Refer a friend

Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move

We should not let Hong Kong fade away. We should not let Joshua Wong fade away. Or Jimmy Lai, or others. Let me elaborate.

For a few years—2019 and 2020 in particular—the eyes of the world were on Hong Kong. It was probably the chief battleground in the perpetual war between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship.

The Chinese Communist Party was determined to make Hong Kong a city like any other in China—unfree, totalitarian. Millions of Hong Kongers were determined to keep the freedom they had enjoyed. The CCP has won, at least for now.

As Perry Link, the eminent scholar of China, remarked to me, we saw a great city “murdered before our eyes.” When I was in my 20s, I saw great cities liberated: Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw … To see a reversal was jarring and painful.

Jimmy Lai is probably the best-known political prisoner in Hong Kong. The 78-year-old businessman and democracy champion has been in prison since December 2020. (For a piece of mine about him, published in 2023, go here.)

Also well-known is Joshua Wong, age 29. He has been in prison for a month longer than Jimmy Lai.

Both of them would be quick to tell you that there are other political prisoners, less well-known, who deserve all the admiration and help we can muster.

Joshua Wong, as the BBC put it, is “the poster child for political activism in Hong Kong.” In October 2014, when he was 18, he was on the cover of Time magazine: “The Face of Protest.” The cover also said, “Teenager Joshua Wong and the youth of Hong Kong are standing up for democracy. Can they win?”

It transpired that they could not—although, as I alluded to above, we are entitled to take a longer view.

ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast

Wong was due to be released in January 2027, after six years and two months, but he has now been charged again and faces another sentence—which could be life.

He was charged with encouraging Western governments to impose sanctions on human-rights abusers in Hong Kong and back the city’s democracy movement. In court, Wong did not dispute the charge. He pleaded guilty.

In Hong Kong’s justice system, such as it is, you have a chance at a more lenient, or less draconian, sentence if you plead guilty.

About 40 of Wong’s supporters were present in the courtroom, and some called out, “Hang in there, Joshua!”

The details of his short but eventful life can be found elsewhere, and I will confine myself to a few basic facts. He was born on October 13, 1996, to a Christian family that followed the Lutheran tradition. He went to the United Christian College (Kowloon East) and then the Open University of Hong Kong.

In May 2011, when he was just 14, he co-founded a group called Scholarism, which opposed attempts by Beijing to inject propaganda into Hong Kong curricula. In April 2016, he co-founded a political party, Demosistō, whose name was a blend of Greek and Latin, conveying the idea of standing up for democracy.

One of his co-founders was Nathan Law, who was able to leave Hong Kong in the summer of 2020, as night fell on the city. On June 30 of that year, the National Security Law went into effect. This law, in sum, bans opposition to the government. Nathan Law found asylum in Great Britain.

(Last month, The Next Move’s Linda Chavez podcasted with Law, here. I podcasted with him myself back in 2021, and subsequently wrote a piece about him and the fate of Hong Kong. For those items, go here and here.)

Joshua Wong was at the forefront of democracy protests in Hong Kong for the better part of a decade. He was in and out of prison. Upon being sentenced in 2017, he said, “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds! We want democracy in Hong Kong. And we will not give up.”

The United States has not covered itself in glory in this matter. As time was running out, in that summer of 2020, Wong requested asylum of the United States but was denied. This, according to a 2023 book by the journalists Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin: Among the Braves. (For an article on this subject, published by Radio Free Asia, go here.)

In the summer of 2019, as Hong Kongers were massing in the streets, a reporter asked President Trump, “Are you concerned by reports that the Chinese army may be preparing to intervene in Hong Kong against the demonstrators?” Trump said:

“Well, something is probably happening with Hong Kong, because, when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time. And I don’t know what China’s attitude is. Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that.”

The word “riots,” used by the president of the United States, was particularly unfortunate. That was the CCP’s word for these democratic protests. And the penalty for rioting in Hong Kong is severe.

Trump went on to say about the situation, “That’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”

In November 2019, the president said, “Look, we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi. He’s a friend of mine. He’s an incredible guy.”

“President Xi,” the “incredible guy,” is, of course, Xi Jinping, the boss of the CCP. How you can stand with Hong Kong and stand with its persecutor at the same time is something I must leave to others to discern.

