Google Terrorism?

There have been a wide swath of recent head­lines con­nect­ing the suc­cess of insur­gent activ­ity in Iraq with their abil­ity to acquire pre­cise tar­get­ing data from Google Earth. Appar­ently searches of sus­pec­ted loc­ales in Iraq have turned up detailed satel­lite imagery of Amer­ican or gov­ern­ment install­a­tions acquired freely over the inter­net. Not too hard to believe. Its there. Some of the more right wing com­ment­at­ors have been demand­ing that Google think long and hard about the moral implic­a­tions of its mis­sion to encour­age the wide and free dis­sem­in­a­tion of such inform­a­tion. This raises a huge cen­sor­ship issue, one that seems not to trouble many in a ‘coun­try under attack’ — that of course is the US, not Iraq. Paul McNamarra has an inter­est­ing blog entry in which he sup­ports free­dom of access, but sug­gests that Google has already cen­sored inform­a­tion for much less spuri­ous notions, i.e. Eric Schmidt feel­ing that his private life was being unfairly examined and cut­ting Google access off for CNET report­ers.
So I popped over to tour Bagh­dad in Google Earthy myself. While its pretty simple to find mil­it­ary install­a­tions and most of the city is covered in superb detail, I was struck more by the addi­tional imagery that has been provided through geot­ag­ging. There’s a wealth of visual imagery uploaded by private indi­vidu­als nam­ing camps and provid­ing pos­sibly even more up-to-date inform­a­tion. Hope­fully this renders moot dis­cus­sion of hav­ing high-level com­mit­tees to decide what should be shown on Google Earth and what shouldn’t. This is an inter­est­ing hot potato. I won­der what the state of cen­sor­ship is of blogs and emails? How does the US mil­it­ary try to keep up with the vast num­ber of ways that sens­it­ive inform­a­tion can be dis­sem­in­ated today?