A California lawmaker is making waves by suggesting that Google Maps and other public access satellite imaging products should blur the locations of “soft targets”, like churches, schools, hospitals, and government offices. Assemblyman Joel Anderson got the bright idea after reading about how Mumbai terrorists used online mapping imagery to plan terrorist attacks. There are so many problems with this bill, i’m actually going to number them.

1.) This is unconstitutional. American courts long ago decided that pictures taken in public places are untouchable by lawsuits or legislation.

2.) You don’t think the terrorists are going to pick up on this? When they are looking for a school or hospital, will they not notice the large blurry area on the map? They will simply assume that American schools and hospitals are like Bigfoot–permanently blurry in photographs.

3.) If this is, by some stroke of idiocy, passed and enacted–we ought to blur out all hospitals, schools, and government offices except for Assemblyman Joel Anderson’s Office. Naturally, we will keep him in a blurred-out bunker somewhere else, but it would serve as an interesting experiment.

4.) Terrorists have not attacked schools or hospitals in the U.S. They have only attacked major commercial buildings (World Trade Center) and massive government buildings (Pentagon)–so maybe we should blur all the big buildings!

5.) If this whole blurring out thing works, we should just blur out the entire United States. The terrorists would go to plan their attack on Google Earth™ and find that the United States was completely blurry. Heck, we could blur out the entire world! Google Earth™ would be rendered useless, but terrorism would be eliminated worldwide!

6.) This is just one of the many tools used by terrorists! They also use airplanes, cars, guns, boxcutters, boots, pants, arabic, and english–we ought to ban all of those terrorist-weapons too!

Google Earth

-Nock the Blogger