I can tell you about Joshua Wong, however. In fact, I will give the floor to Yaqiu Wang, a Chinese democracy activist in exile here in the United States:

“Joshua Wong represents precisely the kind of young citizen any society should value: intelligent, principled, and politically engaged. Instead of celebrating those qualities, the authorities have turned them into grounds for persecution. By potentially imprisoning him for life, Beijing also wants Hong Kongers to forget Joshua Wong—a young man who came to symbolize the energy, courage, and political awakening of an entire generation.”

There is a “but” coming, from Yaqiu Wang.

“But keeping him behind bars will not erase him. It will only make him an even more powerful symbol. The CCP and its henchmen in Hong Kong may be able to suppress the Hong Kong people’s desire for freedom and democracy, but they cannot extinguish it. Severe repression only drives those aspirations underground and makes them return with greater force.”

Perry Link, the scholar, is inclined to agree. He cites what he calls a “Chinese idiom”: “The bird that sticks its neck out takes the bullet.” Joshua Wong—like Jimmy Lai and many others—has stuck his neck out. “He has paid a price and is still paying it,” says Professor Link. “Is time on his side?”

The professor answers the question he has posed as follows:

“In the long run, I believe that it is, because the impulse to act morally is indeed rooted in human nature. There are victories and defeats along the way, but no oppressive authority can finally kill that impulse. I think Martin Luther King was right to say that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Joshua’s choice was not wrong.”

Refer a friend

More from The Next Move:

Amna Nawaz:

It's been 150 years since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most famous and enduring events in American history.

While Native Americans were victorious, Judy Woodruff reports on how the battle reshaped the government's policy towards indigenous people, and why it still resonates so deeply for so many today.

It's part of her series Crossroads: America at 250.

Judy Woodruff:

Along this stretch of sweeping prairie on the Crow Reservation in Montana, members of more than a dozen Native American tribes have gathered for what's known as a Victory Ride.

It commemorates the end of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, or what Native Americans here often refer to as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.

Trina Lone Hill, Oglala Sioux Tribe:

I still look at it as a moment in history that we should be proud of. They're the last ones to surrender. They're the last ones to come onto the reservations and accept our new fate, basically.

Judy Woodruff:

Trina Lone Hill, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, helped organize the Victory Ride. She says she's been coming to this annual event for more than 30 years and hearing stories of her ancestor Susie Shot-In-the-Eye.

Trina Lone Hill:

My great-great-great-grandmother fought here alongside her husband and her sons. And so I continue to tell that to my children. This is why we're here. This is why we fight.

Man:

This is the 150th anniversary, and it's good to see everybody here.

Judy Woodruff:

One hundred and fifty years later, it's an especially poignant moment for Native Americans, as the nation celebrates its own anniversary, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document that culminates with a list of grievances against the British crown and refers to Native Americans as merciless Indian savages.

Ned Blackhawk:

One of the things about the founding is that, when you establish something, it creates enduring legacies.

Judy Woodruff:

Ned Blackhawk is an historian at Yale University and the author of "The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History."

Ned Blackhawk:

That grievance is something obviously that Native Americans have a lot of trouble with, myself included, because it is vilifying and homogenizing and representing indigenous Americans as if they were other than American.

Judy Woodruff:

It's a giant contradiction.

Ned Blackhawk:

It's a giant contradiction. It's an enormous paradox that sits at the heart of America. These are the most misunderstood subject of American history, and we need to understand them to understand ourselves more fully.

Donovan Taylor, Researcher, "The History They Tell: Oral History from Native American and First Nations People Regarding the Battle of the Little Bighorn": We're still here today. We persevered the Europeanism and colonialism and we're adapting.

Judy Woodruff:

Donovan Taylor is a Northern Cheyenne tribal member and a researcher for "The History They Tell," an oral history project that interviewed hundreds of descendants of Native Americans and First Nations people who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Leon Eagle Tail, Gros Ventre Tribe:

This battlefield is just a reminder of what we can accomplish if we all get together.

Judy Woodruff:

Leon Eagle Tail and Chester Whiteman traveled from Washington state and Oklahoma to be here. They joined thousands of other Native Americans from across the country who set up camps and teepees along the banks of Montana's Little Bighorn River.

Chester Whiteman, Cheyenne Tribe:

We have always been like a second-class citizen. We weren't citizens until 1924. But we were here before anybody else came.

Leon Eagle Tail:

We experienced a great genocide. We are recovering. But a lot of times, it takes things like this to help us remember what we went through.

