[MilCom] NGA Publications

[James Nelson]

This is an excerpt from Steven Aftergood's Secrecy
Newsletter talking about withdrawing the NIMA products
from public access...

PUBLIC ACCESS TO AERONAUTICAL DATA WILL BE BLOCKED

Extensive databases of aeronautical information that
have long been
publicly available will be withdrawn from public
access next year, a
U.S. intelligence agency said yesterday.

"The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
will go forward
with its previously announced proposal to remove its
Flight
Information Publications (FLIP) and Digital
Aeronautical Flight
Information File (DAFIF) from public access,"
according to an NGA
news release issued on November 29.

NGA said that copyright concerns raised by foreign
data sources were
the driving factor for the decision to withhold the
information from
the public.

Proponents of public access argued that the move was
unnecessarily
restrictive in its scope.

It sets "a very bad precedent" when "the introduction
of any
copyright-protected material renders a massive
public-domain
database off-limits to the public," said one subject
matter expert
who requested anonymity because he works with NGA. 
"Many, many
other databases are at stake."

"The decision that NGA should have taken, in my view,
was to have
offered a redacted version of the databases for public
sale.  DAFIF
-- a really big database -- could easily have been
stripped of its
Australian-supplied [copyrighted] data and kept public
and
available," he told Secrecy News.

The data withdrawal will be begin in January 2006 and
will be
completed in October 2007.

The NGA did not approve another proposal to withdraw
certain paper
maps from public access.

"NGA has decided not to withdraw paper map products to
a scale of
1:250,000 to 1:5,000,000.  These products will
continue to be
available to the public," the news release stated.

The industry expert welcomed that decision.  But he
said that "the
unstated reality is that NGA has mostly turned off the
oxygen to
cartographic production, so few new maps are being
prepared as
digital masters and even fewer are being sent to the
printing
press."

The NGA proposal to withdraw public access to
aeronautical data,
which was originally announced in November 2004, drew
"numerous
comments ... from private citizens and special
interests groups."

See "NGA to Go Forward with Proposal to Remove
Aeronautical Data from
Public Access," NGA news release, November 29:

    
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/11/nga112905.html