Google Earth — a view to a kill?

Google has dismissed concerns that terrorists are using its free mapping technology to help them carry out attacks.

The head of Google Earth said the program, which allows users to get a detailed bird's eye of practically any location on the planet, was not "tipping the balance in favour of the bad guys".

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, John Hanke said: "The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it's throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process."

Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program that maps the earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and 3D geographical data.

Fears have been raised over the use of Google Earth by terrorists after reports that it was used as part of the planning of the attacks in Mumbai last November in which 170 people were killed. The Mumbai attacks were one of a number of incidents where a new school of "tech-savvy jihadis" were said to have made use of data online and other web-based services to plot and execute their strikes. Military commanders are said to have dubbed the phenomenon "the Google threat".

The British Army is already thought to have taken up the issue with the company.

In a case filed at the High Court in Mumbai, a lawyer argued that Google Earth and similar services should be banned because it had aided terrorists in plotting attacks" by supplying images used to acquaint militants with their targets.

It emerged last year that Iraqi insurgents planning attacks on a British base in Basra had used Google Earth images in which individual buildings inside the camp could be seen clearly. Google replaced the images with photographs that predated the construction of the base.

The Jerusalem Post reported in December that a documentary called The Field of Death posted on the Hamas military wing's website showed terrorists using Google Earth to plot a rocket attack on a fuel depot inside Israel last April that killed two men.

Mr Hanke, the director in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, said advances in technology could always be ill-used and it was impossible to say that any attack would not have taken place if Google Earth was not in place.

"If Google Earth didn't exist, would they have used a tourist map they could have bought or was the real intelligence actually coming from an on-the-ground informant who was working in the hotel and drawing layouts of everything on a napkin?" he said.

"You have cars; you have car bombs. You have GPS transceivers that help you navigate; those GPS transceivers could be used for lots of nefarious purposes. Cell phones have all kinds of benefits; cell phones can be used to detonate a remote explosive device."

While this debate had "mostly died off" in the West, it was still a live issue in countries where the "government is used to controlling everything", Mr Hanke told the newspaper.

Often this concern was a pretext for a government trying to reassert control over its "closed information societies", he said.

"The idea that open information is valuable is more baked onto Western culture," he said. "You have top down command and control types of governments like those in China to some extent and in Russia and legacies of that in places like India where these issues at the government level are more prevalent for us."

Meanwhile police in Switzerland used Google Earth to find a gigantic marijuana plantation. The head of Zurich police's narcotics unit, Norbert Klossner, said the marijuana was hidden inside a field of corn.

But officers using the satellite mapping software to locate two farmers suspected of involvement in a large drug ring quickly spotted the illegal crop.

Mr Hanke said that Google Earth had been the target of a "cycle of concern" about its impact.

"And as people came to understand about what satellite imagery did and about what it didn't [do], that level of concern went down and, as people began to appreciate the value it brought to them, that became effectively a non-issue. If you know that this satellite can come over maybe once a year and it takes a picture, that's different from believing there's an eye in the skye that can follow wherever you go all of the time."