Palestinian militants are using Google Earth to help plan their attacks on the Israeli military and other targets. Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular Internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes.
“We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city centre and sensitive areas,” Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, said.
Abu Walid showed the media an aerial image of the Israeli town of Sderot on his computer to demonstrate how his group searches for targets.
(Source: Guardian UK)
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13 Responses
What is a “militant”? Do you mean “terrorist”?
While Google Earth is a great tool if put to good use, it’s basically giving terrorists the same data that the CIA, NSA and Mosaad has for years used to defend the USA and EY. Bade move on Google’s part. For all we know the Google Earth engineers are Israelis too… Israeli politicians need to lobby google to remove Israel from Google Earth or at least block out any vulnerable areas as identified by the Israeli government.
When Google Earth came about, this was one of our first thoughts. Upon further investigation it appeared that sensitive areas were purposely blurred. Is this no longer the case?
It is interesting to note that Sergrei Brin & Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, as well as Eric Scmidt its CEO are all Jewish.
Given the inaccuracy of the rockets, and the limited resolution of Google Earth (some of which has been intentionally reduced), it’s not clear how much military utility this has.
It does have terrorist utility, in that it scares people into thinking the terrorists are militarily competent.
Only the Ribono Shel Olam can help us against this threat.
Ok, I’m sure google can disable it’s features in certain locations on Earth, can’t it?
#6 – “Only the Ribono Shel Olam can help us against THIS threat.”
— and… the others threats we can handle all on our own?!?
Google earth is a irresponsible corporation that has ties to moveon.org (blocking advertising of a republican senator degrading moveon.org, but any anti rightwing propoganda on sponsored links are fair game).
someone should sue google for that
Why would they admit that? Sounds fishy to me to make a public statement that they’re using public tools to attack Israel. Sounds more like a sabotage. (And being what #4 said, it makes sense.)
blurring the map makes no difference. They are not after sensitive military targets. They are after high population civilian targets. Unfortunately, those are not blurred out.
I’m surprised nobody has thought that the terrorists might be lying. Download Google Earth and use it for yourself. For one thing, it’s not very detailed, at least outside the U.S. A local map would serve these murderers better.
Further, look around the globe on Google Earth. You may notice that many areas, even those close to one another, have dramatically different appearances in terms of plants and such. Some trees have green leaves, some red and yellow, some none at all.
Nu, you say – so the photos are a few months apart. A terrorist could still plan attacks with them! Let’s sue Google! (And the Yidn who started the company, I guess?) Here’s the thing – the satellite information used in Google Earth can be over a decade old. Some of the photos go back to 1990.
These terrorists are trying to do just that – terrify. There’s no threat from Google Earth. It’s a fun useful application by a company founded on the precept of not contributing to anything evil or immoral in any way. Google does not edit its search results. They are based entirely on statistical analysis of web traffic.
For example, if you search for “Jew”, you will sometimes see that a particular antisemitic website comes up first. Because of this, Google added a note to this and other searches explaining that they did not censor search results and that they were just as troubled by hate sites as anybody else.