Judy Woodruff:

This remembrance includes a reenactment of the famous battle that started after the U.S. Army's Seventh Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked a village of mostly Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Native Americans who had gathered in defiance of orders to return to reservations, the military's goal, to force these nomadic tribes back onto reservations as the United States continued to push farther West.

Donovin Sprague, Lakota Sioux Historian:

The big thing was gold in the Black Hills. See, two years before this, Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills, so there was a push to take that land.

Judy Woodruff:

Donovin Sprague is a Lakota historian and a descendant of both Chief Hump and the legendary Native American warrior Crazy Horse, both of whom fought here.

Donovin Sprague:

We had a very big village just right over here that was just kind of like bursting at the seams. And then as soldiers came in and were detected, they come out to meet that resistance. After that, it was a big turning point. The soldiers were dismounted, and they're just running to Last Stand Hill.

Judy Woodruff:

More than 260 U.S. soldiers were killed, including Custer, who is believed to have died here on what is now known as Last Stand Hill.

But it was a victory that would soon bring devastating consequences.

Ned Blackhawk:

It's tragically ironic that the defeat of this relatively small party in Montana will set in motion a policy reform that convinces the federal government that it has to do more aggressive intrusions into Indian country.

And it begins punishing these recalcitrant tribal members, as it sees it, in ways that are unprecedented, the removal of children to the boarding schools, the subdivision of their lands, and begin a process of what is known as Americanization that tragically dismantles essential economies, often governments, and even family relations across Indian country.

Judy Woodruff:

It's a history that many Native Americans say the nation has yet to fully reckon with.

Chester Whiteman:

Declaration of Independence, we're still classified as savages. That needs to change. There's a lot of things that need to change, because we're not savages. We're human beings.

Judy Woodruff:

And this legacy of mistreatment continues to cast a long shadow.

Today, Native Americans have the highest poverty and lowest life expectancy rates of any racial or ethnic group in the United States.

Leon Eagle Tail:

From the Trail of Tears to being put on the reservation in Oklahoma called Indian Territories, to where they put us on reservations here, that's the reason why this battle took place, because they had orders to put us back on the reservations.

It's no different than the concentration camps that the Jews had to survive in Germany, no difference.

Judy Woodruff:

After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, more Western lands would be taken. And Ned Blackhawk says, even in defeat. George Armstrong Custer would become an emblem of American identity, portrayed in countless advertisements...

Narrator:

Errol Flynn in his greatest role.

Judy Woodruff:

... and in feature films like the 1941 Western "They Died With Their Boots On," starring Errol Flynn.

Ned Blackhawk:

The West becomes after 1876 the most imagined region of the United States. And Custer becomes one of its most singular figures. So this vision of Custer in many ways becomes a vision of America itself.

Woman:

Introduce yourself.

Judy Woodruff:

But today there are new efforts to begin changing that vision.

Woman:

Just talk to each other like you guys are at home, OK?

Judy Woodruff:

Native American journalists urged tribal members to record their own family histories and stories of ancestors who fought here. And for those we spoke with, it was a time for reflection.

Donovan Taylor:

I don't like that feeling of animosity. I want to be at peace. Our ancestors already done that. Why should we have to do that too?

Judy Woodruff:

And for many others, it was a moment to acknowledge both the pain of the present while remaining hopeful about the future.

Trina Lone Hill:

You know, I see so much despair on the reservation. We talk -- there's so much -- countless stories about poverty and alcoholism and suicide, all of these things that are modern problems.

I want to see -- I want to bring our kids out of that. I want them to feel this pride. I want them to I guess get a different perspective.

Leon Eagle Tail:

We are the survivors, him and me. We survived. But we want our children and grandchildren to thrive. So that's why I'm here.

Chester Whiteman:

Everybody talks about healing and things like that. But both parties have to heal together. And for a long time, it wasn't like that. Nobody would stick the hand out to try to help the other side. And, today, it's starting to turn, where everybody wants to hear our story, the real story.

Judy Woodruff:

A story still being written, as the nation marks its 250th anniversary.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Crow Agency, Montana.

One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”

But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favorites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation:

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.

A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”

Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”

To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power. Kugihot’s ridiculous suggestion was denied by other editors. Long live the high-five photos, finger guns and all!

I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five.

Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.

I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.

So I launched an investigation. I figured that the high-fivers must have some sort of internet presence, so I started combing the web for mentions of the photos. I saw that they’d graced the front page of Reddit several times, and one such post had a compelling comment:

“Fun fact: me and my wife (then girlfriend) are demonstrating the ‘too slow’ high five on the Wikipedia high five page.”

