Seriously I’ve seen a guy see a bunch of pixels and go “Idk but that reminds me of Mexico” and he was right. There’s no way the three letter companies wouldn’t want that kind of skillset, right?
You can get jobs like that, sure. Normally called GIS analyst (geospatial informations systems)
For a while, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service GIS job applications were less about ticking boxes and more looking at a satellite image of a structure and being asked, “what is this, where is it, and why is it interesting”
And the answer might be "Its ostensibly a wastewater treatment plant, its in southern Iran, and its interesting because the truck parked next to the liquid chemical tank farm has an ISO gas storage trailer, not an ISO liquid storage container as might be expected.
Who says they don’t already? I knew a guy who worked for a major government agency who’s job was to look over horrible pictures to try to figure out where they were taken.
I bet the most skilled people do work for them, not just youtube. But talking to that guy, it’s a tough job, not for everyone. Instead of a random streetview image it’s a scene of abuse, so…
Really it’s crowdsourcing and statistics. Show an image to a big enough crowd and someone will pick something up. It’s like the birthday problem but with geography.
There really are some good geoguessers. It’s not a crowd source game.
There are but they’re part of the crowd: They’ve just been doing it so long they’re great at it.
That’s not what crowd sourcing is.
I’m sure that those agencies have been contacting top players for that game over the last few years. But if those simply dont want to work for them, thats moot.
I just assume they’re super lucky. Or that they play so much, they recognize when it shows them the same picture because it doesn’t have an infinite set of images.
You should check out Rainbolt’s Geoguesser runs. He often narrates his thought process as he goes. He’s looking at things like the angle of the sun and shadows to determine what hemisphere of the planet he’s on, looks at the vegetation and soil types to further pinpoint his longitude, etc. He’ll even take photos sent directly to him from viewers, and he’ll find out exactly where the photo was taken, even if that image had never existed on the internet prior.
Some of these guys are insanely talented at this. Rainbolt is probably the most entertaining and educational, IMO. Definitely worth checking out some of his videos.
GeoWizard (especially his Geo Detective videos) and zi8gzag are also very talented. I love how they talk through the process to find a place, even though a lot of their initial starting points are from clues that they’ve seen hundreds of times to single out a region.
They use Google street view, so it’s a ton.
The problem is getting the pictures to work from. People who don’t want to be found aren’t giving the CIA pictures of their locations, and I’d imagine the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.
The problem is getting the pictures. It’s intel collection, not processing.
the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.
I mean “the CIA” isn’t a person. Someone there does this work. Which is what we’re talking about.
