I realize that. I didn't say "publicly available" but rather that anyone important has access to the information that they want. I expect that any exceptions to that can be trivially remedied on a case by case basis.
It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.
Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities? Or do you concede the point that they do not, in fact, have those yet?
Satellite does not get you most of the way there, the threat model here is military (drone) warfare where you would like 3d maps at high resolution. To me “Targeted collection” would look a lot like “backdoor some small % of the commercial drones we sell and siphon the data out”. You should check the Snowden files for the implant tech that NSA was putting in Cisco routers bound to China if you think this sounds far fetched.
> Do you have any evidence supporting the claim that CCP has high resolution LiDAR point cloud maps of US cities?
I never claimed that - you aren't engaging with what I actually wrote.
I questioned the usefulness of such data in the general case. I also pointed out that in the rare cases where such data for a small area would prove useful it would be trivial to collect (on account of being a small area).
Just what sort of resolution do you believe is necessary or useful for drone warfare or other military uses? What do you have in mind here? Regardless, if I (a civilian) can afford the equipment and plane ticket to collect a LiDAR point cloud of a monument approximately anywhere in the world then any well funded actor can also send a "tourist" to do the same.
For that matter I don't think you even need LiDAR. Photogrammetry techniques can achieve arbitrarily high spatial resolution proportional to that of the input data. LiDAR just has some advantages if you're considering deploying on a wide scale or for certain realtime or power constrained tasks. Generally none of that applies to state actors.
It's a matter of scale. Satellite imagery gets you most of the way there. I can think of only a very few instances where you'd care about higher resolution and those should be few enough that any well funded actor (ie the ones we care about here) can perform targeted data collection.