Are Urban Explorers Really a Threat to Our National Security?

Apparently, urban explorers – those people who crawl into a city’s guts, scale its peaks, and delve into its abandoned infrastructure – are the latest source of concern for counterterrorism experts.

Spencer Ackerman reports on Wired’s Danger Room blog that the National Counterterrorism Center put out a one-page advisory (PDF) last November about the potential dangers posed by explorers who "seek illicit access to transportation and industrial facilities in urban areas." (The human figures in the illustrations are strangely reminiscent of those placed on New York rooftops by sculptor Antony Gormley as part of his 2010 project "Event Horizon.") The document was originally posted on the Public Intelligence site, which publishes stuff like this on the principle that "equal access to information is a human right."