Google Earth Anxiety

[Update: Michael Gianaris has responded. I've posted his letter and my response on my new tech-only blog, here. Please update your links when you get a second.]

Google Earth Makes Some Officials Nervous - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog

NYT has the story of several New York officials who don’t understand how Google Earth and Maps work, or are otherwise suffering from anxiety. After I first heard of Michael N. Gianaris (D. Queens) and his deep misunderstanding of the issues, I sent him an extremely polite and informative email (obviously not speaking for Google) explaining how Google does not actually have its own satellites, nor do they (as far as I know) censor public information.

Such censorship obviously occurs somewhere — we see evidence of it — many different kinds, in fact. But unless Google is schizophrenic, those many varied methods of censorship indicate to me that any censorship happens at the original information sources. It’s fairly useless to ask Google to re-censor the images, especially when the data is also available without going through Google at all. In other words, A terrorist could use a "Censored Earth" to find the most pixelated or blacked out areas (i.e., the most vulnerable) and then buy the uncensored maps to see why. And so, I patiently explained, having Google censor this information would be like asking the New York Times to censor a book review because the book under review contained allegedly dangerous materials. It’s not going to solve the problem, assuming it even should be "solved" in this way.

Well, I never heard back from Assemblyman Gianaris, even though I made myself personally available to help explain these issues over the phone, by email, or in person (I live not too far from his office). And he complains that Eric Schmidt doesn’t answer his letters! Well, that says to me that Mr. Gianaris either doesn’t care about the truth, doesn’t get it, or is simply trying to exploit this issue for his own political benefit. It seems this curious behavior is not only a trait of Republicans in power, but of any politician who thinks increased authoritarianism will benefit him personally. Mr. Gianaris, I invite you to respond.

And as for Google Street Maps, well, I do have real privacy concerns, mainly about how the information should be virtualized to remove individuals (who have a right to privacy, vs. buildings, which don’t) and transient objects that don’t help the mapping goal IMO. But as for Google’s vans taking pictures of the streets and buildings themselves, that’s called public space. If the state comptroller thinks that people taking pictures of the fronts of buildings and putting them on the web will aid terrorists, then these vulnerable buildings should simply not be accessible to the public in any form. Because there’s nothing stopping a would-be terrorist from taking these pictures himself. Nothing, but a disposable camera and a few dollars in processing.

As I explained to Mr. Gianaris, the only way to protect vulnerable sites is to actually protect vulnerable sites, i.e., at the source. Dress the buildings up as something else, you know, like the military does with missile silos. Cover them from aerial view. Camouflage them if need be. Fix the problem at the source.

"Covering up" poor security by censorship for such supposedly "secure" installations is simply a deception on the tax-paying public, and should be exposed as such. If the real message is that installations are not properly secured from terrorist or other criminal acts, then don’t shoot the messenger. Don’t punish the whistle-blower, whether the whistle was blown intentionally or not.

This sort of public exposure is exactly what an open and democratic society needs to highlight lame officials and contractors who don’t do their jobs. Censorship is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Rather than cover-up the problems, we should be asking conscientious Google Earth users to suggest security concerns to the authorities so they can be addressed. We should be using distributed intelligence and public oversight to ensure a healthy, aware, and resilient (as opposed to "hermetically sealed") society.

And if these officials can’t understand that real security means confidence — calm and reasoned discussion of rational threats and actual solutions — then they should be looking for new jobs. Because if the most they can say after some future attack is that they successfully bullied Google into removing any visual reference to the now-destroyed building, then they have completely failed the public trust.