It’s the turn of New York state comptroller Alan Hevesi to jump aboard Google-Earth-aids-terrorists bandwagon, reports the New York Post. In a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Hevesi says he was alerted by Queens assemblyman Michael Gianaris, whose discovery of Google Earth was previously blogged here.

Hevesi feels the need to mention that he is the sole trustee of the NY state pension fund, and that it has $25 million invested in Google stock.

From the article:

Hevesi told The Post, “Since 9/11, we have to be much more security conscious . . . I have asked Google to make sure that making satellite pictures available has been vetted by the appropriate government agencies.”

Which is weird, because in the letter to Schmidt he wrote that:

“I understand that you have contacted the Department of Defense to inquire about any national security issues that could arise from the use of this product.”

What we’ve got here is a bunch of New York politicians who can’t get their way, so they begin throwing around the idea that they could sell their shares as a threat. What a clever idea. Imagine if it worked. All South Korea or Thailand would have to do is buy Google shares through intermediaries, then threaten to dump them if Earth doesn’t obscure a proffered list of sites.

One of the earliest network link hacks to hit the web was Andy Fowler’s EarthCache KML link, a php script that displayed the nearest geocaches for a view, from the geocaching.com database.

This month, Geocaching.com’s owners, Groundspeak, asked Andy to put an end to the link, possibly because they will be offering a similar service to paying customers soon. He isn’t happy about it, but he stops serving the script, though his source code is now up for anyone to take and run on their own servers.

Websites mostly own their content, and thus can restrict access via the terms of use, but when the content is user-contributed, then I think you can make an ethical case for not restricting access to it. Instead, use RSS and KML feeds to drive traffic to the site, where you can upsell community services and cool new products (like the travelbug).

We’ve already had some excerpts from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash on Ogle Earth, and we’ve found that John Hanke took inspiration for Google Earth from the Earth in Snow Crash.

I read Snow Crash over the past week, and bookmarked the Earth passages. Here they are, at least all the ones longer than a passing mention:

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns – all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. (Ch. 13)

Hiro turns his attention to Earth.

The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit.

It’s not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems—vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans—and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator—the line between night and day—has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.

Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.

Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he’s just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down on a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It’s a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit. (Ch. 13)

Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he’s looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right out there, a couple of hundred miles off the Oregon coast, is a sort of granulated furuncle growing on the face of the water. […]

Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he’s looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computers from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he’s looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago. (Ch. 35)

Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.

“YOU ARE HERE,” he says.

Earth spins round until he staring straight down at the Raft, then it plunges towards him at a terrifying rate. It takes all of three seconds for him to get there.

If he were in some normal, stable part of the world, like lower Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he’s got to put up with two-dimensional satellite imagery. He’s looking at a red dot superimposed on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of a narrow black channel of water. YOU ARE HERE:

It’s still an incredible maze. But it’s a lot easier to solve a maze when you’re looking down on it. (Ch. 58)

For the first time that I am aware of, a government official “admits” Google Earth raises privacy concerns. The Age reports that while Australia’s Attorney-General Philip Ruddock does not consider Google Earth to constitute an additional security risk just now, “I am aware of privacy concerns raised in relation to Google Earth.”

It’s interesting that this should first crop up in Australia, which has a lot of very remote rural farming. I myself admit that as a life-long city dweller, I don’t much care if the world can see the rooftop of my apartment. Property owners, on the other hand, especially those with large tracts of it, might feel somewhat naked, suddenly.

Even so, property ownership is not the same as an absolute right to privacy. There are many other legal ways of observing private property — from planes, helicopters, clifftops, ladders… Any of these currently provide much better papparazzi possibilities.

(Note to self: Business idea: Sell next generation private satellite imagery of celebrities to Hola, The National Enquirer, Paris Match… and invest in pergola manufacturers.)

James Fee lauds Brian Flood’s Arc2Earth (which the cool people already call A2E).

A2E (was that subtle?) is a conversion tool for stuff created in ESRI’s ArcGIS, the Microsoft Office for GIS pros (costing $1,500 and up).

All of which raises a broader question in my mind — let’s say you know nothing about GIS but you’ve been impressed with Google Earth. So impressed, in fact, that you’re inspired to contribute your own creations for the greater good of the Google Earth community. Given the conversion tools now available, what’s the best application to be creative with? What is the cheapest? What is the best value for money?

It’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer. I’m aware of ArcGIS (now with a 60-day evaluation CD), as well as SketchUp, for Windows and Mac, (free trial), Amber iQ (with, you guessed it, a 15-day free trial), Google Earth Pro Beta (7-day trial!) and then I run out of ideas. Could GIS pros be so kind as to help us neophytes with a leg up on the product offerings? Cheapness is definitely a virtue for a first application, given most of us are not about to get a student discount on ESRI GIS software.

Jerry Paffendorf will be speaking at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference at Stanford University this coming weekend, about “Brave New Virtual Worlds.” Google Earth is one of them. He’s just posted his slides online, and they are quite a trip.

Canada’s Ambercore, “the leading global provider of high performance spatial decision support systems,” has released version 2.5.1 of Amber iQ, which looks extremely fancy, and which now for the first time also exports Google Earth’s KML. There is a free trial download, but they’re not volunteering prices, so you probably can’t afford it anyway:-)

I’ve never heard of Ambercore before, but that’s because I’m no GIS pro. What I do know is that there is a definite trend by pro GIS software vendors to accommodate KML. It means Google Earth is becoming the default free viewer for spatial information.