First, we learn that the terrorists are using Google Earth to plot their attacks on British forces in Iraq:

Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.

Now Google Earith is not real-time mapping, but the photographs are detailed, often taken by low flying aircraft within the last two years. For instance, here is the Google Earth imagery for the elementary school I went to, St Pius X, in Toronto's west end:

Needless to say, I was amazed. The screen capture doesn't do justice to the effect. If you are already familiar with the area, or if you've had some training in the interpretation of aerial photographs, you'd have no problems pinpointing the parking areas, the school yard, the main school buildings, the adjoining streets, and so forth.

So of course you can see how Google Earth data could be used as a poor man's spy satellite. The image manipulation features that allow the user to create a virtual flyby can easily be used as a way of training the would-be terrorist planning an aerial attack.

On the other hand, Google is also being used by the the other side in this fight:

The U.S. State Department effort last month to issue a travel ban on 12 Iranians suspected of supporting that nation's nuclear program wasn't big news at first. Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the analysis supporting the ban was provided not by the CIA, but by a single junior analyst using Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) searches.

The lesson? Advanced technology and Web-savvy citizenry now make it possible for open source information gathering to rival, if not surpass, the clandestine intelligence produced by government agencies.

Indeed, open source methods have already proved their worth in counterterrorism. Shortly after Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a security expert, recreated the structure and identities of the core al-Qaeda network using publicly available information accessed from the Internet . He started with two Sept. 11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who were identified from a photograph taken while they attended a meeting with known terrorists in Malaysia in 2000.

By scanning public sources for information linking these suspects to others, he recreated the social network identifying all 19 hijackers and described their relationships to their co-conspirators, including the identification of Mohammed Atta as the ringleader.

I know what they mean. Virtually all my work on David Smith was based on public material archived online I found via Google searches.

Again, in the classic Web 2.0 mode, the aggregate effect of thousands of users is critical in how these public searches work:

While motivated citizens and academics have often been able to generate analysis that rivals that of government experts, the difference today is that technology such as wikis and blogs allows thousands to contribute to an analysis. Readers can then "vote" the most accurate and relevant information to the top, giving them enough credibility to be taken seriously.

Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry of Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's entry in this free encyclopedia that anyone can edit has been modified approximately 500 times by about 50 people in the past three years. These motivated authors have expanded the entry and corrected hundreds of one another's errors and omissions.

Blogs are another tool for massive parallel analysis and collaboration. A search for blogs dealing with terrorism generates nearly 1 million results.

While most bloggers generate little of value to intelligence analysis, the collaborative nature of the technology gives greater weight to the better analyses, pushing them to the top.

I suppose this is why I think we'll win in the end. While Google Earth can be used by the terrorists as well as by us, the corroborative power of Google and Wikipedia and the rest is the product of our freedoms. These freedoms are alien to the Islamist terrorist, and that means we'll always have the upperhand.

I hope so, anyway.