The Daily Nightly began on May 31, 2005. As Brian wrote in his first post it aims to provide a narrative of the broadcast day and a window into the editorial process at NBC Nightly News. Brian weighs in every weekday and NBC News correspondents and producers post regularly.
Brian Williams became the seventh anchor and managing editor in the history of NBC Nightly News on December 2, 2004. Read his full biography.
 |
|
 |
|
 |
advertisement
About the broadcast | Biographies
RSS is an easy way to get the news you want as it is updated even if you are not on MSNBC.com. More information about MSNBC.com's RSS feeds.
Podcasting brings you audio and video from each weekday broadcast on your iPod or other portable MP3 player anytime, anywhere. More information about MSNBC.com's podcasts.
Sign-up for our daily e-mail newsletter. It offers a preview of the stories and special reports featured on each weekday broadcast.
Google Maps new feature, "Street View," has a predecessor in the intelligence community. Street View incorporates stills taken by Google staff into their well known satellite photo/map format.
The CIA has been doing the same thing for years, to help their officers familiarize themselves with cities and other areas they had never visited and that may be closed to Americans.
The CIA would take satellite photos of an area and then create 3D videos. They'd also add to the experience by inserting stills their foreign agents had taken at ground level, or that the agency would have acquired elsewhere. Officers about to visit a new city could then sit in front of a screen and take a "virtual walk" down a street they had never visited, using a joystick much like a teenage boy would with a video game, crossing streets and turning corners.
The technology has existed for nearly 15 years. CIA visualization specialists talked with NBC's Jamie Gangel and me back in 1993.
Read more from Robert Windrem
Early Nightly, Pentagon edition
EMAIL THIS
TRACKBACKS
Trackbacks are links to weblogs that reference this post. Like comments, trackbacks do not appear until approved by us. The trackback URL for this post is: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b0aa69e200d8354bb48753ef
Saw the van shown in the Engadget article pic in San Diego 6 months ago. My friend and I were debating the technical aspects and purpose for a day or two. Now I know. Very interesting.
SC (Sent Jun 1, 2007 6:49:09 PM)
From an old course in Photography & The Law, photographs of people in public that are used for gain require signed model releases on everyone in the picture.
(Sent Jun 1, 2007 6:14:05 PM)
And where did all of these map search companies get their data??? - in the case of New York - they got it from the New York State Government who did all the work, paid all the bills and then these companies get ahold of the data under a FOIL request and use it for their own financial gain. Free enterprise my knee-cap. They get to profit where the state (and other state I'm sure) is prohibited from doing so.
stolen data, denver, co (Sent Jun 1, 2007 2:49:45 PM)
yeah, right, the technology has *existed* for 15 years, but satellite views mixed with sporadic snapshots isn't really the same thing as photos of every square foot of Manhattan seamlessly integrated with GIS co-ordinates and street addresses, is it? if you reported the cia was driving trucks around foreign cities with 360-degree cameras 15 years ago, then i would say this tidbit has merit/novelty. heck, amazon's a9 had street level views a couple years ago, and it was impressive, but it is nothing compared to this.
am/nyc (Sent Jun 1, 2007 2:38:22 PM)
This technology is really starting to flush out some interesting finds. Check out this comprehensive list of Google Street View finds here:
http://www.laudontech.com/StreetView/streetview.html
Fred (Sent Jun 1, 2007 1:56:08 PM)
SEND A COMMENT
PLEASE READ: All comments must be approved before appearing in the thread; time and space constraints prevent all comments from appearing. We will only approve comments that are directly related to this post, use appropriate language and are not attacking the comments of others.