My eyes widened and my heart raced. Searching through the activity of that commenter’s account, I quickly gathered that the high-five guy loved indie-folk music, bourbon, and crossword puzzles. He had little kids, a soft spot for Yosemite National Park, and a Disneyland pass, which made me think he was from California. He seemed refreshingly wholesome (he provided calculus help to anonymous internet strangers on r/math) and sweet (he gave genuine advice to lovelorn posts posters in r/relationships).

He didn’t post often — only about once a month or so — and at first I was having difficulty finding anything that could confirm that he was indeed the finger-gunning high-fiver. But soon enough, I scrolled to a comment that confirmed my suspicion.

In a discussion of the photos in an r/askreddit post, he left a response deep in the comments: “For the 3-4 people who might see this, here is a picture of me and her on our wedding day.”

Photo evidence! “Victim misses” had become “victim Mrs.”!

Detective work

By this point, I’d read the guy high-fiver’s decade-old musings about philosophy and his recaps of Disneyland trips, which made me feel like I knew him on a personal level. But I still didn’t have any way to identify him.

Not surprisingly, searching Google for middle-aged men in California who like national parks and Sufjan Stevens didn’t yield anything of worth. I tried messaging him but didn’t get a response.

Then, on a recent snowy Sunday afternoon, I poured myself another cup of coffee and hunkered down at my laptop in pursuit of my white whale.

I went back to the Wikipedia profile of the “long walks on the beach”–loving account. It had only made 76 edits, which isn’t many, and hadn’t been active in a decade. On the user’s talk page, some Wikipedians had written to say how much they liked the high-five picture. “Awesome idea for the photos,” wrote one user in July 2009. “Doesn’t hurt that your girl’s a cutie too.”

Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Was bgubitz the same person as high-five guy? I put on my thinking cap. The three pieces of information that bgubitz had revealed (accountant, likes sunsets, likes long walks on the beach) seemed to match the sweet, math-loving person on Reddit, but then again, two of those three descriptors are among the most generic traits ever. (Find me someone who doesn’t enjoy sunsets!)

Searching “bgubitz accountant” yielded an accountant named Ben Gubitz, who unfortunately looked nothing like the guy in the high-five photo. But Ben Gubitz’s Facebook friends were public, so I perused them until — voila! I finally found the high-fivers: Tim and Tamara O’Nan from Southern California. Nearly 14 years later, they’d barely aged, and now they had two kids in elementary school.

Yet I did not feel entirely satisfied. I wanted to know the whole story. Did they meet the night of the high five? Were they already together? Was it the finger guns that sparked their love story?

Pretty soon, the three of us were together on a Zoom call.

Birthday celebration

“It was my birthday, and we had just come back from a birthday dinner with some friends,” Tim explains on our video chat. “You can see some unwrapped birthday gifts in the background, and I’m pretty sure the shirt I was wearing was a gift from Ben, who was the friend that convinced us to pose for photos for Wikipedia.”

They tell me that he and Tamara are not big high-fivers, and they have no personal connection to the “down low/too slow” maneuver. The participants just realized that move didn’t have any photos on Wikipedia and saw it as an opportunity.

Tim and Tamara tell me that they met three years before the photo was taken. Tamara, who was in college, went to a restaurant in Newport Beach, Calif. where Tim, who was 30 at the time, was performing guitar and singing. Tamara thought he was hot. Tim thought the same about Tamara. Pretty soon, they were a couple.

But by the time the high-five photo shoot happened, Tim was about to move to Scotland to start a Ph.D. program in theology at the University of Aberdeen. Tamara was in a transitional period too: She had graduated from UCLA and was preparing for a physician’s assistant grad program. Because of their uncertain futures and the prospect of going long-distance, it didn’t make sense to stay together.

“Whenever the photos go viral, we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

Or so they thought. “I got eight months in the divinity program and realized I didn’t want to do it anymore. I felt aimless,” Tim says. “I had to get out of the ivory tower and figure out the basics of my life.”

Tamara has a different take: “The romantic version of the story is that he saw on social media that I had gone on a date with someone else and decided to fly home and marry me.”

Tim proposed soon after his return from Scotland, and they’ve been married for almost 11 years now. “We have two daughters who are four and seven,” says Tamara, “and we actually live right down the street from where those photos were taken.” Tim runs a math-tutoring business, and Tamara is a physician’s assistant.

