While reading the article on Google earth by Kumar, I was shocked that one technology could be so influential in terms of national security of sovereign states. The controversy with Google Earth was the availability of satellite images of locations such as a president's house or a government building that were deemed as compromising national security. To complicate matters for many nation-states, Google is not a state, and therefore can not be dealt with in a traditional diplomatic way. Also, since Google is not a state but a business, it cannot identify with the need for security around certain locations or information that might be a threat to the public good.
The situation with Google Earth and India in particular was extremely interesting to me. The Indian government seemed like a fish out of water, completely at a loss of how to get Google to do anything they wanted. As for Google, they didn't need to compromise, it was no matter of diplomatic relations for them. They were a business, and they had an agenda. The Google spokesperson again reiterated their position that the information provided by these satellites was in the public interest and the information could also be obtained elsewhere, if not from Google Earth.
What also surprised me in this article was the silence of the American government. It seemed as if the American government had no objection to any images of American government buildings. But if they had, what legal action could they take against Google, an American company? This issue of new media challenging the sovereignty of nation-states will not go away as more and more global technologies come to exist.
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