Terrorists are able to download a bird's-eye view of sensitive Australian sites, including parliament house, the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and airports, Google admits.
But the Australian federal government today said the increasingly popular Google Earth website posed no security risk and added nothing to information already publicly available.
Anyone
with internet access can download high-quality satellite imagery through Google Earth, a new software program which allows users to zoom across the planet at a height of about 300 metres.
The new technology has prompted the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) to ask Google to consider censoring sensitive information.
"We have approached Google to find out how the technology is changing and what sort of information might be available in the future," ANSTO'S chief of operations Dr Ron Cameron said.
"The current level of information disseminated is not something that really concerns us, but we thought it would be prudent to find out where the technology was going."
Dr Cameron said ANSTO was not alone in its misgivings about the new software.
"Some overseas countries have asked for their defence sites to be censored, but I'm not sure if that's happened here," he said.
"At the moment it only shows buildings and we're about protecting what's in the buildings".
A spokesman for Google Australia said the information provided by the website was already in the public domain and even if the sites were censored people could still access it elsewhere.
"We are taking existing information and making it more accessible to the general public," he said.
A spokeswoman for Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said security agencies had factored the Google Earth website into their assessments of threat and found it posed no risk.
"If we were to receive advice from our security agencies that there were concerns, then the government would take the appropriate action," she said.
"(But) medium and high resolution images have been available for several years to the public from a number of companies both at home and overseas ... the Google Earth website does not add anything to the existing publicly available data."
- AAP
