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.

John Wonderlich, writing at the Sunlight Foundation blog, picked up on a mashup of earmark data and Google Maps and made an awesome discovery: it’s ridiculously simple to mashup earmark data on Google Earth.

I've been completely enraptured by Google Earth for about the last day or so. What Google Earth has done to so grab my attention is to partner with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. The idea is to document and display the effects of mass atrocities in their early stages:

Beginning with Darfur, we are building an interactive "global crisis map" that will provide citizens, aid workers and foreign policy professionals with a new tool to share and understand information quickly, to "see the situation", enabling more effective prevention and response.