"If the military decided to pull the plug and not sell that data to Google, it would be stuffed," says Brotton. That explains, for example, why the residence of Dick Cheney, another former US Vice-President, was pixellated in Google Earth: it came that way. Much of the imagery in Google Earth is commercially available data from US military satellites. I don't think they realised what they'd got." But when Google bought Keyhole outright in 2004, Brotton believes, "Larry Page and Sergey Brin just thought it was cool. Around the same time, In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit company funded by the CIA, invested in Keyhole, presuming Earthviewer could have intelligence applications.
In 2003, the programme came to public attention when US TV news networks began using it to visualise battlefields during the Iraq War. It looked like Gore's vision, but its creators had a more humble vision: they thought people would use it when buying property to decide if they liked the look of an area. Three years later, the IT firm Keyhole launched a new programme called "Earthviewer". The advent of Google Earth was predicted in a 1998 speech by the then-US Vice-President Al Gore, who imagined "Digital Earth", which would be embedded with "vast quantities of geo-referenced data" and could be used for noble causes such as environmental protection and international diplomacy.
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