I ask if they’ve ever been recognized by strangers in public, and they laugh and say no. But people they know have seen the photos circulating on meme accounts or Reddit. “Whenever the photos go viral,” Tim says, “we get texts from friends and acquaintances. It’s our five minutes of fame.”

I suggest that they recreate the photos, and they enthusiastically agree. Nearly 14 years after the original shots, they staged a reenactment in their house, finger-guns included:

Even better, they sent along these heartwarming family shots:

“I’m so grateful that the moment in my life the internet has clung on to for eternity happens to be with my one true love… phew,” Tamara writes to me after the family shoot. “Be careful what you put out there.”

Tim adds that the young man in the original photos would never have believed it if he got a glimpse at these 2022 pictures. “It was just so unlikely at the time,” he writes. “I was just about to travel halfway around the world for school, so our future together was uncertain. But in the end, it all worked out so perfectly.

“Thirteen years later, I’m married to the love of my life with two amazing daughters, and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. It’s more than I could have ever imagined. High five!”

UPDATED, with response of Google
Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.

Today it added a button that makes things up. Google Earth on the web now has image generation built in, powered by Nano Banana 2. It went live today, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application.

You open Google Earth. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet. You click create image. You type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and gives you back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right you refine it.

Google’s own description of the “fun feature” is that Nano Banana “creates concepts grounded in the real world.”

Grounded in the real world means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it.

The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.

The announcement of 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth from just a few hours ago baffled me. His instruction to the planet is six words long:

type whatever you want to see

That is the gate. That is the whole gate.

Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild.

The post opens by asking whether you have ever looked at an empty lot in your neighbourhood and imagined a community garden. It closes by telling you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.

It is live in every country tonight. Free. No application.

Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.

This new feature will guaranteed lead to governments, factions fighting infowars, trolls etc.

A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. A faction wants a hospital to look flattened, or intact, depending which one is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch.

This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

Google responded to this article and said:

We take misinformation seriously - every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was Al-generated. In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.

One clause in there is checkable tonight, so I checked it. Google prevents image creation on harmful topics. Refugees at a border. A nuclear plant in Iran. A fatal crash on an Amsterdam street. A hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza.

Nothing was refused. No warning, no softened output, no suggestion to try a different prompt.

Now look at the rest of the answer. The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it.

I understand that Google has Google products to run Google checks. Planet Earth is bigger than Google.

I put one of tonight’s clips on X and asked nobody to check it. Hive, one of the biggest names in AI detection outside Google, scanned the post on its own and published a verdict underneath.

The video came out of Google’s model minutes earlier. The audio track is silence — I measured it. Minus 91 decibels, first frame to last.

The only thing Hive found suspicious was music that does not exist.

Hive has a defence and it is a fair one, so let me make it before they do. What I posted was a screen recording, and a recording of a screen is a real recording.

That defence is the problem, not the excuse.

Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact. They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry. The one case where the detector has an excuse is the only case that ever happens.

Google’s answer works if the image reaches you through Google, unaltered, and you already suspected it.

That is not how any of this arrives.

There is another problem that Google doesn’t count. The official who now gets to look at a genuine photograph of a genuine atrocity and say: AI.

He doesn’t need the tool for that. He needs everyone to know the tool exists.

If you have never verified anything in your life, here is why a less playfull mapping app matters.

When a photograph turns up online claiming to show a bombed hospital, a refugee camp or a burning refinery, somebody has to decide whether it’s true before a newspaper prints it. What they have is a reference — a picture of that same place, taken from above or from the street, that everybody agrees is real.

They put the claim next to the reference and they look at the gap.

Google built that reference and it is not a small thing. Street View passed 10 million miles of road in 2019. It now holds more than 280 billion images across over 110 countries. Google Earth turned twenty this year. Between them they are a photographic record of the physical world, and — this is the part that matters — every frame of it is dated.

Dated is the whole trick. If you know when the picture was taken, you can prove when something appeared.

In July 2014 the Russian Ministry of Defence held a press conference and produced satellite images about the downing of MH17. Bellingcat compared them against the dated archive in Google Earth and found the landscape didn’t match the dates claimed. The MoD images were fabricated.

Bellingcat published the walkthrough under the headline Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD?

In 2015, that was a rhetorical question. Not anymore.

