What a difference a day makes. If you check out the Digital Globe Online Store now, as we did on Tuesday, you no longer get imagery of Basra from 2004 for sale, but the same pre-war imagery from 2002 that Google currently shows:
Also worth noting is that Mike Williams’s excellent Google Tile Comparisons tool is now off-line — though perhaps that may be due to The Register taking an interest in the story today.
The removal of the September 2004 image from the Digital Globe Online Store during the past 48 hours provides rock-solid confirmation, in my mind, that there has been a concerted effort to close this particular barn door. And without implying any normative judgment, this amounts to the first documented case of self-censorship by Google in Google Earth.
Well it seems you did a good job in letting people know how easy it was to get this data, although I may not personnaly agree with the removal of the data it will probably help many people feel safer. Great work on these stories Stefan, it seems you are becoming a proper investigative journalist :).
i agree with bull, I’m not sure how I feel about the imagery (any imagery for that matter) getting removed but I suppose in this case there is good reason for it.
excellent work stefan, your DG “tutorial” showed just how easy it is to get to the raw data outside of GE.
cheers
brian