President says free mapping program could help terrorists
Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has joined the list of government officials charging that the geographic details provided by Google Earth’s satellite imaging program pose a security risk.
At a meeting of top police officials in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, Kalam said he worried that "developing countries, which are already in danger of terrorist attacks, have been singularly chosen" for providing high resolution images of their sites…
Kalam, who is also the supreme commander of India’s armed forces, made the comment over the weekend while addressing the nation’s top police officers at the Vallabhabhai Patel National Police Academy at Hyderabad. Google has an engineering center in Hyderabad and another in Bangalore.
High-resolution pictures are freely available on the Internet and are provided by many sites in addition to Google Earth, Kalam said. He cautioned officers during his speech to be aware of emerging "open-source intelligence." He also showed the audience aerial pictures of some of the sensitive locations in India.
Google Earth, launched in June this year, allows users to access overlapping satellite photos. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive locations in various countries.
The governments of South Korea and Thailand and lawmakers in the Netherlands have expressed similar concerns. South Korean newspapers said Google Earth provides images of the presidential Blue House and military bases in the country, which remains technically at war with communist North Korea. The North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon is among sites in that country displayed on the service.
The Google site contains clear aerial photos of India’s parliament building, the president’s house and surrounding government offices in New Delhi. There are also some clear shots of Indian defense establishments.
Debbie Frost, spokeswoman for Mountain View, California, Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources and the images displayed are about one to two years old, not shown in real time.
Google takes governmental concerns about Google Earth and Google Maps very seriously. Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to Indian authorities about any concerns they may have, Frost said in an e-mail statement.
Kalam, a scientist who guided India’s missile program before becoming president, called for new laws to restrain dissemination of such material. When you look deeper into it, you would realize that the specific laws in some countries, regarding spatial observations over their territory and UN recommendations about the display of spatial observations, are inadequate, he noted.
An intelligent mining of the data available on the Internet, according to Kalam, could give indicators of pre-formation activities of terrorists groups and their origins and their supporters.
Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Government officials in other countries, including South Korea and the Netherlands, have made similar complaints about the Google Earth application.