If you have not yet experienced Google Earth, I encourage you to give it a try. Download and install the Google Earth program (you don’t have to give out your real name and email address when you register) and hang on for the ride.
Google Earth uses global satellite imagery purchased from some of the same companies that supply various government agencies. You’ll start from a page that looks like you’re floating in space viewing the Earth. Enter a location , such as your home address, and you’ll start zooming in on the globe closer and closer until you land on an aerial view of your house, just like in a Hollywood spy movie. The level of detail can be impressive and, to many folks, a bit unsettling. Forget any quaint notions you used to have about privacy. Your location has been visually hacked from outer space.
While there are other satellite imaging services, none are as easy for the general public to use as Google Earth. This ease of use also applies to Google’s online mapping service, Google Maps. These services are so thorough and easy to use that numerous government agencies around the world, citing security and terrorism concerns, are demanding across-the-board Google Earth and Google Maps censorship.
Some of these government demands border on the absurd. Some are quite understandable. It was learned earlier this year that terrorists attacking British military bases in Basra, Iraq had been using aerial photos and latitude/longitude information provided by Google Earth. Responding to British requests, a Google spokesman stated, “Of course we are always ready to listen to government requests. We have opened channels with the military in Iraq but we are not prepared to discuss what we have discussed with them. But we do listen and we are sensitive to requests.” The pictures showing Basra military bases were replaced with pre-war images.
Other government demands seem more driven by pressures from global corporate interests. In one case, a French court ordered Greenpeace to remove Google Map images from the French version of its website. The pictures show the location of “secret” fields of genetically engineered corn grown by agriculture giant Monsanto. Never mind the fact that the same images are available on a jillion other websites around the world.
Google has also allowed Google Maps to be used as a social engineering propaganda tool by public and private special interests. Google Earth recently teamed up with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to highlight the massacres that have taken place in the western Darfur region of Sudan. Experts estimate that 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million more have been displaced since the conflict flared in 2003, when rebels took up arms against the central Sudanese government. In announcing this new Google Earth “feature,” Google VP Elliot Schrage proudly declared, “At Google, we believe technology can be a catalyst for education and action.” Schrage said he wants Google Earth users to “join the museum’s efforts in responding to this continuing international catastrophe.”
As laudable as these efforts may be, it is becoming increasingly clear that Google views itself, not as an objective provider of unbiased information, but as a change agent worthy of molding public opinion and action. Governments also view Google as a way to control publicly-available information. For a fascinating look at Google Earth pictures that have been deliberately altered, including actor William Hurt’s home, search Wikipedia for “censored Google Earth.”