Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool of western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks one step further -- by launching an "Islamic" competitor.Iran's minister of information and communications technology, Mohammad Hassan Nami, announced that his country was developing what he described as an "Islamic Google Earth" to be called Basir (spectator in Farsi) which will be ready for use "within the next four months".
He said, "Preparations have been made for launching our world's 3D map project and we are currently creating an appropriate data center which could be capable of processing this volume of information."
Nami, a former deputy chairman of Iran's joint chiefs of staff and the armed forces, was appointed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new technology minister in February. Nami, who studied political geography in Iran, is also a PhD graduate in "country management" from North Korea's Kim Il-sung University, according to local reports.
Nami said, "On the surface, Google Earth is providing a service to users, but in reality security and intelligence organisations are behind it in order to obtain information from other countries."
Other Iranian officials have made similar accusations against Google. Iran's police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam, said last year that it was not a search engine but "a spying tool".
Nami gave little information on what he meant by an Islamic 3D map. "We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality ... Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the US, England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel]."