Worldly View

In 2004, Internet giant Google made John Hanke an offer he couldn't refuse. The Silicon Valley video game entrepreneur had built a software program called Keyhole, which let users "fly over" 3-D maps of points on the globe. Google bought Keyhole-for an undisclosed sum-hired Hanke, and renamed the

product Google Earth. It has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Television viewers see it every day when military analysts zip around Baghdad and Afghanistan, offering a God's eye view of the war. But before Google recognized Keyhole's potential, the company got off the ground with financing from an unusual source, and one that became a very big customer: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Before Keyhole, NGA - formerly called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency - was the place to go for 3-D maps and images. Military commanders used them, and still do, to guide troops and target missiles, and spies relied on NGA to covertly capture and analyze satellite photos of America's adversaries. But by the late 1990s, companies like Keyhole were better at building the technology to do this, and they did it for less money. So NGA changed with the times. Today, the only thing classified about most of its maps and charts is how they're used. The tools to build them are bought off the shelf. NGA's workforce also has evolved. Of its more than 14,000 full-time cartographers, geodesists and other specialists, more than half are contractors. This means that NGA might be the closest thing to a quasiprivate institution in the intelligence community, and the privatization trend is continuing.