Google’s good earth

My roommate downloaded the new Google Earth 5.0 last night, and we entertained ourselves for several hours with the new and improved software. The level of detail is stunning. It now has street views for virtually everywhere in the US. Since he was the son of an itinerant Episcopal minister, my roommate moved around a lot as a kid, and he was able to check out every house he lived in as a kid, even in very rural, out-of-way areas like Barboursville, West Virginia.

As he did this, my thoughts turned immediately to less nostalgic uses for the software. Google Earth might just be the greatest archive of open-source intelligence, or intelligence gathered from publicly available sources, of all time. You literally get a snapshot of every 100 feet or so in the US. That’s pretty amazing.

Obviously, after my roommate enjoyed his trip down amnesia lane, we started looking up things that foreign spooks might be interested in, say, NORAD or the Hanford nuclear facility. They’re there, although not having ever been to either place, I can’t speak for the accuracy of what can be seen.

To have such a degree of detail rendered almost instantaneously by Google’s eye-of-God-like descent beneath the clouds is really an incredible tool. It also seems quintessentially American. I can’t imagine another society on the planet, past or present, that would have the technology and the desire to photograph and post for the world to see every 100 feet or so of the country, warts and all.

But is it wise?

Traditionally, most folks in the spook business will tell you that the majority of information deposited in a spy agency’s bank of knowledge is derived from public sources. America’s own first centralized intelligence agency, World War Two’s Office of Strategic Services, relied mostly upon open-source information. Despite the Allies’ fears of Nazi fifth columns and such, the Germans also relied heavily on public information. Indeed, the foundations of German rocket science were built upon the work of American pioneer Robert Goddard, who published his findings throughout the 1920s and 1930s to a mostly somnambulant scientific community in the US. Goddard’s work was culled from scores of scientific journals and patent applications, all open-source materials.

The intelligence implications for Google Earth could be overstated, though. While the street-view photographs are a real contribution of new content, most of the software is merely an aggregation of other content – topographical maps, street grids, satellite pictures, and so forth. For any enterprising spook, most of this stuff is already available. Google simply cuts out some legwork.