The Earth Catchers

Dr Ajay Sharma is happy to see his house in Noida, the first

station, first line, Phase 1 of the Delhi Metro zooms into view all the way

across to Connaught Place, so do the bylanes of Wazir Pur in New Delhi, and

Suldhal railway station in Gokak Taluk of Belgaum district-all in decent

detail. You can't see any people yet, and you are nowhere near convincing your

neighbor that he is dumping garbage in front of your house. However, details of

the terrain will be clearer in the coming months as more "layers" are

added on to the satellite pictures by members of the Google Earth Community (bbs.keyhole.com).

This online community provides helpful hints on how to use overlays, among other

Google Earth (GE) tools.

But, right now, the smudgy but high-resolution pictures compiled

from thousands of remote sensing satellite images leave most people far from

convinced that a security threat looms on the horizon. This, regardless of

President Abdul Kalam recently echoing the fears of Australia, South Korea,

Thailand, and the Netherlands that the maps are a potential security threat.

The Terrain Chasers



Amateur researchers, instant investigators, security agencies and hardened

real estate professionals will find GE handy. Some terrain chasers are moving in

to overturn the existing notions. A Google Earth member, identified as 'K1',

after some investigation now claims that Mount Everest is not the tallest of

them all. "Because of the equatorial bulge of the earth, the summit of the

volcano Chimborazo is the point most distant from the center of the earth,"

he writes.

PARLIAMENT HOUSE That's ol' doughnut alright, but where are the nuts?

For knowledge seekers, the thrill of the terrain chase is even

more interesting than getting there. As for security concerns and fears of

intimate details of vital installations being revealed to prying eyes,

"Even if the Chinese government or the Nepali military have a secret

defence establishment at the base of Mount Everest, how would we know that from

a distance of 5,000 metres?" asks IT developer Dinesh Chandra. "And,

so what if the locations of the Parliament House, Army headquarters and

Rashtrapati Bhavan are labelled and clearly visible? Everybody knows how to find

them anyway. How would a terrorist plan his attack just by seeing approach roads

and parked aircrafts? These pictures are outdated by at least six months, and

vehicle movements don't mean a thing to a terrorist who can plan his attack at

leisure and strike at will. The attack on Parliament in 2001 and the more recent

one on Ayodhya did not need GE 'intelligence'."

According to Chandra, GE is at present more of a fun tool and

merely satiates your need for mystery, to snoop around over terrain you have

never seen and satisfying your curiosity. "GE falls short in the

intelligence gathering department. There are far better tools for that," he

says.

SECURITY THREAT? Military transport aircraft at Palam Air Force base. Who knows, soon you may read the cracks on the aircraft's windscreen

Certain geographical areas are labelled in detail, down to the

smallest bylanes, especially US locations. IT consultant with Ness Technologies,

Krish Murali Eshwar, found that GE fit the bill when he wanted to search out the

address of his office. On a visit to New Jersey last month, Eshwar used GE to

navigate his way to his office without much hassle. "GE pictures are still

two-dimensional. Even if they are updated more frequently in the future, I would

say that no terrorist group can take operational advantage just by being able to

see vehicle movements in defence establishments, even spread across a few weeks.

For GE to become a terrorist tool, you need to gather far more intelligence,

apart from the detail you see on the ground. That does not seem likely to

happen," says Eshwar.

Google India acknowledged questions from Dataquest on GE, but

failed to reply to the same. Reports say that Google has insisted that they have

not received any formal requests from governments to censor images. In the midst

of the imaging controversy, 4,190-employee strong Google has joined forces with

NASA to collaborate in areas like developing search databases for space mission

photographs, bioinfo-nano convergence, supercomputing, datamining, and bringing

entrepreneurs into NASA's space program.

The Concerns



Reports also point out that Google has taken governmental concerns about GE

and Google Maps very seriously. China's objection to GE has been purely

territorial. The Chinese government has taken exception to deletion of the

words, "Taiwan, a province of the People's Republic of China", from a

map of Taiwan.

