Furth and Fortune blog by Will Murray

According to this report, “A California lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require all virtual mapping programs to blur out schools, places of worship, government, or medical buildings or face hefty fines and possible jail time.”

Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R) wants to hamper the efforts of terrorists who use online mapping tools to pre-visualize their targets and gather information prior to n attack. Presumably this would include Google Earth, Google Maps, Live Search Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps, and many other sites that provide satellite and aircraft photographs of schools, places of worship, government and medical buildings. Street-level images would also be prohibited.

While Representative Anderson’s goals may be noble, it is an idea typical of legislators who don’t understand technology or the world in which we live. I also think such a bill would do more harm than good for the average person, by making it more difficult for legitimate users to access helpful information.

I know that I use the aerial-view and stree-view versions of online mapping sites almost exclusively to find locations I’ve never visited before. The amount of detail provided in locating my destination though a photo means that I rarely make a wrong turn or miss a driveway.

Just the other day, I was trying to find the location of a medical office, and the traditional map just showed a star (the destination) near a street that made a loop. When I clicked over to the aerial-view, the map clearly showed that the loop was actually a large fountain with a driveway circling it. When I drove there, I immediately spotted the fountain, and I knew my destination was the next turn. I even knew which of the two entrances to use, because I knew that the larger parking area was next to the second entrance. The traditional map view provided none of that additional information. Another time, I was attempting to find the Social Security office (a government building). The aerial-view showed me the neighboring buildings, which I recognized, and it made it a snap to find the building when I drove there.

Similarly, Google’s street-view has helped me several times. When Microsoft moved their San Francisco office to a different building, I used street view to figure out how to walk from the BART train station to the office building. The traditional map and even the aerial-view were useless, because they didn’t show the BART station. Another time, I was heading to a part of the state I’d never driven through before. Google’s street-view showed me the freeway exit and turns I needed to take, so that when I was driving there later, I didn’t need to take my eyes off the road to figure out which way to go by consulting printed directions. It was great!

I don’t remember the actual numbers, but I read that more people are killed on America’s roads each DAY than were killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Yes, acts of terrorism are horrible, but so is anything that risks increasing the number of road-related deaths. Eliminating all street-view imagery and aerial-views of frequently visited public buildings (schools, government offices, and places of worship) would make it more difficult for people to find where they are going, and that could increase the likelihood of accidents, including fatal ones.

Ignoring driving and travel issues for a moment, there are still many other legitimate uses for keeping this information available to the average user. I do work for a local church (a “place of worship” that would be required to be blurred out under the proposed law). Recently, I was trying to plan some aspects of the wireless and wired networks for the church. Google Earth helped me with that, because I could clearly see the church and neighboring buildings, which helped me avoid placing wireless access points too close to neighboring buildings and risking leaking a lot of the wi-fi signal into densely populated apartment units next door—units I couldn’t see through the walls of the church. Unfortunately for my needs, but fortunately for frustrating terrorists, despite the unblurred view of the church, there just wasn’t enough detail to really help me plan things as well as I needed. It still took a lot of time and effort to scuttle around the various nooks and crannies of the church to figure out all that I needed to know. The same would have to be true for any terrorists seeking to bomb or otherwise harm the church.

Aside from denying legitimate users access to useful information, there are several other fatal flaws to Representative Anderson’s proposed law:

• It would only affect companies that do business in California. While the entire Internet is accessible from California, there are many sources of this type of information that do not do business here. Google would obviously be impacted since its headquarters is here, and Live Search (a Microsoft company) probably would too (MS has offices here). But there are several other mapping sites around the world that offer similar information, often from the same source data. Banning California companies from providing that information would hinder competition, while doing nothing to thwart terrorists. Even a Federal law covering all U.S. companies would be useless for the same reason, because “[m]uch of the satellite imagery used by mapping programs comes from international companies over which U.S. agencies have no jurisdiction”.
• Aircraft regularly fly over places, including schools, places of worship, government, and medical buildings. Terrorists have used them before, of course, and a quick trip over a potential target with a camera can provide more detailed images from a variety of angles than you would ever get from an online mapping service.
• Why bother to rent an airplane or helicopter, when simply walking around the potential target and taking photos would provide much more useful information than Google’s street-view service? Street-view is nice, but distortion and other digital artifacts make the detail for such a purpose a pretty poor substitute to a “tourist” snapping photos with a digital camera.
• Students often use such material for reports and schoolwork, and they would be denied access to that information. Businesses use the information for planning where to expand their businesses, see what competition is in the area, and other legitimate purposes, but some of that information would potentially be blocked now.
• Many of the most interesting places to view are schools (Harvard and Stanford universities), places of worship (the Taj Mahal and National Cathedral), and government (the White House and State Capitol) buildings. For the vast majority of people, viewing these sites from Google Earth or other mapping sites, may be the closest that the average American ever gets to them. It would be terrible to deny that experience simply out of fear of a possible terrorist act.

I have stated before that I believe that if we alter the fundamental ways in which we live our lives, but giving up our freedoms (including the freedom of information), than the terrorists have accomplished their goal of destroying our way of life. We cannot let that happen.

Unfortunately, I do not know the bill number, but I would appreciate it if someone could provide that information in the comments below. Thanks!

Tags: bad ideas, businesses, California, freedom, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, images, laws, Live Search Maps, MapQuest, photos, privacy, proposed laws, security, technology, terrorism, travel, Yahoo! Maps

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