases were marked.
> > And if there's no fence, isn't it just public land that it's OK to walk on?
> Why would it be?
Although land does need to be marked with "No Trespassing" signs in order to gain certain rights under the law.
It’s possible people might wander (especially on Army posts) onto ranges out in the sticks, but the actual garrison area will be off limits to the public (esp in the Navy and Air Force). A quick glance at Google Maps for some Canadian military installations shows them without gate guards and open to the public.
In the USA, no - it's owned by the federal government and has criminal trespass laws surrounding it just like any other owned property ("land parcel"). https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1634-pro...
Criminal trespass does not generally require a fence or sign in most US states (they say you have greater legal protection if you do post a sign or make a fence, but it's not required - IANAL, I just read the internet :)). https://www.bestofsigns.com/blog/no-trespassing-signs-laws-w...
...and some states such as my own do not embrace the concept of BLM managing public land the way California does as a unique state; in some states most land is generally considered private and legally owned by (someone or something). https://www.wideopenspaces.com/public-land-texas-brief-histo... and has corresponding state-specific criminal trespass laws. Pulling from another comment comparing Norway culture, roughly 2.5x(?) Norways can fit inside Texas.
(edit1: fixed HN markup emphasis)
I don't know the answer to your question, but my instincts pose it in the negative sense: Why would there be a right to be on the Queen's land without permission?
E.g. Fort Fontenac, one of the bases named, is the site of a historic battle and so has cultural interest open to the public. But it also has official Canadian Forces business conducted on site. Similarly some of the CFBs have museums etc and are generally open to the public.
Then it would be required of Niantic (rather than its cooperation hoped for) to ensure none were in such areas.
People can walk on unfenced land whether or not they have an AR app. If it's important that they not walk there, put up some signs or increase patrols or whatever. Those are local solutions that aren't easily aggregated by a single app developer seeking all locations with "national security" connections.
Airspace may be restricted for any number of reasons, especially safety. Also, we can't build fences in the air. So, airspace restriction for reasons of "national security" can hide among all the other airspace restrictions. On the ground, that isn't the case.
> [...] "Recognizing that backlog files require more attention, DND recently created a new team in the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Directorate as part of a Backlog Reduction Initiative. This team has been assigned the task of working solely on backlog files so that the other processing teams can concentrate on ensuring newer files do not go late," she said.
LOL, what a waste of resources.
Edit: I don't get why I'm being downvoted. These things do have a cost. FOIA requests are not free. FOIA requests can be frivolous. Here we have one branch of the Canadian government (the CBC) getting another branch of the Canadian government (the military) to spend time collecting information, scanning documents, reviewing everything for security... all so that Brett can write a lame "quirky" story about a video game that's three years old at this point. For what? Clicks? Ad revenue? It's obviously pure waste. No wonder they had to create a special team to deal with the backlog, when the government itself files bullshit requests against itself.
I don't know, maybe the Canadian military has nothing better to do. Maybe Canada's government journalists have nothing more pressing to look into with respect to the military. I guess it's possible. It still leaves you wondering what the Canadian public is paying them for.
BTW, just a few days ago there was an article about how America used to be able to complete large engineering projects quickly and cheaply, and now they can't. Some were pointing out that perhaps the cumulative cost of all the new systems we built on top since then has something to do with it (whether they are public systems due to regulation or private systems due to litigation). Well, maybe it's because our governments keep making laws that say "do this within 60 days or else", and the cost remains forever unexamined.
Then let me at least point out that this is a clear instance of pure waste. And yes, a certain level of frivolous requests probably needs to be tolerated for the system to work at all. But when it's the _government_ creating waste _for itself_ to write a Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article because it's all magic free government money, all I can say is: dear Brett, you're not a stalwart guard-dog of democracy just because your job title has "journalist" in it. You need to actually think about what you're doing and try to do something useful with your government paycheck.
1. The CBC operates at arms length (similar to the BBC) and is not "one branch of the Canadian government".
2. The point of a FOIA request is that they are SUPPOSED to find nothing. The FOIA "threat" is what keeps the government in line, it's not a "waste of time". That the reporter found nothing and went on to write a fluff piece is the system working as designed.
Journalist in Canada can face multi-year struggles to extract any information from Ottawa under the current system.
For further reading on this, please consider CJFE: https://www.cjfe.org/broken_promises_cripple_trudeau_s_acces...
If anything, I'd rather see a policy of default-open rather than default-closed--if people want to classify information they should need to provide a justification for why it needs to be classified, not the other way around.
* The CBC is not a "branch of government", it's a crown corporation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_corporations_of_Canada)
* FOIA is American, ATIP is Canadian. Anyhow, of course they aren't "free", no one said they were. It's (at best) incoherent to make straw-man arguments against the wrong thing...
* Just because there are worse things in the world doesn't mean we can't consider lesser ones. It's not like journalists are all only ever allowed to write about whatever you consider to be the single most pressing topic at the time.
* Just because this article doesn't interest you, personally (it obviously interests other HNers, considering it's on the front page) doesn't mean that it's a "Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article".
* Not all government spending is bad, as you seem to imply, and some oversight is absolutely necessary to prevent corruption.
* This ATIP request resulted in an interesting article that covered Canadian culture, geo-location games and trespassing issues, the health of the ATIP program, as well as humourous anecdotes on how military policy discovered and handled the issue of PokemonGo.
Pure waste? Give me a break.. I guess it's foreign to you that if the public asks the government something in Canada, they better serve us the citizens, because we're who the government serves, not the other way around.
And when something like this happens, Canadian's aren't brainwashed and go straight for the gun as an option. They actually use common sense to adjust to situations unlike those in our southern border.
I find it hilarious that you would rather have work undone and marked unimportant than actually try and serve the public.
Consider living abroad, it'll cleanse your American brainwashing.