There’s a big stir in the UK – probably an unwisely public stir – about the fact that Google Earth now shows the location of the SAS’s secret base in the English countryside. Armed with the information therein, your correspondent did a little virtual fly-by hissownself.
It’s not too hard to pick out the military complex hard alongside a bucolic village.
On the other hand, you will search in vain for streetside views of a certain Neapolitan neighborhood:
Today, you can see on your computer screen, so realistically that you might almost be there, the streets of the Bronx, the bainlieues of Paris, Amsterdam’s red light district or even Tepito, the stronghold of Mexico City’s drug trade. But you can’t see the Scampia district of Naples, Italy. Like Medellin, home of the Colombian narcos, the casbah of Algiers and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the Scampia district of Naples with its ugly high-rise housing, round-the-clock drug dealing and the last of the turf wars, between the Di Lauro gang and the “Secessionists”, is off-limits for Google Street View, the service that has put the rest of the planet just a mouse click away.
Some places you just don’t go.
Right smack dab in the middle of Havasu there’s a sector that doesn’t show up on street view. I’m not unhappy that I’m in that no-fly zone. It does make me wonder though about who some of my neighbors might be. Intrigue and all.
Someone on the U.K. post commented that they couldn’t get within a half mile of the White House, but I’ve been through the Mall several times and seen it all; Rose Garden included. The aerial resolution of late has become pretty durned sharp in most areas, and the marked increase in the number of user contributed photos is astounding.
Over near the Boomer base at Bangor, the locals are very protective of their Navy neighbors. If you’re caught messing about in Hoodsport, law enforcement and the Navy are the least of your worries. I can imagine the good people of Herefordshire are not terribly pleased right now.
To understand the neighborhood Google won’t go into, Scampia, go rent Gomorra. It’s the Naples ADM Ulrich moved the Navy to.