Understandable revulsion at the terror attacks on Mumbai has alas become intertwined with an idiotic need for indiscriminate blame-mongering and grandstanding — a local lawyer has now filed a petition in Bombay High Court demanding that all imagery of India be removed from Google Earth.

The petition filed by Mumbai-based lawyer Amit Karkhanis has demanded removal of images of the country from Google Earth.

“In the alternative, I have demanded that at least the images of vital installations in the country be blocked,” said Karkhanis.

“The petition is filed against the backdrop of terror attacks in Mumbai,” he said. “Even images of nuclear plants and defence establishments are available on this site. It is a security hazard,” he added.

What’s wrong with this story? Let us count the ways.

The terrorists didn’t attack “sensitive” targets like nuclear power plants or military bases. They attacked public spaces in the middle of a city, accessible to everyone with a camera, and visible on thousands of different kinds of maps. Google Earth’s imagery is the best of the bunch, perhaps, but not unique or irreplaceable. Removing it would not have prevented this attack.

Forcing Google to make imagery of India inaccessible to users of Google Earth in India would mean that everyone but people in India could access the imagery. Considering that the planning for the attacks likely took place outside India, such a ban would have achieved nothing, security-wise. And let’s not forget that people sophisticated enough to use VOIP to coordinate their attacks are also likely to know about proxy servers.

Karkhanis’s argument, if he were being consistent, is that progress must be stopped because it cannot be controlled. Because we cannot force people to use maps, mobile phones, GPS and the internet only for good, we must ban their use completely, even if the amount of good they do far outweighs the amount of evil they enable.

The Times of India (TOI) has further clues that Amit Karkhanis is not that clever:

The advocate, in his [petition], said the premium edition with a subscription of US $400 allowed even real-time maps and updates to be accessed. Even the pictures of the ongoing construction of the Worli-Bandra Sealink were available on the site, Karkhanis noted.

That’s just pure fantasy. The dataset is the same for both the free version and the paid version. (It would be really cool if real-time updates were possible, however:-)

One more fact check: TOI continues to claim, despite it being blatantly not the case and despite an on-the-record denial by Google, that Google had previously agreed to blur sensitive sites in India:

Last February [in 2007], as TOI had reported, the Indian government and Google Earth had agreed to show “fuzzy, low-resolution or distorted pictures” of sensitive military and scientific establishments on the web.

So perhaps the kind of media that manages to consistently misreport a verifiable fact should share the blame for this latest legal embarrassment. Amit Karkhanis probably reads TOI uncritically.

In sum, there is not much to worry about — anyone can file this kind of petition, and a modicum of critical thinking will lead to its dismissal.

In the meantime, UK’s Times Online has a balanced piece that raises the question of how India’s upcoming official mapping service, Bhuvan, is meant to show India after Mumbai’s terror episode. Bhuvan’s backers say it will have imagery of India that is more frequently updated and of higher resolution that Google Earth, though with censored sensitive sites. Do those sites include central Mumbai now? Or can Bhuvan predict where terrorists will strike next and automatically blur those places? If not, is the Indian government prepared for news that a potential future terror attack in say, downtown Calcutta, was planned with Bhuvan?

I’m heading off for a week’s worth of road-tripping up the Nile, tagging along with some Egyptologist friends. The narrow populated swath along the river should be awash with 3G connectivity, so I plan to stay connected. If I make any good 360-degree panoramas, I’ll upload them to 360Cities and post them here.

Meanwhile:

• Mumbai terrorists used Google Earth: “Terrorists used Google Earth” announces India’s Business Standard, citing anonymous government sources. Indeed, and RIM Blackberries as well, not to mention boats, energy food, flags and credit cards.
• 3D multitouch User-interface pörn: Oblong Industries’ G-Speak:

  
  g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

• Geobombing via Panoramio: One of the photos in the Panoramio layer above the Armenian genocide memorial in Yerevan mocked the genocide, reported PanArmenian.net. Soon after, the photo was removed by Google/Panoramio.
• Pirate maps: This is a bit older, but Ethan Zuckerman, Aid Worker Daily and Google Earth blog all link to interesting maps depicting piracy incidents off the Somali coast and further afield.
• Ancient Rome? Not so much, please: Ancient Rome in Google Earth is supposed to spur on educators to create compelling classroom content, with prizes promised for the best ideas. But for some educators, the dataset is just too unwieldy to be useful. And from my own experience with the layer, I’d have to agree, as currently implemented.
• Bhuvan blowhards: If you need any more proof of what damage poor reporting can do among credulous bloggers, check out how the nonsensical reporting on India’s planned web mapping service Bhuvan gets credulously rereported on the usually reliable Foreign Policy blog:
  

  So, why does India think its program can compete? For starters, Bhuvan users will be able to zoom in on areas as small as 10 meters wide (Google’s zoom limit is 200 meters).

  I know I’m preaching to the choir here at Ogle Earth, but is it really all that difficult to just run Google Earth and confirm that you can in fact zoom in to an area that is “as small as 10 meters wide”? Of course, how far you can zoom in is irrelevant — it’s the pixel resolution of the imagery that matters.

  But Foreign Policy blog is just that — a blog. The real shaming should be of newspapers who report nonsense as fact. The technology section of the London Times, of all places, is squarely to blame:

  The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth.

  At least the Financial Times, though a bit lazy, makes sure we know what’s a fact and what’s an unverified claim:

  Officials claim that the Bhuvan system will be able to supply more precise images than Google Earth and other services by zooming in to a distance of 10 metres.

  BTW, I haven’t seen a single sourced mention of Bhuvan being a 3D virtual globe— it just seems to be assumed that it is because somewhere along the line a comparison was made with Google Earth by someone.

