Google Earth has led Swiss police to a massive drugs bust, in possibly the most ingenious, or lazy, piece of detective work we’ve ever heard of. Who needs a search warrant when you’ve got Google?
Google giveth and taketh away, eh? It’ll let P2P pirates work out which ISPs are filtering BitTorrent traffic, but it’ll also give the game away to the 5-O if you’re another type of criminal. In this case, eye in the sky Google Earth revealed a two acre field of marijuana to Swiss police, and helped an investigation leading to the arrest of 16 people.
Kudos to all involved. But of course, this does beg the question, what were the police doing faffing around on Google Earth during a shift? They say they were trying to find the addresses of two farmers involved in a drug ring when they stumbled across the score.
“It was an interesting chance discovery,” Zurich narcotics policeman Norbert Klossner told the Associated Press. Yup, the cops chanced across it when they were trying to find their own homes, or see how big their neighbour’s extension is we reckon.
Out TBC | £TBC | Google (Via Ars Technica)
