The news that Google has gone from a small Silicon Valley start-up to a security concern for South Korea should not surprise anyone who has been following the gist of recent media coverage of its move into telephone calls and goodness knows what else.
Yes, Google appears to want to leave its multicoloured mark all over the world. Its latest excursion is into bilateral relations between Washington and Seoul, which will this week deal with the concerns of the South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, that the global satellite mapping service Google Earth could provide overhead images of the presidential blue palace and military sites to his enemies in the Communist North.
More than 50 years after the end of the Korean war, the two Koreas are still formally at conflict, having never signed a peace treaty. In addition, there is a large minefield between them and quite a strong likelihood that the North has nukes - so the South's concerns are perhaps more heightened than most.
But the validity of Seoul's worries still rest on the supposition that when Kim Jong-il draws up battle plans to attack South Korea, he first turns to Google – in much the way you would if you wanted to check the weather forecasts.
The idea of any national intelligence agency or military establishment using Google for primary research is, of course, so fantastical in such a low-rent Austin Powers-type manner that I must have imagined all that stuff about the British government partially basing its February 2003 Iraq dossier on a PhD thesis found on the internet.
Back to Google. The danger of satellite images from the earlier Google Maps being put to nefarious use led to the pixellation of the US Capitol (presumably to hide it).
As this piece from the Register demonstrates, however, Google is considerably less likely to redact than the rival Microsoft operation, which blanked out satellite images of the US's supposed alien postmortem facility at Area 51. Thanks to Google, it also found the face of Jesus Christ in a Peruvian sand dune.
With such images now available to conspiracy theorists and military planners the world over, the only hope for the South Koreans is that Kim Jong-il's computers are either made by Apple or running the Linux operating system. Neither is compatible with Google Earth.
