Greetings. I know a bum rap when I see one. People who should know better -- such as the House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight chairman Brad Miller, D-North Carolina -- are accusing Google of "airbrushing" history on Google Maps.

The charge? At some point in the recent past, Google apparently replaced post-Katrina satellite photo data in the New Orleans region with older pre-Katrina data that doesn't show the hurricane damage.

Google says that one of their imagery suppliers switched to older data that was higher resolution. Balancing timeliness of data with resolution is a non-trivial task for a mapping site, and in retrospect perhaps some sort of exception should have been carved out for that region when the changes went live, but hindsight is 20/20.

In any case, for supposedly intelligent people to start throwing around terms like "airbrushing" (which implies purposeful deception) and suggesting that Google is in some sort of conspiracy to hide Katrina damage, is just plain stupid and grandstanding of the worst sort. The persons making such accusations should be ashamed of themselves.

--Lauren--