The last month has been interesting for the Google Earth-is-a-national-security-threat set:

• First, the DC Naval Observatory--home to the Vice President--emerged from several years of obscurity to appear in high-res glory the week of the inauguration, arousing suspicion that Dick Cheney was behind the blurring of the residence...
• Then the London Times discovered that a Pakistan airbase was hosting Predator drones--once in full view via Google Earth, now housed in a hangar...
• ...And last week, it was revealed that the British military was "furious" over the new high-resolution imagery of some sensitive facilities: a nuclear submarine port, an SAS barracks, MI6, and GCHQ (the British equivalent of the NSA).

Now, California Assemblyman Joel Anderson has written a bill that would radically limit the capabilities of Google Earth and Google Maps Street View.

In plain English, this bill would:

• Require Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and all other online mapping services to blur out images of all hospitals, schools, religious buildings and government facilities.
• Bar Google Maps' Street View feature from providing street-level photography of such buildings.
• Fine offending businesses at least $250,000 per offense per day
• Punish all executives and board members conscious of such offenses with up to three years in prison.

Essentially, this says that Google had better start poring over their images and blur out all public buildings, or Larry and Sergey go to the slammer.

This is just weird. First, these services are never responsible for blurring satellite imagery. They display it in the manner it is provided to them by the satellite services, who sometimes blur imagery upon request. So Anderson has written this bill with a bit of ignorance as to how this process works.

More disturbing is that Anderson sees these services as doing more harm than good:

"...the current level of detail invites bad behavior. So we're asking these services to limit the level of detail. There's no reason they need to show where all a school's air ducts are and the elevator shafts and all the entry and exit points...We shouldn't be in the business of helping criminals map their next target." (source)

Invites bad behavior. I don't know about you, but when I launch Google Earth, I look at all of those vulnerable hospitals and I just...it's too tantalizing, and before you know it, I'm out the door, on my way to go behave badly.

But the scariest part is the thinking behind this bill: what, in Anderson's eyes, is the threat here? Is it the images themselves? Would he try to outlaw the posting of any and all such images to the Web? I don't think so. He's not targeting the information itself. What something looks like from the sky is not a secret.

Instead, he's against the act of organizing this information and making it easily accessible, under the believe that free information does more harm than good. This is a poisonous philosophy. It is an offense not just to search engines, but to anyone who believes information freedom's greatest benefits are the intangible ones.

This bill is now in committee. Write to its members and give them your opinion about AB 255.