They should fire the reporter and the sub-editor: after reading this, I made what was only a cursory check and found that nothing of the White House (or any area around it) has been blanked out! In fact, neither have any of a number of other landmarks/ installations which can be counted as important – and this is all around the world, not just in the US, UK or India! In fact, as any user of Google Earth could have told these guys, metropolitan areas of the US are the ones that are covered in greatest detail. Times of India has been floundering on quality metrics for a long time now but this really takes the cake in both sloppy reporting and drawing asinine conclusions.
This is no big deal – and it is just the FREE version available to anyone around the world with a high-speed connection to the internet. There are more detailed views out there for anyone willing to pay relatively small sums of money for it and importantly, from a national security perspective there’s yet more advanced versions available with our enemy’s militaries! Technology is all around us: and it is for us to choose whether we want to use it – to educate our children, empower our entrepreneurs and serve our citizenry – or want to remain "blanked out" from the forward ranks of development.
And finally, with journalists like these (who are more concerned about "blanking out" than with shedding light on things), it is little wonder that we have taken forever to pass the Right to Information Act and struggle to implement it in letter and spirit.
N.b.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action --
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore
