My Google Map Blog

On the surface, it seems like almost a silly question: “Can law enforcement use Google Earth without a warrant?”. Because the imagery is so outdated (“new” imagery is typically a month or two old, at best), it seems that it would be of little value to police and prosecutors. However, a story from KPLU sheds a bit of a different light on it.

Here’s an abridged version of the story:

Defendant Errol Speed argues investigators subjected him to an unreasonable search when they reviewed aerial images–Google Earth images as well as aerial photos taken by the county for planning purposes–before obtaining a search warrant.

To Speed (the defendant), the images make all the difference. Without those images, he claims, investigators would never have seen the structure on his tree-lined 11-acre property.

“My property is surrounded by 150 feet of native brush for privacy,” said Speed. “It’s impenetrable. You cannot see even in winter, when the leaves are off.”

Speed contends the fact that investigators were looking at those images without a search warrant is a violation of his privacy rights under Article 1, Section 7 of the Washington State Constitution.

He adds the magnified satellite images yield a closer look than what could be seen by the naked eye of anyone flying over his property, and are themselves invasions of his privacy.

San Juan County Prosecutor Randy Gaylord has no doubt these images should be allowed.

“They were always in a lawful place when they took those pictures. That’s essentially the position that we’re taking,” he said. “And these are photos of spaces not necessarily considered private. Nothing prevents flights over Mr. Speed’s house.”

You can read the full story on the KPLU website.

There have been similar stories over the years, such as when Riverhead, NY used Google Earth to track down residents with unlicensed swimming pools. We’ll likely see an increasing number of these stories as time goes on, as Google Earth continues to increase the freshness and quality of their imagery.

What do you think? Is this a good way to catch people that try to hide behind “impenetrable brush”, or is it an invasion of privacy?

The post Can law enforcement use Google Earth without a warrant? appeared first on Google Earth Blog.

Iran is planning to create a new “Islamic Google Earth” called “Basir”, which they plan to have up and running in the next few months. They also plan to have a data center capacity that will match Google within three years, which is amazingly ambitious to say the least.

Many in Iran consider Google Earth to be a “tool for western spying agencies”, so they appear to be building their own version of “Google Earth” so that they can spy back. From an article on the Guardian website:

“On the surface, Google Earth is providing a service to users, but in reality security and intelligence organisations are behind it in order to obtain information from other countries,” Nami said.

Iran has often looked at western web services with a great deal of suspicion.

Other Iranian officials have echoed Nami in making similar accusations against Google. Iran’s police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam, said last year that it was not a search engine but “a spying tool”, according to Fars news agency. Web users in Iran can usually access Google but some features like Gmail or Google Earth have intermittently faced filtering. However, with suspected help from China, Iran blocks access to many search results. Access to more than 5m websites are blocked in Iran.

However, there are many that don’t think this project will happen at all:

An IT consultant who has worked on Iran’s national internet project in the past said the announcement was merely an excuse to obtain funds and secure working contracts for the future.

“They have claimed to run their service in four months and said their data centre capacity will reach Google’s size in three years,” he said. “Three-year project, no business model and only relying on government funding, a piece of cake indeed … To have a data centre with such capacity and security level they need power stations, cooler systems, bandwidth, etc, which will require billions of dollars of investment that doesn’t fit with Iran’s sanctions-hit economy.”

It’ll be interesting to see if this new product launches in a few months or not. Check out the full article on the Guardian website for more.

On a side note: what’s up with the Google Earth screenshot they used for that article (seen below)? That had to have been from version 3.x back in 2005 or so. Interesting that they use an eight-year-old reference image to highlight this article. Based on the image, anyone care to guess exactly what version of Google Earth was used there?

The post Iran to launch an “Islamic Google Earth”? appeared first on Google Earth Blog.