Google Earth vs. New Dehli

I had been wondering about this. In particular, I wanted to get a look at the aircraft carriers currently in the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Bremerton. Sadly, the pictures of NISMF are at extremely low resolution, which is mildly odd given that I doubt Al Qaeda, China, Iran, or Russia could learn all that much from observing rusting supercarriers.

It hadn’t occured to me that, while the US government probably could lean on Google in order to protect certain areas, other countries could not. The Indian government is very concerned:

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. And India’s surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, “They ought to have asked us.”

My guess is that Google will agree to depict certain facilities in low res, but not enough to make the Indians happy. Even more problematic, from India’s point of view, is that satellite photos are available in lots of other places, often at a higher resolution than Google Earth.

And you know what? The Indians are probably right. Google Earth and similar services may actually make the job of a terrorist or military planner easier. Anything that makes the landscape of an urban area more intelligible also makes it more vulnerable. But I really don’t see anything that could be done about it, so it’s probably not worth worrying too much.