Street-View Imagery of Bases Banned

The Defense Department will no longer allow anyone to take detailed street-view images of military bases. The change comes after Google Corp. took pictures at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, that revealed great detail about the post’s facilities, roads, and points of access. The images later appeared on the Google Maps Web site. Google had obtained permission to take the images, and has since removed them from the site. But DoD officials, in afterthought, decided that such wide dissemination of such information posed a potentially serious security risk.