Google Earth Worldwide Security Matters

"When Google introduced Google Earth, free software that marries satellite and aerial images with mapping capabilities, the company emphasized its usefulness as a teaching and navigation tool, while advertising the pure entertainment value of high-resolution flyover images of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the pyramids.

But since its debut last summer, Google Earth has received attention of an unexpected sort. Officials of several nations have expressed alarm over its detailed display of government buildings, military installations and other sensitive sites within their borders.

India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. "It could severely compromise a country's security," V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India's federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth.

Similar sentiments have surfaced in news reports from other countries. South Korean authorities have said they fear that Google Earth lays bare details of sensitive military installations. Thai security authorities said they intended to ask Google to block images of vulnerable government buildings.

And Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the KGB, was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying: "Terrorists don't need to reconnoiter their target. Now an American company is working for them."

But there is little they can do, it seems, but protest.

Google Earth is the most conspicuous recent instance of increased openness in a digitally networked world, where information that was once carefully guarded is now widely available on personal computers.

American experts in and outside government generally agree that the focus on Google Earth as a security threat appears misplaced, as the same images that Google acquires from a variety of sources are available directly from the imaging companies, as well as from other sources.

"Google Earth is not acquiring new imagery," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which has an online repository of satellite imagery. "They are simply 'repurposing' imagery that somebody else had already acquired."

Andrew McLaughlin, a senior policy counsel at Google, said the company had entered discussions with several countries over the last few months.

Those meetings have yet to result in a request that Google remove or downgrade any information, he said. Nor, he said, has the U.S. government ever asked Google to remove information."