• Google Maps API updated again: Just to make it absolutely clear your first-born will not belong to Google. Nor will your second-born. After that we’ll talk.
• More UI pørn: This time, from Microsoft. Behold Second Light, an upgrade of their Surface technology…

• Two Cool visualizations: 1) National University of Singapore’s library map is a model 3D built for the Google Earth Plugin. Impressive, but not accessible to Macs. (Via Google Geo Developers’ blog) and 2) Google Earth in the Cave, a 3D room-sized visualization, brought to you via VerySpatial.

[See update below] A credible report on the China-based Moonlight Blog brings news and visual evidence that during the past few weeks, some of the default layers in Google Earth have become inaccessible from behind the Great Chinese Firewall.

This could of course be a temporary ISP problem, or a problem on Google’s end, and it’s only one report, but given that tunneling to a proxy server outside China restores access to the layers, government censorship is indeed a likely explanation.

If it is censorship, then it is not necessarily an intentional targeting of Google Earth — it could be due to an automated filtering system. The missing default layers are found inside the Gallery and Global Awareness folders — which contain user-generated content and content by organizations with placemarks in China that can be construed as critical of the regime there (see The Elders: Every Human Has Rights). These layers are made of URLs pointing to KML files, which are just machine-readable text files containing, among other things, the texts inside placemark popups — and thus they are susceptible to China’s Golden Shield filtering apparatus, which tries to ensure that Chinese netizens are only exposed to state-approved ideas and knowledge.

Another reason why I suspect that the censorship is automated rather that targeted at Google Earth is that the data which is not machine readable — the satellite imagery — is still accessible. So, yes, you can still see sensitive military sites in Google Earth from China; you just can’t get Google Earth Community’s help in searching for them. It’s an interesting development — while the sensitive sites show up in the raw imagery, there is so much raw imagery out there that it isn’t very useful unless you have pointers to the good bits, and for that you need access to the layers that contain the collective intelligence of Google Earth users.

Here’s hoping that Moonlight Blog keeps us updated on any changes to the kind of content that is available in Google Earth from China.

[Update: 2008-11-27: Others running Google Earth from within China could not reliably replicate this report, so either the problem is not censorship, or intermittent, ad-hoc censorship. It could also be a regional thing.]

It’s been a few months since we’ve had a Google Earth censorship “eruption” so we were definitely overdue the one now underway near Canberra. As usual, the blame lies with the media.

Defence Headquarters Joint Operations Command wiped from Google Earth, begins the article in Australia’s Daily Telegraph and reprinted in local papers like Adelaide Now and the Herald Sun. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the buildings in question once were visible on Google Earth but now no longer. You’d be wrong. They never have been, and not because of censorship. Insinuates the article:

Google Earth’s images of the surrounding area were taken in 2008, but the Bungendore site itself is represented only by an image taken before October, 2006, when John Howard turned the first sod.

Actually, the region to the East of Canberra where the new HQ lies is a hodgepodge of different imagery. Canberra itself has some fine new aerial imagery from March 2008. Move East, however, and you get DigitalGlobe satellite imagery from October 2006. The region of the HQ is DigitalGlobe imagery from May 2005. Just to the South and East of it is DigitalGlobe imagery from October 2004. (You can tell by zooming in on the imagery and looking at the status bar at the bottom of the screen.)

Much as we’d all like to have the most recent imagery everywhere, that’s just not the case. And when sensitive areas fail to be covered by the very latest imagery out there, that does not constitute censorship. And that is the point the Google spokesperson tries to make to the reporter:

A Google spokesman said Defence had not insisted on the image’s removal, but it was “not unusual” for old images to be used if they had better resolution than fresh shots.

Imagine that, an outright denial from Google, and it just gets ignored because it gets in the way of a good story. And even if Defence had asked Google, Google wouldn’t have been under any obligation to help: A state’s jurisdiction does not extend into space, so no country’s government has a say over satellite imagery. (And no doubt that is why Australia didn’t bother asking.) Had the imagery been aerial, then Defence would have had the authority, but then it would have had to censor the imagery itself before releasing it to the public. That clearly didn’t happen here, as Google Earth’s attribution to DigitalGlobe shows.

BTW, here is the spot in question. Le Technoblog du LAC has the intel on the precise location of the new HQ:

And here it is on Google Maps/Earth:

View Larger Map

In Australia, Google Earth seems to have spurred the popular imagination quite successfully. Perhaps that’s because on a per capita basis the country has by far the most high-resolution imagery to gawk over. (Canada has more surface area, but comparatively less of it is in high-res. I’m willing to stand corrected, however, if another country wants to claim this crown.)

We’ve already had one story this year about an Australian finding and then confirming a meteorite crater using Google Earth. Now Australia’s The Age newspaper is going for seconds, reporting on a retired geologist who thinks he’s found a crater as well, in northwest New South Wales.

If newspapers wonder why they’re dinosaurs on the way to extinction, this article should answer it. The online version is screaming for an embedded Google Map showing you the candidate crater in question, but of course no such tool is made available, letting us blogs run away with the bone:

View Larger Map

Another problem is that the article is premature. The feature hasn’t been verified as a meteorite crater, and frankly, to me it looks more like a round ridge of hills. There are plenty of hilly ridges around — some of them will curve. Pre-announcing crater finds is a recipe for egg on face.

As of this morning, the wonderful panoramas of 360Cities‘s photographers are available as a default layer in Google Earth. This is the good stuff:-) Apologies in advance for the self-promotion, but:

It’s yet another great content addition — one that, just like the Gigapan, Gigapxl and Street View layers, gives a much enhanced “sense of place” when visiting a spot on Earth vicariously. I think I’ll go upload all my other ones now!

Because, yes, they are that awesome. And the archive also includes some nice pictures of maps. Just search for “source:life map“. Here’s a teaser: