I used to work in those circles ~15 years ago and the short answer was: Yes.
It turns out that an absurd amount of sensitive/national security information is actually public but it becomes sensitive once it's organized in a way that it becomes "actionable" for attack, compromise, etc. In my particular situation, an acquaintance studying operations+logistics had overlaid communications trunks with transportation hubs and realized many of them were one in the same.
Now that more of this information is available easily and in readily combinable forms should make us re-evaluate all of it and how much gets shared, with who, when, and to what detail.
Btw, this is also a reason you should be skeptical whenever there's a leak and someone claims "none of this data is classified!" While technically true, a piece of non-classified but relatively unknown information might be the missing piece that makes something actionable.
Not necessarily, there's a huge drive at the moment (in the UK at least) encouraging utility companies to make their asset related data open and publicly available. Look up the Energy Networks Association's Open Networks initiative, quite interesting. The same approach is being taken by other European countries.
It is pointless to 'hide' the things which are accessible to anyone, including people who isn't even there physically, eg can look through Google Earth or just browse photos with geo-tags.
Back in the day it could be (and sometimes was) a secret or protected information.
That's somehow naive statement. There is a difference between getting full information just with one query and building complicated fail-prune system for weeks/months to analyze data.
That's somehow naive statement. There is a difference between being visited by the guys in the suits because you were seen with a photo camera near powerlines and not.
You basically said is equivalent to statement that computer software is just a bunch of ones and zeros and everyone has access to ones and zeros for free. But at some point it stops being just chain of ones and zeros and becomes meaningful computer program. It's similar problem like with forbidden numbers - at some point how things are arranged overcomes the value of elements itself, but the line there is blurry. So yeah, the "naive statement" is still on your side.
You may conjure any statements you can, but something can be only hidden if there is a way to keep it hidden. Before the IT and the consumer technology revolution that would have been required physically visiting the locations and making photos (and before ~2000 - making them on a film) of the infrastructure elements.
Now you can obtain pretty recent (no more than 6-8 years old for the most part, usually much newer) photos of almost anything in the world (bar Germany, China and some "not interesting" for the great powers countries) just from your chair, wherever it can be.
So yes, some aspects of that information is still classified or restricted, but that's... Polichinelle secret. Everybody (who cares, of course) knows what is there, yet the suits can harass and even jail you if you somehow trespass the invisible blurry line between their negligence and their obedience to the procedure.
It turns out that an absurd amount of sensitive/national security information is actually public but it becomes sensitive once it's organized in a way that it becomes "actionable" for attack, compromise, etc. In my particular situation, an acquaintance studying operations+logistics had overlaid communications trunks with transportation hubs and realized many of them were one in the same.
Now that more of this information is available easily and in readily combinable forms should make us re-evaluate all of it and how much gets shared, with who, when, and to what detail.
Btw, this is also a reason you should be skeptical whenever there's a leak and someone claims "none of this data is classified!" While technically true, a piece of non-classified but relatively unknown information might be the missing piece that makes something actionable.