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davidgillonHow Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa
TLDR: the US National Geospatial Information Agency mapped Pretoria to someone's backyard, companies that run databases that geolocate IP addresses (which turns out to be a startlingly amateur process) then mapped every Pretoria IP address (over a million) to that backyard. Any time a crime or online dispute got linked to a Pretoria IP address, the database threw out that backyard, but didn't mention the small print.. Harrassment happened, including having the house stormed by SWAT.
