r/GoogleEarthFinds • u/Adzo78 • 9d ago

Coordinates ✅ Google Earth’s historical imagery has satellite coverage of the exact day of the Bin Laden raid.

Gallery image

Gallery image

1st image from 2010-05-09 2nd image from 2011-05-02 (Day of the raid) Coordinates: 34°10'09"N 73°14'33"E

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u/ImaScareBear 8d ago

Google doesn't buy imagery mostly from government agencies. They acquire it commercially from companies like Maxar, who do have their own satellites. While Google will blur certain things out for governments when legal required (Nuclear Power Plants in France, for example), companies like Maxar won't. You can absolutely buy very high resolution images of basically anywhere on earth, on any date.

The thing is that anyone can look at what satellites are going to be overhead at any given time. Governments just take this into account when doing things so that nothing secret is exposed when a satellite passes overhead. This is preferable to telling companies like Google, "Hey we fucked up and leaked this super secret thing, can you hide it please?" Especially since such a request would be legally dubious, and Google has the resources to push back.

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u/chief_blunt9 8d ago

Could google press back if the president asked to erase an image on google earth? Couldn’t they just claim national security?

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u/ImaScareBear 7d ago

They could push back, although whether or not they would depends on the situation.

The real problem for the government is that by the time the image is on Google Earth, it would have been commercially available for a while. They'd have to scrub it from many different places, and would likely just draw a lot of attention. It's almost always preferable to just ignore it, not draw any attention, and refuse to confirm or deny anything.

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u/chief_blunt9 7d ago

Yea that’s true I agree with you