PIL asking Google to remove India from Google Earth
Mumbai attack terrorists used Google Earth to memorize digital satellite images of the city in order to find their targets and coordinate their attacks.
A PIL has been filed against Google asking them to remove India from Google Earth, as their product helped terrorist in planning the attack.
The petition filed by Mumbai-based lawyer Amit Karkhanis says that it is easy access to satellite images of the vital installations in the country through Google Earth and this would aid terrorists in plotting attacks.
Karkhanis demanded that at least the images of India should be blocked from Google Earth.
Few years back, Google Earth completely exposed the images of INS Virat docking station (a highly secretive station with no access to civilians) and later, Indian govt. and Google earlier agreed to show ‘fuzzy’/low-resolution pics of sensitive military and scientific establishments on the web.
Google Earth’s high-resolution has been questioned by other countries as well – the product is banned in Sudan, China too was mulling over to ban the product. Interestingly, Google Earth doesn’t show US military base,
The petition is likely to come up for hearing on December 18,
What’s your opinion on this entire issue? While terrorists can easily use other options (like yellow pages/maps), Google Earth does ‘eases’ out the entire operation for them (360 degree view of the entire location).
What happened to ISRO’s ambitious project, Bhuvan (supposed to take on Google Earth)? What will be their strategy to combat such intends?
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
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I think this is misdirected. The terrorists were also using phones, can we ban those too?
Poorly thought out by the petitioner. We should not blame products like pens, pencils, mobiles, maps to hide the weaknesses of Government leaders. It is a pure failure by the government and petitioners must work towards that instead of pulling strings against google microsofts or yahoo…
Well, Few pointers
- Didn’t we had Terrorist attacks even before Google Earth was launched ?
- Google Earth don’t provide internal maps of Taj n all …
- Even if Google removes India from Google Earth, still terrorist can have access to Indian maps by other means. Remember ISI is with them.
A well educated person filing such a frivulous FIR. I think they should also ban fishing trawlers, Mobiles, phones, taxi etc. They had not only aerial image of Taj Mahal but also had complete inside map of the hotel. That was not provided by Google Earth. Google has street view in US, UK, AUSTRALIA and many other countries. That is much for comprehensive than our Google Earth images. Please stop blaming third parties for our own intelligence failure.
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The images for Indian cities is of lesser resolution and void of details as compared to data of countries like US, UK. I agree such products make their task easy but we should understand its unvailabiltiy will not hold them back from finding information from other sources (printed maps, a commodity). From what they are upto, collecting this info and even digitizing it is nothing.
The PIL looks a myopic act.
blaming a technology tool for human failiure is completely ridiculous. there are umpteen number of instances where the lives of millions of people were saved by these hi tech tool…tsunami relief is an example…these tools actually empower the common man so,if these are banned then we lose our ability to protect ourselves. we will be devoid of knowledge of our own living spaces.
Lame. Lame!
Its a well thought approach for giving trying to solve what we Indians r facing at this moment.
The argument that pencils, papers bla bla bla.. holds good for some scenarios but not this.
Its like putting a gun in to the hands of a zelot who is out to harm others around him, may be you cant persecute the gun maker but the gun maker should have some moral obligations to see to that his product doesn’t fall in to the wrong hands.
The entire idea of the FIR i think was not to persecute the maker(google earth) for the Mumbai blasts but sensitize him to the fact that his product is being used and is aiding a totally wrong cause and going by the current attitude most of us have towards this approach its not going to be of much help.
But my best wishes are there with the lawyer who tried to change things in the best possible manner he knew.
Wat a damn situation! Whole drama went infront of their eyes n they are blaming google! Wat about the coast guards? And internal security? Ya if the govt. can claim that we dont have internal security, google must bend it! But it is obious that google shud respect the security of ones country, like they do when it comes to america…
We should have to remove the sensitive place from any map service .
We should have to remove our sensitive place from any map services.