For some, the security concerns stem from the fact that images

of many defense installations are available on GE with reasonable clarity-even

certain North Korean tank columns, and 'Area 51' in the US, as testified by

at least three GE users. However, the peaceful countenance of Baghdad city from

up above does not betray the strife convulsing the Iraqi capital. IT expert

Mohan Krishna of LMK Consulting feels that hiding key arms installations from

the prying eyes of military satellites is a job many a countries have

specialized in. "I would say that Google Earth images are far more quickly

updated than we all think-many pictures are often updated between a week and

ten days apart," he claims.

Krishna, like a few other Google Earth watchers, attests to the

fact that maps from the website are becoming increasingly dynamic over the last

two months.

Detailed panoramas of approach roads, parked aircrafts, and

weaponry do not worry users like Krishna. More worrying is the fact that

material and logistics movement of important defense establishments across time

periods of two or six months can be logged by extremist groups. "Putting

together a bigger picture of an organization's security priorities is easy

once you know how its materials are moved around. Google Earth makes this pretty

easy," Krishna says.

Parallely, the possibility to customize and widen GE's

developer base is gathering steam. Google Maps offer APIs for those who are

comfortable working with Javascript, and Google Maps EZ for those who like the

straight HTML. While both are freely available, Google Earth Enterprise allows

you to combine your own data with Google Earth data to provide a robust GIS

solution to your organization. However, this service isn't free.

"In fact, GPS, which has been a strong GIS solution being

implemented in automobiles, would pose a stronger threat than Google Earth and

Google Maps. Companies like Toyota and Honda are putting more electronics into

their cars every year. Remember that auto GPS systems are right now not entirely

hack-proof. Even if they are, there is still no guarantee that they can protect

all knowledge about my whereabouts from prying eyes," says Eshwar.

Nevertheless, the US has obscured the White House roof, but

Edwards Air Force base is clearly visible. The censoring efforts, if any on GE,

remain partial. This is because security concerns remain multi-pronged-and

fraught with conflict at the individual or organizational levels. On the one end

you would want to access data transparently across the globe, while on the

other, you would also want knowledge of your whereabouts or other sensitive data

shielded from everybody else. At any rate, with GE, this contradiction does not

arise at the moment, says Eshwar. "It is simply not advanced enough and is

still pretty bad technology. The pictures are not updated frequently, people are

still invisible, and no amount of layering in the months ahead will produce

real-time and accurate tracking of vehicle, material and people movement."

However, as the Google Earth Community is presently widening its

database and image compositing software to include greater detail and more

frequent landscape updations, industry watchers like Mohan Krishna fear the

worst. "The government will have to wake up to the threat of extremists

snooping, at least a few months from now, when technology catches up," he

says.

Adds a defence analyst, "Terrorists can remotely view the

entire infrastructure and the access points of sensitive installations and they

could plan a strategic bomb placement. But their job will be made 90% easier

only when the real vulnerability points can be mapped, which is not the case

currently."

The 'plugin mentality' of the developer community is helping

to tweak GE to the benefit of real estate dealers. Realty dealers in the US,

like Prudential Preferred Properties, have come up with customized versions

where a plug-in allows the users to search its listings by city, property

location, area, and price. Disaster management is an additional incentive. The

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provided GE with images of

New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama, which were hit by Hurricanes Katrina and

Rita in September. GE members created overlays that drape on top of existing

satellite images, which help viewers compare before- and after-Katrina images.

Other Threats



Even the critics acknowledge that there is no way of stopping the

availability of information in a transparent world even if it is to terrorists

and insurgents. Government officials agreed that "selective censoring"

would not be a good long-term strategy, as image resolutions get better and

better. Censor online satellite imagery, and there will be other sources of

similar information which you would have to restrict as well, including

Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Yahoo! Maps. One user jokes, "Defence

installations face no threat from GE, but GE does face a good business threat

from Yahoo! Maps."

As further scrutiny from the security hawks keeps pace with the

sharper detail definition which GE Maps will have to show in the months to come,

the government will have to operate on the premise that the bad guys do have

access to that kind of terrain information. For Google, it will be a

wait-and-watch approach, while development work on the sprawling GE database is

pooled out in the true spirit of open source.

Ravi Menon