Working on Honesty Traces

A few years ago, I saw an article about honesty traces. These use the basic utilities on your average PC, along with a GPS capable of downloading its data via USB to find potential ambush points. I've wanted to figure out how to make honesty traces for a few years now, and I've never taken the time to do it. As I'm killing time prior to graduation, I've been able work on some security-related projects, and figuring out honesty traces is one of them.

I've had to be somewhat field expedient, though. For example, the instructions call for the use of Garmin's MapSource software. At the time I started playing around with my Garmin eTrex Vista H, I could not for the life of me find the MapSource software, so I defaulted to an open source program called EasyGPS. The slide deck also calls for the user to utilize FalconView, which is software that was developed in partnership with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Department of Defense; however, there are two versions of the software, and the slide deck demonstrates the restricted DoD version that's not available to the public. So, I'll eventually attempt to learn how to do honesty traces that are nearly the same as those demonstrated in that slide deck; but using EasyGPS and Wikimapia, and with a bit of my own HTML/XML editing for the .gpx files created from the GPS data, I'm also trying to figure out an alternate method.

Using six tracks that I took in Kirkwall over the course of the last week, I made a preliminary honesty trace. You can see a number of "choke points" (or else, points where my path crossed multiple times), which is the entire point of the exercise. It still needs some work to get it all figured out; as you can see, there's a massive red line that runs straight through St. Magnus Cathedral that's quite obviously not part of my route, and that's something that I need to figure out how to reconcile (I'm already close). The end goal is to not only teach myself how to do it, but to create a work instruction so that others can follow my lead in a manner that's more "open source" and, hopefully, a bit simpler than the original instructions from the Marines.