How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
A truly stunningly bad decision by whoever is doing product management at Google for Google Earth:
If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playful mapping app matters.
When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real. They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.
Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated. Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.
In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.
Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?
In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.
Tags: google ai nano-banana llms fakes forgery google-earth mapping bellingcat verification truth