There is a village in North Brabant, ninety minutes from my desk, called Volkel. It has an air base. That air base stores American B61 nuclear bombs, a fact the Dutch government has never confirmed, which became public through a leaked diplomatic cable and was later described by a former Dutch prime minister as absolutely pointless.

On Google’s maps, Volkel spent years as a rash of coloured pixels. So did the ammunition depot at Staphorst. So did a Patriot missile site in Limburg, and several royal palaces, because the Dutch approach to hiding a military installation was to paint a large abstract artwork on top of it. The photographer Mishka Henner collected them into a gallery and sold them as art, which tells you how well the hiding worked.

Tonight it is all in the open, and anyone who wants a missile site in Limburg can simply add one.

Now notice what that entire twenty-year argument assumed.

You only censor a map that works. Every blur, every polygon, every diplomatic request was an admission that Google Earth was accurate enough to be dangerous. Governments were not worried the map would lie. They were worried it would tell the truth.

Google’s position never wavered. It does not blur satellite imagery by choice. Sites come pre-obscured because a government or a supplier requires it as a condition of flying over.

So to take one real building out of Google Earth, you need a state.

To put a nuclear plant into Iran, I needed a sentence.

The asymmetry is not meant to be funny. For twenty years the danger was a map that revealed something true, and there was a procedure for that — a law, a ministry, a condition on the overflight permit. Tonight the danger is a map that shows something which was never there, and for that there is no procedure at all.

Somebody already did the hard version of what I did tonight.

In February 2025 a Google Earth satellite pass photographed a parking lot at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Ordinary cars, ordinary rows.

A year later those cars were on X, in a photograph of the same base supposedly flattened by an Iranian drone strike.

Same cars. Same rows. Same spaces, vehicle for vehicle.

Somebody generated a war zone and forgot to move the Toyotas.

The Tehran Times posted it as a before-and-after of a US radar site in Qatar. It was not Qatar. It was Bahrain. The “before” was a genuine Google Earth capture from 10 February 2025. The “after” was made with Google AI — AFP and BBC Verify both ran it through Google’s signature detector and got a hit. It passed 950,000 views before anyone counted the parking spaces.

Building it took six steps. Screenshot Earth. Open Gemini. Upload. Prompt. Download. Crop. Six chances to get bored, and one forger who got bored at the parking lot.

Tonight, Manama can be changed in seconds with Nano Banana.

Upload a suspicious satellite image to Gemini, ad @verifyai and it will tell you if Google is behind the forgery.

Adjudicate off Google entirely. Sentinel-2 is free and refreshes every five or six days. Landsat, Planet, Airbus, Vantor. You want a sensor with an orbit, a collection time and a resolution you can check.

Take two collects. Todd Myers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency said it before any of this existed: for every collect, you need a duplicate collect from different sources.

Check the orbit. If an image claims a specific satellite at a specific hour, the published orbital elements will tell you whether anything was up there. The most boring check in the toolkit, and the only one no model can fake, because it isn’t about the pixels.

Disclosure

I build ImageWhisperer. Google technology is part of it, not the whole of it. No single score is ever the finding.

Sources

• Google, Transform any place with Nano Banana in Google Earth, Bryan Horowitz, 30 July 2026

• Google Maps Platform, Street View Insights is now Generally Available — 280 billion images, 110+ countries, March 2026

• TechRadar, Google says its Street View imagery now covers 10 million miles

• Bellingcat, Who to Trust, Google or the Russian MoD? A Guide to Verifying Google Earth Satellite Image Dates

• Bellingcat, MH17 — The Open Source Evidence

• CNN, Google Maps: When censorship is beautiful — Mishka Henner, Dutch Landscapes

• Live Science, 15 Secretive Places You Can Now See on Google Earth — Volkel Air Base

• Google, We’re creating a new satellite imagery map to help protect Brazil’s forests

• Forbes, Google Earth Users Get Powerful New AI Image Upgrade Today, 30 July 2026

• Engadget, Nano Banana image generation comes to Google Earth, 30 July 2026

• Dan Clark, How AI fakes are turning satellite images into war misinformation, Financial Times, 4 March 2026

• AFP / CEDMO, Fake AI satellite imagery spurs US-Iran war disinformation

• DW fact check, Fake satellite images distort Middle East conflict from above

• European Commission, Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act

• TechRadar, You can now ask the Gemini app if an image was made by AI

• History & Archaeology Online, Did the Earthquake of 62AD lead to Pompeii’s Decline or Renewal?